The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 Hardcover – 27 Sep 2012

Review

Formidable ... one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published (Max Hastings Sunday Times )

The arguments [Clark] sets out in this quite superb account of the causes of the First World War are so compelling that they effectively consign the old historical consensus to the bin ... Clark's history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, was a masterpiece. The Sleepwalkers surpasses it. It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history (Mail Online )

Christopher Clark has written the most readable account of the origins of the First World War since Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. The difference is that The Sleepwalkers is a lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations (Niall Ferguson )

Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject. Planting himself at the contingent end of the spectrum, he prefers to establish how the war happened rather than to explain why by means of hindsight ... It is a refreshing approach. He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war (Irish Times )

A brilliant contribution (Times Higher Education )

For decades, historians have argued about the origins of the first world war. For Cambridge professor Clark, however, the answer lies in a metaphor: far from consciously planning the war, the statesmen of 1914 were "sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world ... Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written, his book is a model of scholarship (Sunday Times Books of the Year )

In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war (Stephen Howe Independent BOOKS OF THE YEAR )

From the Back Cover

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade. Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans a peripheral region far from Europe's centers of power and wealth come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Sleepwalkers is a magisterial account of one of the most compelling dramas of modern times." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.