ABSTRACT
The twentieth century was dominated by wars, general and local, regular and irregular, to register an incontestable claim. It is less well appreciated that the international relations of the nineteenth century similarly were shaped and reshaped decisively by wars. Moreover, that reshaping critically contributed to the outbreak and character of what the British victory medal proclaimed to be the Great War for Civilization, or World War I. The Concert of Europe, so called, contrived in 1814-15 with its initial flurry of congresses, was a response to the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, their consequences and implications. In mid-century the succession of wars between great powers from 1854 to 1871 entirely restructured the balance of power in Europe. Those conflicts yielded a political context of enduring rivalries that enabled and eventually triggered the catastrophe of 1914. To extend the argument geopolitically, the outcome of the American Civil War of 1861-5 created the modern United States, and ensured that that country would be a giant among nations. This is not to claim inevitability to the events just cited. The point, simply, is that the strategic history of the nineteenth century, though less dramatic and obvious in its consequences than the like history of the twentieth, was just as influential over the course of events.
