ABSTRACT
What explains the 1914-18 war that claimed the lives of 10 million people, caused unprecedented levels of social and industrial mobilisation and triggered some of the most remarkable military and, subsequently, political revolutions? There are thousands of scholarly and popular works on the Great War. However, many well-known historical accounts of the First World War contextualise the war only briefly before moving to discussing in detail its outbreak, escalation, strategies, battles, negotiations and outcomes (e.g. Stevenson 2004); or tend to focus on the armaments race of the last decade before the war (e.g. Stevenson 1996). However, there have also been longerterm historical accounts, such as A.J.P. Taylor’s (1971) standard benchmark treatise The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918; Joachim Remak’s (1976) The Origins of World War I, 1871-1914; and Eric Hobsbawm’s (1994a) repeatedly reprinted The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, focusing on the war in the last chapter.1
