The First World War: A Concise Global History (review)

William Storey set out to write a "short narrative history of the First World War that takes into account human decisions and experiences as well as environmental and technological factors" (p. 3), and he has done a masterful job of condensing his study into a book of fewer than 200 pages. Yet the challenges posed by writing a concise history of any massive topic are numerous, in particular the selection of what to include or omit. Furthermore, the imposition of concepts from particular fields—such as environmental history—to focus the discussion can complicate matters.

The author sets his examination of the war's origins cogently in the context of the European empires and of military and naval technology at the turn of the century. In the process, he observes that the "prevailing political idea of the nineteenth-century industrial countries was liberalism" (p. 6). He then concentrates on the German Empire to the near exclusion of the other imperial powers, because the origins of the war stemmed "largely from the rise of Germany to the status of a great power" (p. 14). Yet liberalism was under assault by the end of the nineteenth century even in England and France, while in Germany, surely an industrial country, the short heyday of liberalism in mid-century had long passed. In fact, the rise of conservative nationalism and the nationalist imperialism that emerged toward the end of the century did much to undermine liberalism and impel Europe toward war. The author's singular focus on Germany, which implies that Germany alone was responsible for the war, is dated and simplistic, and even a concise history must present the roles and circumstances of the other imperial powers and Germany's relationship to them to explain the war's origins.

In a discussion of the land war, the author applies the environmental historical concept of a "sacrifice zone" to the war's battlefields,which entails a considered decision to "sacrifice local resources" to a "greater good, such as industrial production." First World War battlefields thus "became zones in which leaders deliberately sacrificed men, animals, trees, and land for the greater good" of victory (p. 37). Surely the nature of wartime decision-making, as multiple powers struggled over the vast reaches of land, renders this notion preposterous for Europe. The French did not choose to destroy and lose northeastern France, their most industrialized region, and not some rural sector of mere trees and land, nor did Russian leaders willingly sacrifice some one-fourth of their most arable land. In both cases, the invading Germans tore these vast territories from their opponents. At war's end, the victorious Allies felt no exhilaration or sense of having achieved a greater good from the fact that the Germans had fought the war on and destroyed allied territory and resources.

Storey's discussion of the war in East Africa, however, does indicate that their imperial and social Darwinist view of Africa and Africans enabled Europeans to render the entire eastern part of the continent, its peoples and territory, a sacrifice zone, as they conducted a deliberately destructive guerrilla war that ravaged vast reaches of the inhospitable region. This qualified applicability of the concept of "sacrifice zones" leads this reader to ask "who" rather than "what" was being sacrificed in the original environmental historical contexts from which Storey appropriated the term.

Storey's discussion of wartime military and naval technology is excellent, although he omits the technology of the submarine. He also convincingly explains wartime financing, although this reader would have appreciated more examination of the industrial mobilization necessary to produce the technological weapons of war. Finally, one of the best parts of this work that concentrates on technology and environment is the author's too-short section on wartime culture, "The Arts of War."

This global history of the First World War does offer a nicely condensed study of the most destructive war in history to that time...