Abstract
Adrian Gregory has taught a wonderful comparative history course on the First World War to undergraduates (among them this reviewer) at Oxford for almost twenty years, and that deep experience shines through in this new history, which offers to students and others an accessible introduction to the conflict. The book is only short – just two hundred pages of text – but Gregory packs in a remarkable amount of information. The work reflects the recent turn to global history among scholars of the conflict. The Western Front, the war’s defining and decisive theatre, receives its due consideration, but the book roams impressively widely, recounting events from as far afield as Argentina and America in the West to China and Australasia in the Far East. It also embraces the innovative questions and cutting-edge approaches which have contributed to the exceptional dynamism of First World War Studies. The ‘new’ military history of ordinary combatants, gender-studies-informed examination of home fronts, and the preoccupations of the ‘memory boom’ figure prominently on its pages.
There are some costs to this broad reach. There is little space in the five chronologically organized chapters to acknowledge historians’ major – and sometimes acrimonious – differences of interpretation in the causes and course of the First World War. However, Gregory addresses this problem by bookending his account with a short concluding historiographical review and, imaginatively, an introduction which explores the challenges faced by historians in their interpretation of sources. The sources that he adopts as case studies are representative of those utilized by modern work on the war. They comprise a still from the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front, a soldier’s song, an Italian bomber, a statistical table showing food deliveries to Petrograd in the months before the February revolution, Falkenhayn’s probably faked Christmas 1915 memorandum on attritional battle, and the Edith Cavell memorial in London. His discussion of each is incisive, and will be invaluable for any secondary-school or university teacher tasked with explaining to students the difficulties of source evaluation and criticism, and also as illustrations of the wide range of documents and objects that historians are now analysing in order to understand the past.
The book’s main narrative can – because it covers such broad ground in such short space – be a little breathless. For example, in just seven pages in the middle of the book, readers are whisked from Romania’s defeat at the end of 1916, through the Hindenburg Programme of rearmament to the Western Front, then to the fighting in Africa, and after that back to southern Europe and the Habsburg–Italian bloodletting on the Isonzo. Breaking up the chapters into thematic sections or adding boxes focusing on major figures or events might have allowed a clearer organization and a more measured narrative pace. The book’s only other notable drawback stems from its timing: released in May 2014, it is largely unable to take account of the important literature published for the centenary of the war’s outbreak. This is particularly significant in its treatment of German leaders’ role in initiating hostilities and their subsequent war aims. Without engaging with Christopher Clark’s best-selling and controversial Sleepwalkers, the discussion of these issues in A War of Peoples already feels somewhat outmoded.
Notwithstanding these minor reservations, A War of Peoples is a very good book. Gregory succeeds not only in condensing an immense amount of information into an accessible format but also in presenting to readers the state-of-the-art methodologies and approaches to the First World War. For teachers of undergraduates and secondary-school pupils, as well as for anyone wanting a concise but full account of the First World War, this history will be a valuable addition to their bookshelves.