Introduction

This volume aspires to an international outlook, both in the geographical origins of its contributors and of their chosen subject matter. We regard this as an essential response to current developments in the study of the First World War (and, of course, to the conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries more widely). Only in recent years has the study of the Great War of 1914–18, so fundamental to our understanding of subsequent history, begun to escape from a state of national and doctrinal compartmentalization.