During the liberal era, the presence of settlers in Libya was quite small. The institutionalisation of Fascism accelerated the process of colonisation:

According to the census, in 1921, there were still less than one hundred Italian people employed in agriculture.

In the subsequent years, Fascism tried to solve the problem of the scarcity of available land through confiscations from the ‘rebels’ and, above all, with the decree of 18 July 1922, which made the non‐cultivated land state‐owned. The state began seizing the customary collective property of Indigenous semi‐nomadic tribes.

Experts advised against the implantation of the small peasant property, and to focus instead on medium and large capitalist agriculture, dividing the land into large concessions (on average about 265 hectares in 1925). At the end of the 1920s, there were less than 500 Italian concessions, with 25% of the concessionaires controlling 45% of the land.

After 15 years of colonial occupation, the myth of the ‘promised land’ was just a myth, and most of the land was owned by businessmen employing an Indigenous workforce. The turning point was the two‐year period 1926–1927, with Mussolini’s journey in Libya, and the shift in migration policy designed to stop the flow of emigration abroad.

In Tripolitania, a 1928 decree forced the [Fascist] entrepreneurs in the coastal territory to employ one or two families of Italian farmers every hundred hectares of concession. The [Fascist] Tobacco Company divided its concession into lots entrusted to settler families. They would become owners, redeeming their lots with the products of their labor in a number of years.

[…]

To the political shift corresponded a switch away from capitalist colonization, based on a few concessionaires who exploited African — or Italian — labor, and toward the settlement of farmers, calling for the direct intervention of the State in their support. With the fascist incentives for settlement, the number of Italian farmers in Tripolitania increased from less than 2000 in 1929 to more than 7,000 in 1933.

Despite the substantial progress that the Fascists made in colonising Libya, they never met their long‐term goals:

The régime believed that they were still too few. With the long‐term goal of balancing the Indigenous population with the Italian, the government drew up an ambitious scheme for the settlement of 100,000 settlers in five years.

In 1938, the first step, a two‐year scheme for the arrival of 3000 families (approximately 30,000 settlers) was approved. On 28 October the anniversary of the fascist ‘March on Rome’, the first wave of peasant settlers — the so‐called ‘Ventimila’ (the ‘Twenty thousand’; actually they were only about 16,000) — left for Libya.

The Fascists selected settlers based (more or less) on eugenics:

The settlers had been chosen by the régime and had to pass a physical, political and ‘moral’ selection, proving to be good fascists and capable farmers.

Fascist colonization was intense compared to other manifestations of European colonialism, but even this acceleration proved insufficient:

The total white rural population in Libya on the eve of [1939], according to Italian archival sources, had exceeded 40,000 people. A remarkable result, even in comparative terms, if we consider the other European colonies in Africa; and yet, the expectations raised by half a century of official discourse about the ‘promised land’ were still largely unrealized.

Narratives on ‘virgin’ fertile lands, for everyone, available to the masses (of Europeans), are a central aspect in settler colonial discourse; but this conceptualization was problematic when applied to Africa, where the context was extremely different from North America and Oceania, and demographic balances remained to the disadvantage of the settlers.

The bourgeois state (once again) had to bail out the petite‐bourgeoisie:

Considering the settler colonies in Africa, particularly those in which the metropolitan authority actively and directly engaged in settlement policy, leaving little or no autonomy to the settlers, the unsustainability of the small agricultural settler property is not surprising.

Libya is a case in point: Mussolini’s farmers depended heavily on state aid, depended on loans and advances; in some cases, the families asked to be repatriated, in others they survived for months o[n] canned food due to [a] lack of water that made it impossible to cultivate gardens.

In addition, the settler farmers were actually neither millions nor hundreds of thousands, and constituted only less than half of the total Italian population in Libya.

Here is the class composition of the settlers:

The distribution of the settlers in the colonial space and other sources such as marriage registers confirm that the number of agricultural workers among settlers was very low — less than 10% at their peak – largely overtaken by workers and laborers (about 30%), public and private employees (about 20%), military forces (more than 13%, counting the police), artisans (about 5%), retailers (about 4%), professionals (about 3%) and technicians (about 3%), to mention only the most numerous categories.

In 1936, it was a society composed mainly of young (only about 2.4% had more than 65 years), unmarried (about 55%), males.

[…]

The other Italians in the cities were mostly workers and traders; the business élite was not demographically significant. [Fascist] entrepreneurs registered with the Chamber of commerce of Tripoli had 968 industrial and 921 commercial activities, respectively, only 32.8% and 11.6% of the total.

The marriage registers confirm this point, showing, on the basis of the occupations declared by settlers at the time of their wedding, a middle‐class white‐collar share of slightly above 30% of the sample, a lower class of about 45%, about 13% of soldiers, and a very restricted élite.

The low number of settler capitalist firms and professionals, along with the other statistics, shows a society mostly made up of employees, workers and traders. A heterogeneous and stratified settler society settled in urban areas already inhabited by a complex and multifaceted Indigenous population.

In conclusion:

[A]fter decades of propaganda, and the extraordinary — and extraordinarily expensive — effort made by the régime, ‘terra promessa’ never transited from theory to practice. The distance between the two was consistent: Libya was not home for masses of peasants, but for an urban petty bourgeoisie in the few major coastal cities and for a — less numerous and latecomer — rural settler population in the inland.

However, we should not underestimate how the myth put deep roots in the settlers’ conscience, and its long‐term consequences.

The distance between theory and practice should not overshadow a settler presence which was numerically high and settled enough to build a new society with a long‐term perspective, as demonstrated by the fact that the end of the settler colonial régime did not mean the end of settlement, as many settlers remained tied to the land that had been promised to them.

A false promise, then, with real and lasting consequences

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Due to competition with the natives and the general lack of progress that was being made, many Italian settlers left Libya voluntarily. The process continued until the postmonarchist government kicked out the few remaining stragglers in 1970.