During the First World War, over 300,000 emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian phenomenon. This presentation explores the phenomenon of these emigrant soldiers, examining how military service obligations shaped decisions to repatriate—or not—both before and during the war. What motivated men to return and fight? What were their experiences on the battlefield and of demobilisation at war’s end? Yet the call to arms was not answered by all of Italy’s emigrants. Far more emigrants chose to stay abroad than to return. Thus, in parallel, the presentation also investigates the experiences of wartime draft evaders who opted to remain abroad in their adopted countries. To illuminate these diverging paths, the presentation adopts a micro-historical lens. Through the exploration of the experiences of various emigrants, the presentation reveals the complex interplay between conscription and repatriation at the end of Italy’s period of mass migration.

Dr Selena Daly is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at University College London. She is the author of Italian Futurism and the First World War (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2025). She is currently writing a global history of Italian emigration, which is under contract with Viking Penguin (US), Hodder & Stoughton (UK), and Mondadori (Italy). She is the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for the academic year 2025-26.

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