Experts from St Andrews University are examining how living under a dictatorship affected the lives of ordinary people.
A prestigious 1.5 million Euro grant will pay for a five year study exploring how everyday life under the 20th century dictatorships of Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and Metaxas compare.
Dr Kate Ferris of the university’s School of History will oversee the project, believed to be the first of its kind.
She hopes it will demonstrate the complex ways in which dictators’ ideology and practices were enacted in the worlds of ordinary Italians, Spaniards, Greeks and Portuguese.
This will reveal the differences between how the dictator intended to impose his will and how it actually affected people.
Dr Ferris said: “Although dictatorship conventionally conjured an image of a charismatic, dogmatic male leader ruling from on high through magnetism, propaganda and violence, it is crucial to remember that individual men, women and children experienced dictatorship subjectively.
“They encountered the dictatorial state not just in official policies and propaganda but in everyday settings — the market, the factory, the bar, the street, the home.”
Dictatorships were ruled “from above” with policies, rhetoric and practices intended to both violently coerce and positively entice citizens’ acquiescence.
Dr Ferris added: “It is in everyday interactions and in relationships between, for example, consumers, shopkeepers and municipal price-committees or between new mothers and state health visitors that we can find the casual connections between, on the one hand, macro-policies and the interventions of the central state and, on the other, micro-processes that were experienced on a local and human scale.
“We contend that this is a vital part of understanding how dictatorships actually ruled.”
The grant from the European Research Council will run from September and will help fund two postdoctoral research assistants and two PHD students.
