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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Cambridge History of the First World War
  • Cited by 6
  • Volume 1: Global War
  • Edited by Jay Winter, Yale University, Connecticut
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2013
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9780511675669
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511675669
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, British History: General Interest, Military History, History, Twentieth Century Regional History
Collections:
Cambridge Histories - Global History, Cambridge Histories - British & European History, Cambridge Histories - American History, Cambridge Histories - Asian History, Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Series:
The Cambridge History of the First World War
Information

Book description

This first volume of The Cambridge History of the First World War provides a comprehensive account of the war's military history. An international team of leading historians charts how a war made possible by globalization and imperial expansion unfolded into catastrophe, growing year by year in scale and destructive power far beyond that which anyone had anticipated in 1914. Adopting a global perspective, the volume analyses the spatial impact of the war and the subsequent ripple effects that occurred both regionally and across the world. It explores how imperial powers devoted vast reserves of manpower and material to their war efforts and how, by doing so, they changed the political landscape of the world order. It also charts the moral, political and legal implications of the changing character of war and, in particular, the collapse of the distinction between civilian and military targets.

Reviews

'… both scholarly and deftly drafted, a joy to read. It provides broad as well as deep analysis of just about every conceivable facet of this global catastrophe. It deserves close reading and contemplation.'

Len Shurtleff - World War One Historical Association

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 17 - The Ottoman Empire
    pp 459-478
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A history of the Italian fronts is essential in creating a more comprehensive and global interpretation of the history of the First World War. Much about the Great War becomes clearer once authors shift their attention south and east to the Italian-Austrian frontier. This chapter describes the matter of different strategies suiting different war aims. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy had two very different military structures at their disposal. Italy and Austria were part of international alliances whose fate depended, to varying degrees, on the Italian Front. The Italian Front was not isolated from the other fronts. They were both an integral part of a wartime alliance. Italy depended heavily on economic and financial alliance, but called for little at the military level. In 1918, the demobilisation of armies took time in Italy.
  • 18 - Asia
    pp 479-510
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The war against Ottoman Turkey evolved piecemeal and over disparate areas. In the initial phase, 1914-15, with the exception of Gallipoli, only relatively small forces were involved and many of these did not originate in Britain. By the end of the war, 500,000 troops had been committed against Ottoman Turkey and Egypt had become the greatest base for British troops outside the homeland. There were four areas of British involvement against the Turks and although the operations in all four areas overlapped at one time or another, they will be dealt with roughly in chronological order: Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Sinai and the Arabian Peninsula. The continued existence of the Ottoman Empire, in light of a putative German victory or a compromise peace, or its transformation into a militant Republic tied to a victorious Imperial Germany, after 1918, is a counter-factual people can all live without.
  • 19 - North America
    pp 511-532
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explains why did sea power itself play such a relatively limited role in the Great War, as compared to its magnificent and undoubted importance in both the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War. Sea power was vital for the extension of Japanese maritime influence across the waterways of Asia and the Indian Ocean; eventually, a Japanese destroyer squadron was to operate out of the Grand Harbour, Malta. In the classic study of the US Marines and amphibious warfare in the Pacific campaigns, Jeter A. Isley and Philip Crowl begin with a very blunt comparison: Success at Okinawa and Failure at Gallipoli. The US Marine Corps studied the Gallipoli campaign throughout the interwar years. The chapter presents an example of the crimping of the influence of sea power in the new era of mines, torpedoes, entrenched coastal gunnery, motor tropedo boats and submarines.
  • 20 - Latin America
    pp 533-556
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In August 1914, the European powers had gone to war with rudimentary air services and embryonic aviation industries. Once airplanes proved themselves as a means of reconnaissance and, most importantly, of artillery spotting, air commanders required more of them to conduct effective aerial operations and prevent enemy aerial reconnaissance. The second aim led to armed aircraft and then the development of specialised pursuit, or fighter, aircraft. The battles of Verdun and the Somme forced the codification of aerial combat tactics and brought home the importance of mass. Military aviation did not determine the outcome of the First World War, but the airplane did establish its very real significance in support of the army and especially the artillery on the battlefield. Theory and wishful thinking after the Great War focused on strategic aviation and nearly drove the lessons of tactical aerial importance and success from the minds of post-war observers.
  • Part IV - Rules of Engagement, Laws of War and War Crimes
    pp 557-642
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on a study of the murder of the Ottoman Armenians and other Anatolian Christians during the First World War, which incorporates an account of pre-war state-minority relations. Then, it discusses the violent political landscape of a very large part of greater Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. The most extensive anti-civilian violence occurred in the lands of the older dynastic land empires in the east, south-east and east-central parts of the continent. The removal of the Armenians from eastern Asia Minor mainly took place, and from western Anatolia and the province of Edirne in Thrace, 1915. In eastern Anatolia, men and youngsters were mostly massacred on the spot, with those in the army, mostly already separated into unarmed labour-battalions, also killed. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918 allowed the relaunch of pan-Turkist schemes and raised the spectre of further Armenian extermination.
  • 22 - Genocide
    pp 585-614
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Great War of 1914-18 began and ended as a global conflict that imperial powers waged in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Africa and East Asia. Great Britain and France, with overseas colonies and control of the seas, relied on their possessions for men and materials to fight the war in Europe. European and native soldiers of the empires had fought in Europe and around the globe. As the war eroded the traditional prohibition against using coloured troops from the colonies to fight against Europeans, it heightened the fear of white people towards peoples of colour. The participation of African and Asian troops in the slaughter of white men, their access to white women in ways theretofore unimaginable and, the French use of Senegalese soldiers in the post-war occupation of western Germany, all threatened the traditional imperial order of racial supremacy.
  • 23 - The laws of war
    pp 615-638
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The significance of the First World War in African history was its place in the chronology of European colonisation. There are four striking features of Africa's entanglement with the 1914-18 war. The first essentially European war fought amongst and profoundly affecting African populations had been the major war waged by Britain to subdue Boer republicanism, the Anglo-Boer War, or South African War. A second feature is that the first and last shots of a war which was won and lost in Europe were discharged on opposite sides of the African continent. Thirdly, for many regions and numerous inhabitants, the absorption into a global war was virtually imperceptible, and its impact on life barely felt. Larger tremor is the fourth and deepest inroad made by the European war, as respective imperial powers set about trying to extract the maximum manpower and material resources from their colonial dependencies.
  • Plates
    pp 643-643
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The study of the First World War has been impeded first of all by the politicisation of the late Ottoman period, especially scholarship on policies towards Christian minorities, of which the Armenian case is emblematic and one whose legacy continues to affect Turkey's domestic politics and foreign relations. In Turkish historiography, assessments of the war have taken a backseat to the history of the Kemalist Revolution and attempts at secularisation and democratisation. The Ottoman state's wartime policies and the profound social, political and especially demographic developments that occurred during the war, not only made the Turkish nation-state possible in the first place but also defined its character ever since. These policies required the raising of a national army based on mass conscription, and they assured, until very recently, the army's unrivalled role in post-war Turkish politics. These policies also included the social and ideological mobilisation of the Muslim civilian population.
  • Bibliographical essays
    pp 644-686
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explains Asian legacy and impact on their history and the development of their nations in the First World War literature. It highlights the multi-layered involvements and perspectives of various Asian nations on that great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. First, the chapter reviews the diplomatic, social, political, cultural and military histories of China, Vietnam, India and Japan in a comparative way by focusing on the shared experiences, aspirations and frustrations of people from across the region. As a rising power in Asia, Japan was determined to become a leading player in international politics, but Japan's efforts faced some resistance from the Western powers. China, a partisan on the side of the victors, was treated like one of the vanquished at the post-war Peace Conference. The sea changes that had taken place occurred to a great-extent because of war experiences and broad dissatisfaction with the Paris Peace Conference.

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