DISPUTING DISASTER

An examination of the many approaches historians have taken to understanding the origins of the First World War.

As British historian Anderson notes, thousands on thousands of books have been devoted to World War I. Yet only a small number concern the history of history—historiography, that is. Anderson considers six major historians whose work even well-read students of the Great War may not know. While many historians have viewed the war as inevitable, others as the result of a chain of errors, Anderson’s sextet took a far more nuanced view and delivered far more intriguing interpretations of events. Some suggested, for instance, a causal chain that traces the war to England’s arrangement with Russia that the czar could do much as he pleased in Central Asia as long as Russia left British India, the keystone of its empire, alone. In the view of conservative American historian Paul Schroeder, the war was at least in part due to the major European powers’ undisguised desire to bring down the Habsburg Empire: “No actor in the system gave any thought to what the consequences of the deletion of Austro-Hungary from it were likely to be,” Anderson writes. “Sensing this, Austro-Hungary rebelled against the system, only to bring itself down with the system.” And it took plenty of lives down with it: Italian journalist and historian Luigi Albertini examined the reluctance of Italy, initially an ally of Germany and Austro-Hungary, to join in the war, only to do so 10 months after the outbreak in order to take part in the spoils; the result, thanks to the blusteringly inept chief of staff Luigi Cadorna, was the slaughter of the Italian army at Caporetto, “the most ignominious single defeat of any belligerent in the First World War.”

Provocative exploration of overlooked causes of a war that may or may not have been a historical inevitability.