ABSTRACT
The Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 founded a lasting peace based on Great Power management of international politics and moderation in the pursuit of self-interest. The general peace was broken by the Crimean War of 1853-56, and then by the three Great Power wars of Italian and German unification between 1859 and 1871. Britain, the world's greatest seapower, with overwhelming military, financial and industrial resources at its disposal, found itself humiliated when two tiny and backward Afrikaner republics resisted British annexation. Modernization flowed as a consequence of the scientific, French and industrial revolutions, characterized by rationalization, secularization, urbanization and industrialization. The triple stalemate explains why the war continued for 52 months, and why the decisions of July-August 1914 were so momentous in their consequences. The entry of the United States, however, in the short term probably rescued the Entente from bankruptcy, and in the long term turned the contest against the Central Powers.
