Many scholars have explored Liberal Italy’s (1861–1922) grandiose territorial ambitions during the First World War and the myth of the “mutilated victory” that followed when Italy failed to secure them all. Yet historians have tended to view imperialism as peripheral to the real substance of Italy’s foreign policy which prioritized relations in Europe. As a part of Oxford University Press’s The Greater War Series, Vanda Wilcox’s new book pushes the geographic and temporal boundaries of scholars’ traditional conceptions of Italian ambitions in the First World War. Wilcox effectively situates Italy’s drive for great power status within its wider global and imperial context by arguing that imperial and expansionist conquest was the motivating force behind Italian intervention in the Great War. The desire to make “greater Italy” a reality dominated Italian diplomacy. The circumstances of the war offered to extend Italy’s borders to the north and definitively complete the national unification process in Europe, but the war also offered Italy the chance to obtain a new colonial empire across the Mediterranean. The Italian Empire makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature devoted to recognizing the First World War as a truly global war.

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书评：意大利帝国与大战

许多学者探讨了自由主义意大利（1861-1922）在第一次世界大战期间的宏伟领土野心，以及意大利未能确保所有这些野心之后“残缺不全的胜利”的神话。然而，历史学家倾向于将帝国主义视为意大利外交政策实质内容的边缘，后者优先考虑与欧洲的关系。作为牛津大学出版社大战争系列的一部分，万达·威尔科克斯的新书突破了学者们对第一次世界大战中意大利野心的传统观念的地理和时间界限。威尔科克斯认为，帝国主义和扩张主义的征服是意大利干预一战背后的动力，从而有效地将意大利对大国地位的追求置于其更广泛的全球和帝国背景下。使“大意大利”成为现实的愿望主导着意大利外交。战争的环境使意大利的边界向北延伸并最终完成了欧洲的国家统一进程，但战争也为意大利提供了获得横跨地中海的新殖民帝国的机会。意大利帝国为致力于将第一次世界大战视为真正的全球战争的不断增长的文学作品做出了重要贡献。