Britain and the Origins of the First World War

Britain and the Origins of the First World War
Author: Zara S. Steiner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2017-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230213014

How and why did Britain become involved in the First World War? Taking into account the scholarship of the last twenty-five years, this second edition of Zara S. Steiner's classic study, thoroughly revised with Keith Neilson, explores a subject which is as highly contentious as ever. While retaining the basic argument that Britain went to war in 1914 not as a result of internal pressures but as a response to external events, Steiner and Neilson reject recent arguments that Britain became involved because of fears of an 'invented' German menace, or to defend her Empire. Instead, placing greater emphasis than before on the role of Russia, the authors convincingly argue that Britain entered the war in order to preserve the European balance of power and the nation's favourable position within it. Lucid and comprehensive, Britain and the Origins of the First World War brings together the bureaucratic, diplomatic, economic, strategical and ideological factors that led to Britain's entry into the Great War, and remains the most complete survey of the pre-war situation.

Britain and the Origins of the First World War

Britain and the Origins of the First World War
Author: Zara S. Steiner
Publisher: London : Macmillan
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1977
Genre: History
ISBN:

Taking into account the scholarship of the last 20 years, this new edition rejects recent arguments that Britain went to war out of either weakness, fear of an "invented" German menace, or fears for the Empire. Instead, while placing greater emphasis than before on the role of Russia, Zara S. Steiner and Keith Neilson maintain the view that Britain was forced into the war in order to preserve the European balance of power and Britain's favorable position within it.

The Origins of World War I

The Origins of World War I
Author: Richard F. Hamilton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2003-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521817356

Discusses and examines the possible causes of World War I.

Hidden History

Hidden History
Author: Gerry Docherty
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1780577494

Think you know about British history and the causes of the First World War? Think again. This fascinating and gripping study of events at the turn of the Twentieth Century is a remarkable insight into how political and social factors that we widely accept to be the causes of The Great War, were really just a construct put together by a very small, but powerful, political elite... 'Thought-provoking . . . Docherty and Macgregor do not mince their words . . . their arguments are powerful' -- Britain at War 'Simply astonishing' -- ***** Reader review 'Very illuminating' -- ***** Reader review 'You simply MUST read this book' -- ***** Reader review 'This is a page-turner' -- ***** Reader review *********************************************************************************** Hidden History uniquely exposes those responsible for the First World War. It reveals how accounts of the war's origins have been deliberately falsified to conceal the guilt of the secret cabal of very rich and powerful men in London responsible for the most heinous crime perpetrated on humanity. For ten years, they plotted the destruction of Germany as the first stage of their plan to take control of the world. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was no chance happening. It lit a fuse that had been carefully set through a chain of command stretching from Sarajevo through Belgrade and St Petersburg to that cabal in London. Our understanding of these events has been firmly trapped in a web of falsehood and duplicity carefully constructed by the victors at Versailles in 1919 and maintained by compliant historians ever since. The official version is fatally flawed, warped by the volume of evidence they destroyed or concealed from public view. Hidden History poses a tantalising challenge. The authors ask only that you examine the evidence they lay before you . . .

The Origins of the First World War

The Origins of the First World War
Author: William Mulligan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107159598

The second edition of this leading introduction to the origins of the First World War. Updated to take account of the latest debates around the war's origins and outbreak, this is an essential classroom text which significantly revises our understanding of diplomacy, political culture, and economic history from 1870 to 1914.

The Russian Origins of the First World War

The Russian Origins of the First World War
Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674072332

The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

The Pity of War

The Pity of War
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2008-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 078672529X

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

The Beauty and the Sorrow

The Beauty and the Sorrow
Author: Peter Englund
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2012-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307739287

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.