The First World War

All major wars prompt debate among historians over their causes, but the First World War has loomed as a particularly important case study. This war in particular demands explanation due to its unprecedented scale and destructiveness, especially as it came after a fairly long period of peace among the Great Powers. With all the technological and ideological forces that the war unleashed, studying the origins of the war promises to reveal a point of connection between an old world that the war shattered and the new one that we still inhabit.

One of the most hotly contested questions within this field is the degree to which Germany bears responsibility for causing the war, as the victorious Allied powers declared at the postwar Versailles Conference. The proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, piecing together what had been dozens of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and cities into a single state, severely challenged Europe’s centuries-long effort to ensure a relative balance among its major powers. The new German state had just seized the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France in the Franco-Prussian war. Germany and its principal ally, the empire of Austria-Hungary, flanked Russian-controlled Poland on two sides. When Kaiser Wilhelm II announced plans to build a large navy, which he regarded as necessary to confirm its status as a first-rate power, Great Britain feared a challenge to its own dominance over the high seas.