Ezequiel Mercau Book Launch
The book launch for Ezequiel Mercau’s The Falklands War: An Imperial History, published by Cambridge University Press, took place on Wednesday 22 January 2020 at Dublin’s historic and iconic bookstore, Hodges Figgis. The keynote speaker, Professor Robert Gerwarth, described the trajectory of Ezequiel’s book, which began when he was an MA student ten years ago, inspired by a course taught by the then-Keith Cameron Chair of Australian History, Professor Stuart Ward. On returning to Denmark, Prof. Ward invited him to participate in a new collaborative research project at the University of Copenhagen, ‘Embers of Empire’. After completing his PhD in Denmark, Ezequiel returned to UCD, where he turned his thesis into a book. In his own speech, Ezequiel thanked Prof. Gerwarth and everyone in the UCD School of History and at the UCD Centre for War Studies for their support over the years.
The Falklands War: An Imperial History seeks to understand why Britain and Argentina went to war over a wintry archipelago that was home to an unprofitable colony, by looking at the conflict through the transnational perspective of the British world. Taking Britain's painful process of decolonisation as his starting point, Ezequiel Mercau shows how the Falklands lobby helped revive the idea of a ‘British world’, transforming a minor squabble into a full-blown war. Boasting original perspectives on the Falklanders, the Four Nations and the Anglo-Argentines, and based on a wealth of unseen material, he sheds new light on the British world, Thatcher's Britain, devolution, immigration and political culture. His findings show that neither the dispute, the war, nor its aftermath can be divorced from the ongoing legacies of empire.