Britain and Italy in the Era of the Great War Defending and Forging Empires Cambridge Military Histories Series

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.

List of Figures; List of Maps; Introduction; Part I. Making the Anglo-Italian Entente (1914–1915): 1. Context; 2. Traditional Friendship; 3. Crumbling Principles; 4. Pushing Friendship into Alliance; 5. The Contested Treaty; Part II. Integrating Italy into the Triple Entente (Spring 1915 – Summer 1917): 6. Context; 7. Turning Papers into Policies: the Implementation of the London Treaty; 8. Dealing with Recalcitrant Allies: Shaping Italy's War; 9. Peripheral Competition; 10. Shaping Allied Grand Strategy; 11. Italy's Empire Project Accepted; Part III. The Forked Road to Victory and Peace (Autumn 1917 – Summer 1919): 12. Context; 13. Clash of Responsibilities: the Caporetto Crisis; 14. Response to Military Emergencies: Keeping Italy Alive; 15. Re-Shaping Allied Grand Strategy; 16. Propaganda as a Strategy; 17. Divided at the Finish Line; 18. Versailles 1919: Italy's Empire Project Repudiated; 19. Epilogue: Bloody Christmas in Fiume; 20. Conclusions; Bibliography and Sources; Index.

Stefano Marcuzzi is a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University College Dublin, an analyst in Emerging Challenges at the NATO Defense College Foundation, and an external fellow at Boston University.