History is full of watershed moments—points in time so pivotal, so foundational, that the consequences of their events ripple across the annals and can still be felt decades, centuries, even millennia later. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the hands of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, 1914; Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE; the death of King Philip II in 339 BCE, and the ascendancy of his son, Alexander, to the throne of Macedon. Such moments might bring to mind the Great Man Theory of History, an observation made by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle in 1841, in which he confidently stated that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” While most modern historians rightly argue against the theory’s disenfranchising undercurrents, it’s difficult to deny the presence of the powerful personalities that so often live at the center of these tumultuous times. It must be said, however, that not all watershed moments break for the better—and not all of these “Great Men of History” are, in reality, all that great.

Roger Casement was a man who found a voice on the global stage in a time long before the ever-present din of a worldwide cacophony, and through his work, shed light on the horrific injustices that were occurring in places like Africa and Peru. He was also a man strongly divided by nature and nurture, who held extreme nationalistic views and allied himself with some of the darker characters of history in order to further his agenda. The following is a profile of Roger Casement: human rights activist, Irish republican, and traitor to the British Empire.