With the centenary of the First World War, a number of scholars have employed the concept of the “Greater War” in making sense of not only the conflict itself but also its larger reverberations. These scholars’ works often begin with the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and end with either 1923 or 1924 as European civil wars and revolutionary violence wane. Richard S. Grayson's new book on Dublin between 1914 and 1923 fits squarely within this tradition of the “Greater War” by following the experiences of Dubliners through war in Europe and revolution at home. By assuming this chronology and focus, Grayson unites separate historiographical narratives and disparate memories of war, revolution, and civil war into one cohesive story of a city torn apart by bloodshed.

Dublin's Great Wars is a chronicle of the city landscapes and the people who inhabited them, and as with his earlier work on Belfast, Grayson seeks to demonstrate how those living in the greater Dublin area negotiated the ambiguities and the heartbreak of the conflicts for and against the British government. Although a military history at its heart and in its structure, the book also provides a glimpse into the social history of the city, with individual stories of families, streets, and neighborhoods. Grayson has included some top-notch charts and maps that scholars will find useful in studying the metropolis. However, the book shines most in Grayson's creation of a unified story of uniformed service, whether it be in the Volunteers, the British Army, the Irish Republican Army, or the Auxiliaries; these identities proved much more fluid and unpredictable than has been typically understood in general histories. Grayson also spends some time thinking about the ways in which Ireland's wartime experience was both representative and unique in relationship to other parts of the United Kingdom. Here his section on Gallipoli is quite instructive. A related strength of the book is its coordination of local and global scope. Grayson demonstrates quite effectively how men from a single street in Dublin ended up in diverse theaters of war, from Mesopotamia to Belgium and beyond.

This volume will be particularly useful for scholars of military history, revolution, and civil war, as Grayson writes a crisp narrative of battles, military movements, and fluctuating formations of battalions in the period. It will also certainly be of use to those who study modern Irish history in all its complexities, and Grayson includes both classic and recent secondary sources on the Easter Revolt, the First World War, and the postwar conflicts in Dublin. Ultimately, Grayson's analysis makes it impossible to separate these fields of inquiry. His book's great virtue comes from his management of parallel narratives. For instance, in seeking to show the complexity of wartime identities and losses in his narration of Easter 1916, Grayson juxtaposes the actions and losses of Ireland's soldiers in Europe with the day-to-day events of the Revolt in Dublin itself. Not only does this technique show quite starkly the whiplash felt by Dublin residents, many of whom witnessed the shelling of their city while worrying about their sons in the army, but it also helps explain the complicated responses of ordinary people to the Revolt and its aftermath. This section of the book is among the most effective and helpful to readers.

Grayson's book succeeds brilliantly in two principal ways. First, he puts a human face on the Dubliners involved in the conflict, tracing their connections to each other and their motivations for joining military formations. Particularly compelling are the stories of individuals that Grayson is able to trace throughout the book, such as Emmet Dalton. Dalton was an American-born naturalized British citizen who joined the British Army in Dublin, served as an officer in the war, then, after his April 1919 demobilization, became a high-profile member of the Irish Republican Army. As Grayson points out, the military expertise of men such as Dalton provided a huge boost to the Irish Republican Army during the Revolution. Dalton's is just one of the fascinating lives Grayson recounts. Second, as noted above, Grayson contributes to the fields of First World War, Irish history, and British studies by weaving together the war with the postwar period from 1919 to 1923. By so doing, he illuminates connections between the war years and the revolutionary upheaval that followed. For instance, he demonstrates the war's long shadow over both government forces, such as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, and the republican forces. In addition, his last section on the memory of these varied conflicts extends his chronology further and solidifies the contribution the book makes to the larger historiography.

While there is much to recommend Dublin's Great War, it is not really a book for students or for the general public unless they already have some knowledge of the First World War and Irish history. Grayson refers to Home Rule, to military concepts such as attrition, and to other important strands in the story without providing an in-depth explanation of these ideas and their contexts. Those without sufficient background might have difficulty understanding his larger argument or in identifying some of the people involved. For example, Sir Roger Casement first appears (20) with no identifying information about who he was or why he was buying arms in Germany. This is not meant as a criticism of the book, which is deftly written and exhaustively researched. In the end, Grayson has created an important memorial to the lives of those who died in this decade of violence and has revealed how difficult it is, even a hundred years later, to recover the complexity of their stories.