World War Zero

What if World War I wasn't the beginning, but the culmination of a conflict already raging across the globe? World War Zero reconstructs the vast, largely unrecognised war waged across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Australasia, the Pacific and the Americas in the centuries before World War I.

Joining the dots between campaigns and expeditions long treated as separate events, Dan Hicks traces how a system and logic of conquest and extraction reshaped the world before 1914. From colonial battlefields to cultural institutions, the book’s excavation of this buried history provides an urgent framework for understanding global conflict in the 21st century.