Drafting Italy

This study is the first full account of conscription and the armed forces in Italy, tracing the subject from the Restoration to the years just before the First World War. Rather than a narrow institutional survey, it sets the Italian experience beside those of many other countries, examining how ideas and practices travelled between states and how they were adapted or copied once they reached Italy.

The author draws on a wide range of sources and an interdisciplinary method that views the subject both from above, through policy and state institutions, and from below, through the experiences of ordinary men. The book covers recruitment in peacetime and wartime, daily life in the ranks, military culture, military justice, and the relationship between the armed forces and civilian authorities.

It also considers what the military contributed to the country, including state-building, nation-building, modernization, models of education and discipline, and ideas about masculinity and the roles of women. The author questions familiar categories for classifying armies and established theories of how armies developed. The Italian military emerges as an internally varied institution that could neither define a single identity for itself nor impose one on its members. As a result, it forms a part of national history much like any other, relevant to people whether or not they wore a uniform. The army serves less as the sole object of inquiry than as a lens onto Italian history in the long nineteenth century.

The book is written for professional military historians and general readers interested in military affairs, as well as scholars of Italian political, institutional, socio-economic, cultural and gender history before and after unification.