The First World War – serie

To Arms is Hew Strachan's most complete and definitive study of the opening of the First World War. Now, key sections from this magisterial work are published as individual paperbacks, each complete in itself, and with a new introduction by the author. Ever since its outbreak in 1914, the causes of the First World War have been one of the major debates in world history. For some it was a war engineered by Germany, and a pointer towards Hitler. For others it was the product of miscalculation - a verdict whose poignancy is heightened by the knowledge of what followed. The Outbreak of the First World War eschews either extreme. Instead, the first half of this book approaches the issues from the perspectives of those who grappled with conflicting priorities and vital national interests. The second considers the responses of their peoples and the so-called 'ideas of 1914'. This was the crisis which, more than any other, shaped the twentieth century.

To Arms is Hew Strachan's most complete and definitive study of the opening of the First World War. Now, key sections from this magisterial work are published as individual paperbacks, each complete in itself, and with a new introduction by the author. The First World War was costly in treasure as well as lives. Before its outbreak many commentators reckoned that the great powers could not afford to fight or that economic dislocation would bring war to a rapid close. They were wrong. Ways were found to fund the fighting that went beyond conventional devices like taxation or domestic borrowing. Britain managed to raise much of the money which it and its allies needed in the United States, so implicating America in the war long before its formal entry in April 1917. This is the first full history of how the war was financed. It resulted in hyper-inflation in the 1920s and, in due course, in New York's displacement of London as the world's money market. Its effects are still with us today.