Italy has all too often been left out of wider histories of the ‘battle of empires’ due to its perceived peripheral role as one of the newest and the least powerful of the ‘great powers’. Vanda Wilcox's latest book, The Italian Empire and the Great War, is the first book to put the Great War in an Italian imperial perspective and it brings Italy to the foreground of recent research on the world's first global conflict. Published as part of Oxford University Press's The Greater War series, the book looks further than the historical and historiographical stereotypes that continue to place the peninsula in the shadows (and footnotes) of the imperial power struggle that dictated the global conflict. Wilcox does this convincingly, arguing that Italy's colonial ambitions equally drove the nation's entry to, role and impact in the First World War alongside its European counterparts. The author details the young nation's rampant desire for collective identity and pride through belligerence and expansion by analysing its foreign policy and immense war experience across continents. Through a seamless contextualisation of Italy's place in the hostilities, and an integration of recent trends in Italian colonial and diaspora history, Wilcox narrates the nation's quest for a ‘greater Italy’ compellingly, adopting an original chronological and geographical lens.
With 12 chapters, the book examines 12 years of imperial conflicts, beginning before the inception of the First World War. It starts with the Italo-Turkish War in 1911 and ends with the withdrawal of Italian forces in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1923, following the foundation of the new Republic of Turkey. Thus, instead of a conventional start upon Italy's entry into the war in 1915, Wilcox's introduction outlines and builds on recent scholarship to argue that because the 1911–12 war over Libya involved two combatant European powers, it crucially preceded the global conflict and became an important war front. Chapters 2 and 3 summarise Italy's early imperialist and irredentist aims in Africa, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, viewing them as nation-building projects that set the scene for Italy's transition from neutrality to interventionism during the First World War. This contextual recapitulation of Italy's declaration of war may be a familiar story to experts in the field, but these introductory chapters are key to the comprehension of the main themes, arenas and events that anticipated Italy's policies and actions at the height of the First World War.
Wilcox's impressive research really shines through from Chapter 4 onwards. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on state attempts at ‘total war’ in its staunchest form, including military service for Italian emigrants across the world, the utilisation of colonial troops, overseas fundraising and cultural mobilisation on the home front. Chapters 6 and 7 emphasise the truly global and imperial nature of Italy's role and experience in the conflict, from the Mediterranean theatre which comprised Libya, the Balkans, Albania and Macedonia to the presence of Italian contingents in Palestine and as far afield as Manchuria. Chapter 8 takes a thematic approach, underlying the importance of analysing contemporary notions of race, nationality and citizenship, which is increasingly reflected in the historiography. This chapter explores the concept of italianità and constructions of whiteness in Risorgimento racial theory, as well as their transformation and popularisation in the war, all of which heightened ethnic violence against Italy's enemies in Libya, the Balkans, Germany and Austria.
The last chapters describe the end, outcomes and legacies of the war and, in particular, the effect this had on Italian politics and foreign policy. Chapters 9 and 10 summarise the postwar peace treaties, the delusions they brought Italy, the consequential myth of the mutilated victory and the occupation of Fiume. In Chapter 11, Wilcox's research on the withdrawal of Italian troops from the Eastern Mediterranean, Palestine and Asia Minor further highlights the extent of their reach in the conflict. The book ends by providing crucial context as to how the failures of the nation's last and greatest unification project led to the rise of Fascism and an intensification of Italian imperial policy and practice during the ventennio.
Accessibly written with subchapters and well-considered background information, the book will be informative and enjoyable to a range of readers. Wilcox's extensive primary and secondary research allows us to reconceptualise the political and military history of Italian imperialism and the First World War, opening new avenues of inquiry into the cultural dimensions of the battlegrounds that the author has shed light upon, the continued relevance of which should not be underestimated and is evident in the collective memory of these conflicts and present-day geopolitics.
