Overview

During the First World War, over 300,000 Italian emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. But what happened to these men following their arrival and once the war had ended? Selena Daly reconstructs the lives of these emigrant soldiers before, during and after the First World War, considering their motivations, combat experiences, demobilisation, and lives under Fascism and in the Second World War. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Emigrant Soldiers explores the diverse fates of four men who returned from the United States, Brazil, France, and Britain, interwoven with accounts of other emigrants from across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Through letters, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and diplomatic reports, Daly focuses on the experiences and voices of the emigrant soldiers, providing a new global account of Italians during the First World War.

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9781009268905

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'Selena Daly casts aside clichés about those citizens of Italy's world-ranging informal empire who returned to fight after 1915. She thereby movingly restores the complexity and nuance of humanity to these sometime soldiers of the patria, releasing them from the simplicities of the reality and memory of war.' R. J. B. Bosworth, author of Mussolini's Italy 'A welcome and long-awaited addition to the literature on the First World War and global mobility. Emigrant Soldiers restores the voice and subjectivity of hundreds of thousands of Italians caught in dilemmas of loyalty and patriotism, providing us with a challenging, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written multifaceted history of their choices and motivations.' Daniela L. Caglioti, author of War and Citizenship 'Selena Daly's sensitive study of Italy's 300,000 migrants in uniform tells an absorbing story. Travelling with them to the war and back we discover their motives, share their ups and downs, and learn their fates. Once undeservedly forgotten, they have found the historian they so richly deserve.' John Gooch, author of Mussolini's War

Author Information

Selena Daly is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at University College London. Her research explores modern Italy with a focus on the history of Italian emigration. Previous publications include Italian Futurism and the First World War (2016), which was shortlisted for The Bridge Book Award 2017.

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