Researching World War I: A Handbook (review)

Anything that guides one around the sheer volume of scholarly work on the First World War is very welcome. Robin Higham and Dennis E. Showalter are to be congratulated on this very useful book, which largely achieves its aim in helping the reader to "get his or her bearings in the literature of the 1914-18 War" (p. vii). The subject is broken down into seventeen chapters, covering publications by country, area of conflict (e.g. "The Middle East"), or by theme (such as "Origins"). Each chapter takes the form of an initial bibliographical essay, with contributors going about their task in slightly different ways. All provide a list of key works that have been produced in English and other languages. Most of the contributors are American, with a handful of writers who hail from various parts of the Commonwealth.

Arranging the material in this way is generally effective, although there is some overlap between chapters. It is good that Canada, and the Anzac countries, are treated separately, rather than being lumped in with Great Britain. One problem however, is the roughly equal allocation of space to topic. Great Britain is awarded only nineteen pages (Japan, by contrast, gets twenty-one). The First World War has been perhaps the dominant topic in British military history over the last two decades. As a consequence, the numbers of works produced has been very large, leading the writer of the chapter on Britain, Ian Beckett, to confess that "Space precludes dealing with the many studies of individual campaigns" (p. 83). To put it mildly, this is not very helpful and limits the usefulness of the book for scholars of the British and Empire military experience.

There is, perhaps, a case to be made that a book like this should be written by people that know the literature but are not actively engaged in the debates. Some of the opinions expressed by contributors are contentious. I for one would not agree with Beckett that "there is an emerging consensus that British successes in 1918 owed most to German failures" (p. 84).

Inevitably, a book of this size contains a number of minor errors, and most specialists could point to omissions that they feel are significant. This is to be expected, but rather more serious is the fact that little or nothing published later than 2000 is included. This suggests that contributions were completed by 1999. In a field of research as dynamic as the First World War, this is a long time between submission and publication. The result is the omission of a number of important books and articles. As a bibliophile I hate to admit it, but this prompts the question whether it is any longer worth producing this sort of publication in hardcopy. In the age of the Internet and e-publishing, these entries could be produced in electronic form and easily updated. These criticisms aside, Researching World War I is a most useful tool for the historian.