Italian Empire

The Italian colonial empire comprised the colonies, protectorates, concessions and dependencies of the Kingdom of Italy from 1882 to 1943, with a brief United Nations trust administration of former Italian Somaliland lasting until 1960. At its height between 1936 and 1941 its African holdings, grouped as Italian East Africa, included present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, and it also held the Dodecanese Islands, Albania, and a concession in Tianjin, China. Under Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who took power in 1922, the regime pursued imperial expansion through demographic colonization and military conquest, briefly extending its wartime reach into British Somaliland, Egypt, Yugoslavia, France and Greece before Allied forces reversed every gain by 1943. Italy's colonial claims were formally ended by the 1947 peace treaty, and Somalia's independence in 1960 closed out the empire entirely.