Book Launch: Global War, Global Catastrophe

Global War, Global Catastrophe presents a history of the First World War as an all-consuming industrial war that forcibly reshaped the international environment and, with it, impacted the futures of all the world's people.
Narrated chronologically, the authors identify key themes and moments that radicalized the war's conduct and globalized its impact, affecting neutral and belligerent societies alike. These include Germany's invasion of Belgium and Britain's declaration of war in 1914, the expansion of economic warfare in 1915, anti-imperial resistance, the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the United States' entry into the war. Each chapter explains how individuals, communities, nation-states and empires experienced, considered and behaved in relationship to the conflict as it evolved into a total global war. Above all, the book argues that only by integrating the history of neutral and subject communities can we fully understand what made the First World War such a globally transformative event.

This book offers an accessible and readable overview of the major trajectories of the global history of the conflict. It offers an innovative history of the First World War and an important alternative to existing belligerent-centric studies.

Ismee Tames is Professor in History at Utrecht University and Senior Researcher at NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her most recent publication is Fighters across Frontiers: Transnational Resistance in Europe, 1936-48 (co-edited with Robert Gildea, 2020).

Maartje Abbenhuis is Professor in Modern History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of several books on the international history of the nineteenth century and the First World War, including An Age of Neutrals (2014) and The First Age of Industrial Globalization (co-authored, 2019).