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Italian Eritrea

Italian Eritrea
Colonia Eritrea
Colony of Italy
1890–1936
Flag Coat of arms
Capital Asmara
Languages Italian (official)
Tigrinya, Hejazi Arabic
Religion Catholicism
Oriental Orthodoxy
Islam,
Political structure Colony
Governor
 •  1890 Baldassarre Orero
 •  1935-1936 Pietro Badoglio
Historical era Scramble for Africa
 •  Established 1890
 •  Disestablished 1936
Area
 •  1936 121,000 km² (46,718 sq mi)
Population
 •  1936 est. 1,000,000 
     Density 8.3 /km²  (21.4 /sq mi)
Currency Eritrean tallero
(1890-1921)
Italian lira
(1921-36)
Preceded by
Kingdom of Ethiopia
Medri Bahri

Italian Eritrea was a colony of the Kingdom of Italy in the territory of present-day Eritrea. Although it was formally created in 1890, the first Italian settlements in the area were established in 1882 around Assab. The colony officially lasted until 1947.

In 1869 the lands surrounding the Bay of Assab was bought by the Rubattino Shipping Company from the minor sultan of nearby Raheita to serve as a coaling station along the shipping lanes introduced by the recently completed Suez Canal. The area—long dominated by the Ottoman Empire and Egypt—was not settled by the Italians until 1880; two years later, the Kingdom of Italy took possession of the nascent colony from its commercial owners.

Most of the western coast of the Red Sea was then formally claimed by the Khedivate of Egypt (under the notional rule of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, who held the eastern coast) but the region was thrown into chaos by major Egyptian defeats in the Ethio-Egyptian War and by the success of the Mahdi's uprising in the Sudan. In 1884, the British Hewett Treaty promised the Bogos—the highlands of modern Eritrea—and free access to the Massawan coast to Emperor Yohannes IV in exchange for his help evacuating garrisons from the Sudan; In the vacuum left by the Egyptian withdrawal, though, British diplomats were concerned about the rapid expansion of French Somaliland, France's colony along the Gulf of Tadjoura. Ignoring their treaty with Ethiopia, they openly encouraged Italy to expand north into Massawa, which was taken without a shot from its Egyptian garrison. Located on a coral island surrounded by lucrative pearl-fishing grounds, the superior port was fortified and made the capital of the Italian governor. Assab, meanwhile, continued to find service as a coaling station. As they were not a party to the Hewett Treaty, the Italians began restricting access to arms shipments and imposing customs duties on Ethiopian goods immediately.


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