Amazon Review
Hew Strachan's The First World War Vol I: A Call to Arms counteracts the argument that of the two world wars in the 20th century, it is usually only the second that is thought of as "global"--spanning from the Pacific to Normandy as Hollywood continues to remind us, from the River Plate to Scapa Flow as naval buffs will recall. By contrast the First World War is often assumed to be a European war, literally bogged down in the Somme and the Dardanelles. But as Hew Strachan argues in this magisterial and wide-ranging book we would do better to use the German phrase, "weltkrieg" to describe the conflicts of 1914-18 as well. The Call to Arms is the latest in a long line of Strachan's distinguished and subtle works of military history at its best: his recent The Politics of the British Army is particularly good. A Call to Arms covers the war in every part of the globe--chapters on Turkey, Africa and Japan sit alongside sections devoted to the Western and Eastern fronts. And Strachan shows too that the war was global not just in its geography, but also in its outcome. The entente powers had better access to international finance than their foes; the war accelerated religious and tribal nationalism in the old colonial empires; industrial mobilisation fuelled the growth of heavy industry in 'undeveloped' parts of the world. This is a big book--1,000 pages plus, and it is only the first of three volumes. It needs time and attentive reading to absorb the range of its scholarship and the originality of its arguments. But anyone wanting to understand how and why the First World War, as one French writer put it in 1914, extended "to the whole universe" must read this book.--Miles Taylor
Review
"Definitive", proclaims the blurb accompanying the first volume of Hew Strachan's magnificent new history of the first world war, and definitive it is." -- The Economist, 12/05/01
"Historians of Africa will bless him for writing so comprehensive an account of a war as traumatic for their continent as it was for Europe" -- Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement
"Incontestably the most important addition to the published work on the war for many years." -- Stand To! The Journal of the Western Front Association
"It is hard to imagine a more definitive survey. ... The First World War grandfather to whom this book is dedicated could not have a more fitting memorial." -- Robert McCrum, Observer
"This book stands in the classic tradition of academic political and military history: an essential work of reference with every page densely packed with facts, figures, and analysis" -- The Sunday Telegraph
"This deserves to rank as one of the most impressive books of modern history in a generation." -- Max Hastings, Evening Standard
"We can be confident that subsequent volumes in Professor Strachan's series will analyse in the same exquisite detail as the first this bruising reality, what Correlli Barnett has called going 'fifteen rounds with a heavyweight" -- Allan Mallinson, The Times, 20 June 2001
"a wonderfully readable and comprehensive new account of the war that was supposed to end all wars, a book that's all the more impressive for the precise and thoughtful way in which it navigates past some notorious historiographical hazards" -- Robert McCrum, Observer
"historians of Africa will bless him for writing so comprehensive an account of a war as traumatic for their continent as it was for Europe" -- Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement
"this magisterial new history" -- Robert McCrum, Observer
About the Author
Hew Strachan is Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow. He is also Director of the Scottish Center for War Studies and Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
