Italian Somaliland

Italian Somaliland was an Italian colony on the Horn of Africa from the 1880s to 1936, on the coast that is now southern Somalia, with Mogadishu as its capital. Italy moved into the Somali coast in the Scramble for Africa, signing protectorate treaties with Somali sultans and taking direct possession of the Benadir ports, which it first leased and then bought from the Sultan of Zanzibar. For a quarter century the colony's grip on the interior was contested by the Dervish movement of Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, and effective Italian control stayed on the coast and in Benadir until the movement collapsed. Under Fascist rule the colony was developed as a settler and plantation economy, with roads, railways, dams, farms and villages, fifty thousand Italian settlers, and the agricultural settlement of Villaggio Duca degli Abruzzi founded by the explorer duke in 1920. In 1936, after the conquest of Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland was merged with Eritrea and the new Ethiopia into Italian East Africa, ending its separate existence; after the Second World War it returned briefly as a UN trusteeship under Italy before joining independent Somalia in 1960.