The Great War

The Great War

Ian Beckett

"Beckett's... outstanding history of the First World War should be in every school and university library" Prof Sir Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement

[The Great War] deals in a very clear and effective way with the key issues of the war, including its prosecution at the political and military levels, its effects on state and society and on science and the military art. The book is widely regarded as the best of its kind currently available J.M. Bourne, Director of the Centre for First World War Studies, University of Birmingham

The Great War is probably the most widely read about and most widely misunderstood conflict of our times. The history of this era is not simply one of military manoeuvres and battle weary soldiers but one with transformatory implications for world politics, economics, human psychology, culture, technology and innovation.

In this seminal work, Ian Beckett challenges the clichd images of the Great War that have come to dominate popular culture. Rather than dismissing the War as an exercise in mindless futility, he argues that on the contrary it was vital to the national interests of its participants, and shows how what originated as a European affair became a global event involving not only the extended colonial empires of European nations but also Japan, China, the Ottoman Empire, Latin America and the United States.  

For victors and vanquished alike the treacherous course of this conflict set the stage for far-reaching economic, social and political change.  In this tumultuous period the creation of new frontiers and new balances of power allowed strong national identities to develop and new varieties of political thought to materialise and ultimately provided the conditions for Fascist and Communist revolution and occupation in the decades that followed.

Ian Beckett is an internationally renowned specialist on the Great War. His publications include such acclaimed titles as Ypres: The Last Battle, 1914 (2004). The First World War: The Essential Guide to Sources in the UK National Archives (2003), and A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War (with Keith Simpson) (1985)