1916 in Global Context ― An Anti-imperial Moment

The year 1916 has recently been identified as "a tipping point for the intensification of protests, riots, uprisings and even revolutions." Many of these constituted a challenge to the international pre-war order of empires, and thus collectively represent a global anti-imperial moment, which was the revolutionary counterpart to the later diplomatic attempt to construct a new world order in the so-called Wilsonian moment. Chief among such events was the Easter Rising in Ireland, an occurrence that took on worldwide significance as a challenge to the established order. This is the first collection of specialist studies that aims at interpreting the global significance of the year 1916 in the decline of empires.

Enrico Dal Lago is Professor of American History at NUI Galway. He is the author of several books, the latest of which are The Age of Lincoln and Cavour: Comparative Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century American and Italian Nation-Building (2015), and Civil Wars and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy (2018).

Roisin Healy is Lecturer in Modern European History at NUI Galway. Her publications include The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past (2014) and Poland in the Irish Nationalist Imagination, 1772-1922: Anti-Colonialism within Europe (2017).

Gearoid Barry is Lecturer in Modern European History at NUI Galway. His books include The Disarmament of Hatred: Marc Sangnier, French Catholicism and the Legacy of the First World War, 1914-45 (2012) and Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I (2016).