Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War: Defending and Forging Empires

 

British Tommies on the Italian Front with an
Italian Soldier and Civilian Volunteers

Tomlinson Prize, 2021

By  Stefano Marcuzzi

Cambridge University Press, 2022

This is an important reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Stefano Marcuzzi sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defence and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion. 

Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, he reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped Allied grand strategy. 

Marcuzzi considers three main issues—war aims, war strategy and peace-making—and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian traditional friendship" turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period.

From: U.S. Dept of Commerce Library

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There is in Anglophone discourse and in particular in Anglo-American historiography, a long tradition of belittling and running down post-Risorgimento Italy's quest for Great Power status. From Lord Salisbury's ‘sturdy beggars’ to Richard Bosworth's telling description "the least of the great powers," post-1861 Italy has been seen, as in the words of Prince Bismarck, suffering from ‘a big appetite but bad teeth’. In his book, Britain and Italy in the era of the Great War: defending and forging empires, Stefano Marcuzzi seeks to challenge this narrative for the period between Italy's involvement in the Great War to the Treaty of Versailles. Marcuzzi aims to show that during this era "Britain was Italy's main partner within the Entente and that Rome sought to make London the guarantor of the promises upon which Italy joined the Allies" (p. 2).

According to Marcuzzi, Italian governing elites, especially the Italian prime minister at the time, Antonio Salandra, and his foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, "assumed that Britain and Italy enjoyed special geopolitical, economic, cultural and historical ties" (p. 2). In his subsequent narrative, Marcuzzi uses a detailed analysis of primary sources on Anglo-Italian diplomatic interaction in the period to argue that "the geopolitical goals of Britain and Italy, which seemed compatible and even mutually supportive, grew irreconcilable by the end of the war."

From: International Affairs, Volume 97, Issue 4