Alessandro De Cola

Alessandro De Cola is a research fellow at the Department of History and Culture, University of Bologna, and a Research fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State. He is currently working on the research titled “African consumers and the 19-the century Global Economy: the case of Venetian glass beads”, within the Italian Research Project of National Relevance (PRIN) 2022 “Arms, Beads and Cloth. African Consumers and the 19th-century Global Economy”. His work focuses on social, economic and monetary history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published on the impact of colonial monetary policies in Eritrea during the First World War, the role of money in the regularisation of African soldiers in the Italian army, and the tropes on the Eritrean monetary systems in colonial publications. He is writing on a monograph on the monetary history of Eritrea from the 1850s to the 1950s.