Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Abstract

In the fragmented academic domain of history, genuinely comparative cross-disciplinary studies remain rare. Tiago Saraiva’s stimulating book represents a resourceful attempt to draw substantive connections among three disparate fields—environmental history, science and technology studies, and the history of fascism—applied to three distinct case studies: Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Salazar’s Portugal. Each of these fields and each of these regimes, with their own ample scholarly literatures and ongoing internal debates, can lay claim to the core events the book examines. But Saraiva resists the temptation to narrow his focus, insisting that researchers on seemingly unrelated subjects have much to learn from the neglected story the book has to tell. Fluently written and ambitious in scope, this is a study that deserves attention well beyond the range of specialists. Even if its historical lessons are not always persuasive, the book succeeds in posing provocative new questions that could alter common views of the environmental history of fascist societies.