Abstract
Reviewed by: Samuel Foster, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
As the late Keith Jeffery recently observed, the Easter Rising in Dublin against British control of Ireland, which would subsequently lead to the Irish War of Independence, ‘was far from being the only rebellion against imperial rule in 1916’ (3). However, scholarship continues to frame the Rising strictly within the domestic context of Irish national history as a romantic failure, often echoing contemporary depictions in British propaganda. This recently edited volume seeks to address this lacuna by internationalizing the events of 1916, challenging historical preconceptions that Russia in 1917 offered the definitive model for revolutionary politics and anti-imperialism in the twentieth century.
The volume is divided into four sections, exploring various aspects of the Irish rebellion, its international reverberations and parallels after 1916. In section I, the editors outline the methodological and contextual framework in which the topics discussed in the other chapters are analysed (3–17). This is followed by Timothy D. Hoyt’s convincing reassessment of the Rising as the first stage in a new form of heterogeneous ‘irregular warfare’ that went beyond simple violent struggle; arguably the book’s most vital chapter. Having internalized the lessons revealed in the uprising’s failure, Ireland’s radical republicans successfully capitalized on public hostilities that Britain’s excessive military response had engendered to incrementally strengthen their position as a force of political resistance. Following the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin, the republican's political arm, was the single largest Irish political party at Westminster. During the subsequent War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, the failures suffered by the republicans in 1916 were spectacularly reversed as a combination of assassination, armed skirmishes, propaganda and widespread civil disobedience saw British control effectively collapse by 1920. This irregular warfare and anti-imperialism that characterized Irish republicanism would, Hoyt contends, reverberate around the world well beyond 1916 and profoundly impact other independence movements in the coming decades (18–28).
The remaining chapters explore how this anti-imperialist paradigm established by the Easter Rising in 1916 translated into differing geographical and imperial contexts. In this respect, it unfortunately becomes apparent that not all the examples covered aligned with, or really drew any tangible influences from events in Dublin, as evidenced in section II. Within the ‘Atlantic World’, intriguing connections are identified in relation to pre-existing tensions in other areas of the British Empire. Analyses of cooperation between Indian and Irish nationalist émigrés in New York, and their divergence over the use of violence after 1918 (62–75), as well as Irish links to the 1922 Rand Rebellion in South Africa (76–90) offer present intriguing parallels. However, Cecelia Hartsell’s observations on African American migration from the USA’s rural South to the industrial North feels more strained in her attempts to construe this as a continuous form of revolutionary protest, with only brief mention of the Irish or 1916 (49–61).
Section III extends notions of revolutionary anti-imperialism to North Africa, Asia and the Pacific. While questions of direct Irish influence are addressed, they appear more perfunctory or coincidental than integral, with the exception of Stephen McQuillan’s examination of anti-British allegiances during the First World War (117–30). Michel Provence’s survey of the Middle East for example, reads more as a brief overview of the region in 1916, even insinuating that an earlier erosion of Ottoman power before 1914 was more significant in fermenting anti-imperial unrest (93–102). Particularly disappointing is the lack of coverage afforded to the Central Asian Revolt – speculated to have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths – that broke out against Russian imperial rule in July 1916, besides Danielle Ross’s chapter on discourses in Russia’s Muslim press (131–45).
The volume concludes by considering how the Rising was reflected through anti-imperial struggles in the rest of Europe. This is best reflected in chapters examining how aspects of the Irish struggle paralleled those of their fellow ‘small nations’: Finland’s struggle for independence from Russia (188–207) and the successful efforts of Polish insurrections in forcing the province of Poznania’s political secession from Germany and unifying it with the reconstituted Second Polish Republic from 1918 to 1919 (208–21). Another chapter covering reactions to the rebellion among Britain’s labour movement grants some perspective on its impact closer to home (159–72). However, its inclusion appears somewhat incongruous given that, in 1916, Ireland legally constituted part of the British state. Moreover, as with Hartsell’s chapter, Vanda Wilcox’s deconstruction of the Habsburg Italian irredentist Cesare Battisti’s execution by Austro-Hungarian authorities in July 1916, while evoking some parallels, feels tangential at best (173–87).
Despite its commendable editorial objectives, 1916 in Global Context is too often undermined by the numerous ambiguities between the central thesis and many of its authors’ contributions. This is compounded by the absence of a concluding chapter to resolve these issues. Similarly, readers are unlikely to feel convinced that revolutionary action in 1916 exerted greater historic influence than that which occurred in 1917, since the idea is never properly assessed in any of the chapters.
Nevertheless, regardless of its often disjointed premise, this is by no means an insignificant or unwelcome contribution to the study of anti-imperialism before 1917. The breadth of scholarship on display not only enriches understanding of a period too often confined to the military and political narratives of the First World War in Western Europe and the Russian Revolution. Indeed, it is in this exposure of greater contextual diversity existing outside of traditionally perceived ‘centres’ of global power that the book’s key historiographical value lies.