2005 marks the seventieth anniversary of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - final humiliating step in Europe's colonisation of Africa; bloody symptom of the collapse of collective security in Europe; harbinger of the world war to come. In this issue of Socialist History our contributors offer provocative reassessments of this key episode, set in its broader contemporary context by the issue's editor, Allison Drew. Exploding the myth that Italian fascism was not marked by the racism of Nazism, Willie Thompson's article describes the stark brutality displayed in Abyssinia by Italian troops and the key role which the conflict played in Mussolini's domestic and international calculations. The conflict also had a significant impact upon the international left and the challenges simultaneously posed it by the rise of fascism, the reconfigurations of democracy and imperialism and the uncertainties of Soviet foreign policy. In his article, Christian Hogsbjerg explores the major impact which the Abyssinian struggle had on the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James, who was then in Britain working on his masterful study of the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins. Britain, and the predicaments of this socialist anti-war movement are evaluated here by Andrew Flinn and Gidon Cohen. If socialists and internationalists seemed preoccupied with the issue, the same cannot be said of the wider British public. In our final feature, David Howell shows that in the 1935 general election voters were generally far less interested in Abyssinia than either politicians or political activists. Perhaps, Howell suggests, the same cannot be said so confidently of the last general election and the impact of Iraq. The issue concludes with a discussion of the contemporary Moscow arts scene by Margarita Tupitsyn and our usual reviews section.