In 1916: A Global History, Keith Jeffrey describes a World War I monument, located on the Zambezi River in central Africa, which commemorates a number of white Rhodesians and, as the inscription reads, “many other natives of the territory of whose names no complete record exists.” As Jeffrey notes, these African dead of the Great War are thus “relegated to a kind of monumental footnote” (240). This book attempts to rectify this relegation by highlighting the “inescapably global nature of the conflict” (2). With an eye to exploring the “human dimension … of the war experience” (8), he also sets out to chart the ways the ever-increasing “intensity” of war caused fractures in the body politics of many nations, and he does so by pausing over small-scale and even individual stories, as well as by meditating on various memories of the conflict: popular, collective, public, monumental, and individual. To accomplish these goals, Jeffrey analyzes the larger significance of a major event from each month of 1916, from the end of the Gallipoli campaign and the Entente forces’ withdrawal from the peninsula in January, to the murder of Grigori Rasputin on December 30. All in all, this approach is often fascinating, but also frequently uneven and inconsistent.

The book begins strongly with an account of the Gallipoli campaign, which ended in defeat and embarrassment for the British and French, and in triumph and pride for the Ottomans. The author notes that Gallipoli “exemplified,” more than anywhere on the European Western Front, “the remarkable global reach of the Great War” (25-26), driving home at the outset of his study his contention—consistent with the latest historiography on the war—that one must take seriously the global nature of the conflict. He sustains this claim throughout the book, describing how the unprecedented intensity and scope of the war caused political and social strains worldwide. Jeffrey observes, for instance, that events in western China show “how almost nowhere, however remote, escaped the effects of the First World War” (190). His discussion of Africa is also interesting and revealing in this respect, and relies on the relevant scholarship. Even in Europe, the action was often far from the Western Front. He rightly stresses just how essential the context of the Great War was to the Easter Rising in Ireland, noting that Dublin was a “First World War battlefield” (104) just as much as Verdun and the Somme were. Indeed, he argues, most British army soldiers believed that they were fighting Germany in Ireland, and even assumed that German support and machinations were behind the rising.

Jeffrey's insightful analysis is also often apparent when discussing memory. With a fine eye for vivid detail, he relates the irony of a gun from a German submarine, the U-19, being used as a monument to commemorate the heroism of Edward Bingham at the naval Battle of Jutland. Bingham won the Victoria Cross for his actions, and the gun was placed at his birthplace in Northern Ireland. Yet, the U-19 was the very same boat that had carried Sir Roger Casement to Ireland on a clandestine mission to foment rebellion in the south. As a result, the gun might be seen to commemorate simultaneously the loyalty of the Unionists and the rising of the Republicans. Jeffery offers a similarly sensitive reading of a memorial in Morogoro, Tanzania, whose inscription refers obliquely to an African soldier's wife. This, the author notes, reminds us of the profound effect that the war had on numerous civilian families.

Jeffrey's treatment of memory is not always one of the book's strengths, however, since discussions of it are sporadic and inconsistent. Some of the chapters, such as those about the Eastern Front and the United States, do not address memory at all. Comments about memory related to the Battle of the Somme appear in the middle of the chapter, rather than at the end, as they do in most other chapters. Chapter 10, which focuses on the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, concludes with interesting comments about the imperial legacies of the war, but legacy and memory are not the same things. The author also has a tendency to discuss at length matters that are not necessarily relevant to the subject at hand. Chapter 10, for example, contains lengthy sections on the actions of British intelligence, but the ostensible subject is the Balkans. The chapter on the United States also focuses at length on British intelligence, without obvious justification. Chapter 3, “On the Isonzo,” begins with many pages about the experiences of English ambulance drivers in the Italian theater, rather than about those of Italians or Austrians, and then goes on to cover a great deal of material that is not clearly tied to the year 1916.

The author's selection of sources is sometimes curious. The chapter on the Battle of Verdun begins by quoting extensively from reports by the English-language press on the first days of the battle, to provide a sense of “what the wider general public”—presumably the British and American publics—“knew about First World War fighting” (39). Surely it would have made more sense to examine French and German reporting. In several places, Jeffrey relies on the press for many details, even though, as he notes, eyewitness reports by soldiers bring us closer to their actual experiences. In discussing the Eastern Front, for example, Jeffrey describes at length reminisces written many years later by a Times correspondent who, the author acknowledges, might not be entirely reliable. Finally, the difficulty of trying to write a comprehensive history of the entire war through the lens of one year is clear in the strained attempt to include an entire chapter on “Americans at War,” given that the United States only joined the conflict a year later in 1917.

In the end, Jeffrey may have done better to focus entirely on events that actually occurred in 1916, an admittedly critical year. The book's conclusion, which examines the potential for peace that year, is fascinating and insightful, showing both the very real possibilities for a settlement, as well as the very clear reasons why one proved impossible to reach. Ultimately, the book finishes powerfully, with a moving statement by an Italian soldier about the difficulty of killing a man, even an enemy. This eye for telling anecdotes and Jeffrey's sensitivity to individual experiences and the humanity of the people he writes about are the strongest aspects of this book.