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Review
| Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy, by David Stevenson. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 564 pages. $35.00, cloth.
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| For some years now interest in the First World War has been booming. Social and cultural histories, no less than military, strategic, and political studies or studies of wartime economic mobilization, abound. We know incomparably more than before about the home fronts, country by country, in relation not just to workplace disaffection and growing industrial militancy (the early focus of social historians), but also about the entire landscape of social life, including family relations, childraising and control of youth, sexuality and all aspects of gender relations, entertainment and leisure, generations, and the impact of food shortages and other hardships of everyday life. If anything, the war's cultural meanings have captured still greater interest, whether in studies of popular culture, the arts and aesthetics, or in the continuing wave of research on monuments and memorializing. Not to be outdone, military historians have also enormously expanded their remit, working not only on planning and strategy, logistics and provisioning, and armaments and technology, but also on medicine, social welfare, and psychiatry, together with all aspects of the combat experience. The extra-European and imperial aspects of the conflict—the frequently neglected "worldness" of the war—are also slowly coming into view. |
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David Stevenson's general history brings this scholarship impressively together. More detailed than Hew Strachan's single-volume summary of his massively exhaustive work in progress, more securely grounded than Niall Ferguson's stimulating but perversely opinionated The Pity of War, and better integrated than any of the multi-authored volumes, Stevenson's Cataclysm deserves to join Ian Beckett's The Great War as the best overall account. It has four parts. The first presents the prehistory in a succinct chapter of 32 pages, followed by a fine overview of the opening campaigning (41 pages). Likewise, the book closes with four chapters of comparable aggregate length (79 pages) on the war's consequences, proceeding from Versailles through a judicious account of the 1920s to the collapse of the Versailles system after 1929, and ending with a Conclusion entitled "The War Becomes History." Stevenson divides the body of his account equally between Part Two, "Escalation" (158 pages), and Part Three, "Outcome" (163 pages). After a brief conspectus, the eight topically organized chapters of the former carry the analysis forward from spring 1915 to early 1917, when the Russian Revolution and the U.S. intervention qualitatively shifted the terms of the conflict. The latter's five chapters then shift to a chronological format, expertly integrating the war's various dimensions in a sequence of admirably intelligible narratives. After beginning in the spring of 1917, these take us from incipient mutual exhaustion, through the resurgence of German optimism after the spectacular advances in the east ("The Central Powers' Last Throw, Autumn 1917-Summer 1918"), to the final collapse of Germany and its allies in summer-autumn 1918. A judicious chapter on the Armistice ("Ceasefire") brings the main account to an end. |
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Predictably, given his own main interests, Stevenson's forte is the war's international history. Giving due weight to the structural consequences of the alliance systems, he shows very well how the reciprocal intransigence of the rival war aims programs coalesced. Likewise, his three chapters dealing with economic and social mobilization, "Technology, Logistics, and Tactics," "Manpower and Morale," and "Armaments and Economics," provide excellent syntheses of recent scholarship. In contrast, unfortunately, the treatment of "The Politics of the Home Fronts" is weak, giving poor access to a wealth of recent research, particularly on the experience of women. If on the one hand the mobilizations of women profoundly shifted the gendered terms of citizenship talk, country by country, then on the other hand the belligerent states' variable capacity for ensuring reliable and equitable supplies of food decisively affected popular morale, leading in the German case, to an ever deteriorating crisis of legitimacy. But in Stevenson's account the work of Belinda Davis, Ute Daniel, and others on Germany (who are at least mentioned) and of Susan Grayzel and others on Britain (who are not) is not given its due. More generally, the war's lasting impact on the state's regulative and interventionist capacities, both as an active program of governmentality and in popular expectations, might have been explored. Similarly, while the extra-European significance of the war is acknowledged, it remains somewhat under-explicated. But despite those relative limitations, Stevenson's book presents a clearly expounded and strongly argued comprehensive account, which contains all the virtues of an authoritative and accessible general history. |
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| University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
Geoff Eley |
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