Manchester University Press signs Richard Smyth’s ‘vital’ book on fascism and the environment

Manchester University Press has acquired Richard Smyth’s Greenshirts, a new book that uncovers the "deep, often obscured entanglements between fascist ideologies and environmental thought" over the past 150 years.

Publisher for trade non-fiction, Tom Dark, acquired world English-language rights from Kay Peddle at Colwill & Peddle, and said: “This is a vital book for our times. As nature and climate crises gather pace, it is vital that we all see the dangers of creeping fascism adding fuel to the many fires humanity needs to fight.”

In Greenshirts, Smyth traces a "chilling", century-long thread from 19th-century Romanticism and social Darwinism, through the Nazis’ weaponisation of rural imagery and ecological rhetoric, to today’s resurgence of eco-fascist ideologies in mainstream political and corporate discourse.

Smyth said: “For more than a century, fascist ideas – about the weak and the strong, the native and the alien, nation and race, blood and soil – have shaped or warped the way we, as societies, think about nature, the countryside and the environment.

“With Greenshirts, I want first to throw open that mostly hidden history of where fascism has crossed paths or even found common ground with environmentalism, and second – perhaps more importantly, and certainly more urgently – to enable us to see clearly where the dangers lie today.”