War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April 2008)

Niall Ferguson. _The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West_. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. lxxi + 808 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $18.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-14-311239-6.

Reviewed for H-German by Talbot Imlay, Département d'histoire, Université Laval, Québec

An Awfully Bloody Awful Half-Century

As a historian, Niall Ferguson is in a class by himself. He is the author of several best-selling books on topics such as the First World War, British and American empires, the role of money over the past three centuries, and the Rothschild banking family. Along the way, he has presented several television documentaries related to the subjects of his books and has written scores of editorials, book reviews, and articles for prominent newspapers and magazines. But Ferguson is not merely a successful--not to say, the most successful--public historian. Also to his credit is an academic monograph on politics and business in Hamburg during the opening three decades of the last century as well as an important edited collection on counterfactual (or virtual) history. If this were not enough, Ferguson has also published and continues to publish articles in leading academic journals.

As befits someone of Ferguson's talent and energy, his latest book offers a panoramic study of war, conflict, and violence during the first half of the twentieth century. As with most of his earlier books, this one is ambitious in design and wide-ranging in scope. Its arguments are often convincing, sometimes provocative, and occasionally frustrating. The book, in short, is eminently readable despite its considerable length. Following recent scholarly trends that underscore the dark, not to say, catastrophic history of the twentieth century, Ferguson sets out to explain why its first five decades experienced such high and, indeed, unprecedented levels of violence and especially death. The answer, he argues, lies in three overlapping factors: ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires. The presence of these three factors distinguishes the period from earlier and later ones, and the changing mix of the three accounts for the variegated nature of the violence, whether in terms of place and time or in terms of the identity of victims and perpetrators. This variation notwithstanding, Ferguson suggests that the period should be viewed as a whole, as a "fifty years war" (or "war of the world")--one defined by multiple, sometimes overlapping regional conflicts that overflowed the temporal boundaries of 1914-18 and 1939-45. To this schema, Ferguson tacks on an additional argument concerning the decline of the West: the twentieth century, he insists, witnessed a transformation in world politics marked by the rapid end of western dominance over the East (Asia), a process due in no small part to the rippling effects of conflict and war ...

REVIEW: Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-War (July, 2008)

Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Translated by Richard Veasey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6.

Reviewed by: Mark R. Hatlie, History and Government Program, University of Maryland University College, Europe Division.

War and Memorial Culture

This study of the casualties of war offers a broad overview of the cultural meaning and impact of mass wartime death in the West over the past 150 years or more. "Did the brutality, the suddenness, the sheer numbers of those killed change the relationship with death in the West?" (p. xi). The period covered by the book is the same as that of other recent studies of modern war and memorial culture, extending from the French Revolution through the wars of the twentieth century, but emphasizing primarily the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. These years were a period during which a tension arose between a greater political and social concern for the individual on the one hand and developments in military technology and practice which killed unprecedented numbers and, often, did so in such a way that the dead were also not only distant, but often physically obliterated, depriving the bereaved of bodies to mourn.

War Dead defines "Western societies" in a refreshingly broad manner, including not only western Europe and North America, but also South America, primarily the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Indeed, these last cases promise to open up recent studies on wartime death and dying to a new cultural context. However, most of the examples and analysis are taken from France during and following the world wars, especially World War I. The authors include scattered examples from the Franco-Prussian War and the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from other countries such as Germany, Spain, and Britain and even one or two anecdotes from Soviet experience. South America gets, in the end, relatively little attention, however. Thus, this study remains rooted in western Europe and does not radically break with works such as those by George Mosse, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, or Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann. The other examples, however, serve to show that some patterns and conclusions are indeed more broadly applicable ...

REVIEW: Andrew August, The British Working Class, 1832-1940

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (April 2008)

Andrew August. _The British Working Class, 1832-1940_. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. ix + 286 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $33.40 (paper), ISBN 0-582-38130-4.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Dennis Dworkin, Department of History, University of Nevada

In the 1960s and 1970s, the working class--and particularly the British working class--had a special place in historical writing.  It was at the center of the new social history and history from below, in large part because of E. P. Thompson's enormously influential _The Making of the English Working Class_ (1963).  Yet, Thompson's book built on a tradition of radical historiography in which the British working class was important to the historical process broadly conceived.  It was the world's first industrial proletariat and central to Karl Marx's understanding of the historical dynamic of capitalism and the transition to socialism.  The British working class's experience had universal implications.

Certainly, much has changed since the heyday of the new social and labor history.  The end of communism, the rise of identity politics, the decline of the labor movement, the advent of post-Fordism, and a host of other changes have contributed to a declining interest in the working class within historiography.  As a result of the impact of the linguistic turn, the new cultural history, postmodernism, and postcolonial studies, the fields of labor and social history are less central than they once were.  Yet, at the same time, there has been an outpouring of theoretical discussion that has revised our understanding of class, and historians have produced a more complex and nuanced picture of British working-class life.  The theoretical transformations have been analyzed at length, including by me in _Class Struggles_ (2007).  Andrew August's _The British Working Class: 1832-1940_ is a highly readable overview of British working-class history that builds on the achievement of numerous social, cultural, and feminist historians, while deploying numerous primary sources to make its principal points ...

REVIEW: Gerald E. Shenk, "Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Minerva@h-net.msu.edu (October, 2007)

Gerald E. Shenk. _"Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 194 pp. Notes, index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-6175-4; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4039-6177-8.

Reviewed for H-Minerva by Richard S. Fogarty, Department of History,  University at Albany

Drafting Conformity

With the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1917, the United States adopted a new system of conscription to meet the challenges of full participation in Europe's Great War. While the U.S. military actually needed less than 10 percent of eligible men to serve in uniform, officials believed that the exigencies of modern total war required the utilization of all of the nation's productive capacities, both military and economic. The resulting policies, vividly distilled in the slogan "Work or Fight," sought to ensure that every available, healthy American male contributed to the war effort through uniformed service or labor deemed necessary to the prosecution of the war. However, Gerald Shenk's study of the draft during the First World War shows that the officials who administered the system, and the people who supported it in unofficial capacities, sought not only to mobilize the nation for war, but also to ensure "that millions of other men and women work to sustain the existing social order" (p. 2). In short, "the fundamental goals of draft officials at the local, state, and national levels were to protect privileges associated with property, patriarchy, and white supremacy, while providing men to fight the war" (p. 153).

Shenk's work is not a general history of the origins and operation of conscription during the war,[1] but an attempt to write "a multilayered portrayal and analysis of what the draft meant to Americans of all kinds where they lived their daily lives in their homes and communities" (p. 4). In particular, he investigates how the workings of the Selective Service System revealed the roles race, gender, and class played in American life in the early twentieth century, and how local attitudes about these issues affected the administration of conscription policies. To that end, Shenk has taken a case study approach, focusing on the implementation of policies at local and statewide levels in Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and California. The author employs this methodology presumably because it provides broad national coverage--of the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and the West--though he does not spend much space justifying this approach or explain fully why he chose these states, what makes them representative or good choices for closer examination. Still, the strength of the approach is to set these state and local stories against the broad background of the national war
effort, and the wide-ranging regional coverage allows the author to draw conclusions at both the macro and micro levels ...

REVIEW: Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (July 2007)

Stefan Goebel. _The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940_. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xviii + 357 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $ 90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-85415-6.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Antoine Capet, University of Rouen, France

Some Are More Medievalist than Others

It is clear from his stated objectives as indicated in the introduction that the author set himself a very ambitious task, from at least two points of view. First, because the general theme of the book is not one with which most readers are _prima facie_ familiar: "The 'medievalising' of the memory of the Great War is the subject-matter of this study. It argues that the Middle Ages figured centrally in the remembrance of the First World War in both Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1940" (p. 1). Second, because, as Stefan Goebel himself admits, the book "ventures into a significantly underdeveloped field of historical enquiry: empirical comparative history" (p. 6). Mastering the subject and the enormous historiography of First World War memory in Britain or Germany was already a considerable difficulty, which he chose to compound by covering both countries, fully aware of the pitfalls, since he writes that "the comparative historian of the First World War seems to tread a tightrope between emphasizing European convergences, national
peculiarities, or sectional diversities within nations" (p. 10).

Goebel's approach is clearly influenced by Pierre Nora's _Lieux de memoire_ (1984-1992). Those who are familiar with the work or its translations will remember that the "sites of memory" in question go much further than mere places and buildings, to include all elements of culture. Here, of course, lies the first major difficulty as the signifiers "culture" in English and "Kultur" in German do not have the same signified notions, with "Kultur" including references to Germanity which "culture" does not have in English for Britishness. Since, not unexpectedly, he founds his reasoning on the chivalrous ideals of the Middle Ages, Goebel draws a constant implicit comparison between the exploitation of the Knights of the Round Table in Britain and the Teutonic Knights in Germany. But as the very expression "the Arthurian legend" immediately suggests, the Knights of the Round Table are not "history"--at best they are "cultural history"--admittedly a British _lieu de memoire_ in Pierre Nora's wide acceptation of the notion, but evidently not with the same grounding in the national historical awareness as the "real" Teutonic Knights ...

REVIEW: A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-Albion (November, 2006)

A. N. Wilson. After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. xii + 609 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography index. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-374-10198-5.

Reviewed by: Rohan McWilliam, Department of History, Anglia Ruskin University.

A. N. Wilson and Edward, George, Edward, George

A. N. Wilson is a force of nature. Novels, histories, journalism, and biographies leap from his Chestertonian pen along with the odd bon mot and a delight in troublemaking. A self-appointed chronicler of English manners and foibles, he writes from the not unfertile position of the conservative maverick. By this I mean that he displays an affection for national institutions and traditions, but he is not deceived about their shortcomings and limitations. He celebrates the pragmatists rather than the ideologues and is ever willing to expose the distance between soaring rhetoric and sordid deeds.

A sequel to Wilson's Victorians (2002) (whose subject I suspect was more to his taste), After the Victorians is very much a popular history written for a non-academic audience and should be assessed as such. Like the earlier volume, this is intended as a "portrait of an age." It covers the years from Victoria's death in 1901 to the accession of Elizabeth II. Wilson's waggish agent apparently suggested that the book should be titled "Edward, George, Edward, George" after the monarchs in between. The English paperback edition has been given the subtitle, The World Our Parents Knew, which perhaps explains Wilson's attraction to the subject but which does not give much away about the contents of the book. The subtitle of the American edition is The Decline of Britain in the World which is not much more helpful as the issue of "decline" is ever present but never discussed in a coherent way, although the book ends predictably with Dean Acheson's observation that, after the Second World War, the British lost an empire and failed to find a role (p. 528) ...

REVIEW: Richard J. Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920-1931

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h.net.msu.edu (October 2006)

Richard J. Shuster. _German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920-1931_. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 256 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-35808-6.

Reviewed for H-War by Bianka J. Adams, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia

Diplomatic Trench Warfare

Richard Shuster's _German Disarmament after World War I_ is a solid and very timely book. This might sound far-fetched, considering that he covers the period from 1919 to 1931, but the reader will soon discover that weapons inspections in the early years of the last century were not all that different from similar efforts in modern times and were just as important. Even in our technologically advanced age, the effectiveness of disarmament undertakings--whether voluntary or mandated--still depend on the skill and persistence of the inspectors and the political will to punish violations. Then and now, weapons experts incurred the wrath of states and their organs whose national sovereignty they violated. Harassed by the armed forces at inspection sites, the specialists also contended with host governments' obfuscation and endless bureaucratic foot-dragging. On occasion, irate citizens even tried to assassinate inspectors as the representatives of a hated control regime. In one of the most notorious incidents in March 1920, Prince Joachim of Prussia led a group of Germans in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin (the IAMCC Headquarters) in an assault on two French officers who refused to stand during a spontaneous outburst of _Deutschland über Alles_.

The approach Shuster chose was to treat this complex issue through a combination of chronological phases or parts subdivided into functional chapters. Hence part 1 ("1919") introduces the readers to the victors at the Paris Peace Conference. The military clauses of the resulting Treaty of Versailles receive a thorough treatment--as does the machinery set up to implement them. The author also takes care to develop the divergent national agendas of the two dominant powers, Great Britain and France, who used the disarmament process as a diplomatic version of trench warfare. By the end of the first postwar year, however, the British and French had agreed on the military clauses of the Treaty that were designed to eliminate Germany's capacity to conduct offensive operations. They included limiting the number of troops, amount of war material, and fortifications of the German army. To implement this monumental task of turning Europe's most advanced land power with nearly 500,000 men under arms into a state with a standing army of only 100,000 and next to no armament production or fortifications, the allies set up an Inter-Allied Military Control Commission. This new body consisted of three sub-commissions: Armaments, headed by the British; Effectives personnel), directed by the French, and Fortifications, administered by the Americans. As Shuster points out, the distribution of sub-commission responsibilities reflected each nation's  respective interests in forestalling a resurgent German threat ...

The Gallica Collection: WWI

An extraordinarily large and rich collection of original color photography from 1914-1918, c/o, originally,  Gallica, a website of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France .

REVIEW: Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-German (September, 2005)

Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society. Trans. Andrew Boreham and Daniel Brückenhaus. Oxford: Berg, 2004. 322 pp. Index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-8597-3881-8; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 1-8597-3886-9.

Reviewed by: Kevin Cramer, Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier?

After the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1815, the "German Question" was whether or not there could (or should) be a nation-state called Germany. After this question was decided with unification in 1871, the "German Question" soon evolved into the "German Problem," which was widely viewed by contemporaries and posterity as the root cause of two world wars. For many historians and other observers of German political and cultural life, the essential characteristic of Germany's historical development, which explained this nation's de-stabilizing pursuit of continental hegemony, was the prominent role "militarism" played in German society. Another name for this trait was "Prussianism," a convenient label that summoned up images of Hohenzollern authoritarianism and saber-rattling, goose-stepping soldiers, and monocled Junker generals in spiked helmets. After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, "Prussia" was deliberately erased from the map of a partitioned Germany, as if a virus of war somehow lay dormant in the soil itself.

Ute Frevert's book is an original and insightful re-examination of the role the military has played in shaping the German civil, political, and cultural landscape. She sees this aspect of German life evolving out of the French revolutionary concept of "the nation in arms," that is, conscription, which established a new kind of link between the state and civil society. Frevert believes that conscription, as a European and "modern" phenomenon, created the possibility of what she calls the "peacetime military socialization" of the citizen (p. 3). Conscription also broke down the assumption that the "civil" was the antithesis of the "military" and in so doing gave the state a powerful means of building the nation around new definitions of citizenship, patriotic values, and social order. In other words,conscription allowed the state to infiltrate civil society effectively by creating what Hermann Broch, in his novel The Sleepwalkers, called "the cult of the uniform ... the man who wears the uniform is content to feel he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life" ...

REVIEW: Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-German (April, 2006)

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. viii + 250 pp. Bibliography, index. $28.99 (paper), ISBN 0-521-61633-6.

Reviewed by: Kevin Mason, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Different Generations' Perspectives of World War I

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost analyze a multitude of books on World War I written by French, British and German scholars in order to show patterns of themes and methods over time. The authors set themselves a daunting task, as their comparative study considers not only the work of historians, but also encompasses literary works, television shows, films and museums. The book's cover page has a picture of a cemetery with books as tombstones, portraying the countless numbers of books already written on the Great War. Even though most of the writings on the First World War focus on military, political and diplomatic history, the authors add social, cultural and economic history. The work presents a multi-disciplinary, multi-national and multi-methodological approach. Prost and Winter argue that books and films on World War I can be grouped into three different generations (pp. 1-5). The book, originally published in French, examines how seven major themes (diplomatic and economic histories and the histories of generals, soldiers, workers, civilians and memory) have been treated within this three-generation framework. Although the authors leave out some works, do not fully state the arguments of each historian, and force the history of memory and that of workers into a slightly uncomfortable framework, they offer an outstanding historiographical study.

Prost and Winter argue that three different generations interpreted the war within "three historiographical configurations" (p. 31). The first, which they have called the "Generation of 1935," understood events in a nineteenth-century context. These scholars emphasized the nation and wrote history from the top down. The second generation, which witnessed World War II, described the Great War as a "tragedy played out by powerful collective actors: soldiers, workers, civilians" (pp. 200, 203). Finally, the third generation has turned toward cultural history and micro-historical analysis. According to Winter and Prost, regardless of which generation historians belong to, three questions reoccur again and again: "Why and how did the war break out? How was it conducted; how was it won and lost? What were its onsequences?" ...