Globalising the Easter Rising: 1916 and the Challenge to Empires

The year 1916 has recently been identified as “a tipping point for the intensification of protests, riots, uprisings and even revolutions.”1 Many of these constituted a challenge to the international pre-war order of empires and thus collectively represent a global anti-imperial moment, which was the revolutionary counterpart to the later diplomatic attempt to construct a new world order in the so-called Wilsonian moment.2 As Keith Jeffery has pointed out, “The Easter Rising in Ireland … was far from being the only rebellion against imperial rule during 1916.”3 The Rising was an attack, in late April 1916, on British rule by a group of 1,000 committed revolutionaries, who seized key strategic positions in Dublin and other parts of Ireland, but were defeated by 20,000 British forces. The Rising was marked by the destruction of the city centre and the deaths of over 400 civilians. It was followed by the arrest of the combatants and thousands of alleged sympathisers across the country, the execution of fifteen of its leaders for treason after secret courts martial and the public trial and hanging of the famous humanitarian turned revolutionary Roger Casement in London in August 1916.4