Book Review

Methods/Theory

With its combat casualty lists of twenty million, its monetary costs of hundreds of millions of 1918 dollars, and its overwhelming social, political, and economic legacies, the 1914–1918 conflict certainly deserves to be remembered as the Great War. Niall Ferguson, in a book that has caused quite a splash in Britain and is now published in the United States, certainly agrees. But, he tells us, there is much in the historical canon with which he does not—and therein lies the tale of this defiantly revisionist work. He rejects the usual narrative format to explain the war and instead sets down a series of questions; in answering them, he pleads his case: was the war inevitable? Why did the Germans risk all on war in 1914? Why did Britain intervene? (This book is really about Britain and Germany—a fact that will gravely disappoint many readers.) Did Europeans welcome a war, and did propaganda prolong it? Why did the economic power of the British Empire not defeat its enemies more quickly and without American help? Why did the superior German military machine not subdue its adversaries in the West as it had done in the East? Why, given the manifest horrors of trench life, did men continue to fight for more than four years, and why did they finally stop fighting? And "Who won the peace—to be precise, who ended up paying for the war" (p. xxvi).

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This brief review can touch on only some of the answers on offer. Was the Great War inevitable? Of course not, we are told—but then, who among us thinks that it was, save for the dwindling band of threadbare Marxists. These latter Ferguson pounds appropriately. Why did the Germans risk all on their war "gamble"? They did so not in pursuit of a Napoleonic dream of European conquest but out of anxiety that their economic limitations and the growing strength of Tsarist Russia would render their position much weaker in the not distant future. This assertion also will not come as a complete surprise to historians of the war. Although Ferguson does not ignore Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg's carnivorous September Program, he generously considers it a bit of after-the-fact political opportunism rather than a blueprint for European domination.

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