Empires at War

Robert Gerwarth is the author and editor of several books on the history of violence, including a biography of Reinhard Heydrich (with Donald Bloxham, 2011), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (2011); and War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (with John Horne, 2012).Erez Manela directs the Program on Global Society and Security at Harvard University. He is the author of The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007) and co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010). He is currently completing a book on the global eradication of smallpox in the Cold War era.

• Introduction ; 1. The Ottoman Empire ; 2. The Italian Empire ; 3. The German Empire ; 4. Austria-Hungary ; 5. The Russian Empire ; 6. The French Empire ; 7. British Imperial Africa ; 8. The Dominions, Ireland and India ; 9. The Portuguese Empire ; 10. The Japanese Empire ; 11. China and Empire ; 12. The United States ; 13. Empires at the Paris Peace Conference

The First World War was a war not fought between nations but between empires European and Asian as well as "blue-water empires". This fundamental insight of the Greater War opens a powerful new perspective on the way the war was fought, the aims of the combatants, and the strains it imposed on their brittle systems of rule. The result is a major contribution to rethinking the First World War's impact on modern world (and not just European) history.