THE FIRST WORLD WAR, A Very Short Introduction
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loginSince the Great War of 1914–18 was fought on all the oceans of theworld and ultimately involved belligerents from every continent, itcan justifiably be termed a ‘world war’. But it was certainly not thefirst. European powers had been fighting each other all over theglobe for the previous 300 years. Those who fought in it called itsimply ‘the Great War’. Like all its predecessors, it began as apurely European conflict, arising out of the conflicting ambitionsand mutual fears of the European powers. That its course shouldhave been so terrible, and its consequences so catastrophic, wasthe result not so much of its global scale as of a combination ofmilitary technology and the culture of the peoples who fought it.Karl von Clausewitz had written in the aftermath of the NapoleonicWars that war was a trinity composed of the policy of thegovernment, the activities of the military, and ‘the passions of thepeoples’. Each of these must be taken into account if we are tounderstand both why the war happened and why it took the coursethat it did.
