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This essay deals with the theme of transfer from a colonial perspective. How did legal transplants work in Italian colonies? What was really colonial law and what does the word transfer mean? Transfer, in the Latin form transferre, means transport, but also transcribes, translates and hence adapts change. For the Italian jurists the difference of colonial space and African »barbarism« required an organization of power free from the rules of the state of law, founded on a pre-modern legal pluralism and on an authoritative paternalism of executive power. The colony lived in a different temporal space. It still belonged to the world of the Ancient Regime, a world that legal modernity brought back from the past and used to represent the colony as a difference, as a space of exception.