P amela B allinger . The World Refugees Made

From its foundation in 1861, the Italian nation-state was a land of departures—and would become the most mobile nation in modern Europe. Italian migrants moved across the Alps, over the Mediterranean Sea, and into the Americas and Australia. What united them was the likeliness of their eventual return and the strong ties that bound them to their homes on the peninsula. The development of the Italian citizenship regime reflected both this persistent state of exodus and the inclination to return. Driven by nationalist anxieties of an unleashed bloodletting of the national body, the Italian state facilitated emigrants’ possibilities for regaining Italian citizenship with the citizenship law of 1912, enshrining the principle of blood and descendance (jus sanguinis) while complicating naturalization for aliens. As recent Italian scholarship has shown, such conceptions of citizenship were not only products of Italian emigration abroad but also deeply entangled with the imperial endeavors...

Citizenship · Emigration · Ethnology · Immigration · Nationalism · Naturalization · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Scholarship · State (computer science) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · North African History and Literature · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies