The Locomotive of War
Money, Empire, Power, and Guilt
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- 219,00 kr
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- 219,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
An innovative exploration of the origins, impact, and consequences of the First and Second World Wars, from Peter Clarke, one of our foremost historians.
"War is the locomotive of history," claimed Trotsky, a remark often thought to acknowledge the opportunity that the First World War offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia 1917. Here, Peter Clarke broadens the application of this provocative suggestion in order to explore how war, as much as socioeconomic forces or individuals, is the primary mover of history.
Twentieth-century warfare, based on new technologies and vast armies, saw the locomotive power of war heightened to an unprecedented level. Through the unique prism of this vast tragedy, Peter Clarke examines some of the most influential figures of the day, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, David Lloyd George, without the strains of war, would never have become prime minister in 1916; Winston Churchill, except for the war crisis of 1940, would have been unlikely to be recalled to office; and John Maynard Keynes likewise would hardly have seen his own economic ideas and authority so suddenly accepted. In different ways, the shadow of the great nineteenth-century Liberal leader Gladstone hung over these men - as it did also over Woodrow Wilson in the United States, seeing his presidency transformed as he faced new issues of war and peace. And it was Franklin Roosevelt who inherited much of Wilson's unfulfilled agenda, with a second chance to implement it with greater success.
By following the trajectories of these influential lives, Peter Clarke illuminates many crucial issues of the period: not only leadership and the projection of authority, but also military strategy, war finance and the mobilization of the economy in democratic regimes. And the moral dimension of liberalism, with its Gladstonian focus on guilt, is never forgotten. The Locomotive of War is a fascinating examination of the interplay between key figures in the context of unprecedented all-out warfare, with new insight on the dynamics of history in an extraordinary period.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"War is the locomotive of history," Leon Trotsky declared in 1922, and former professor Clarke (Lancashire and the New Liberalism) uses this oft-quoted line as the driving force for his own narrative of world war and the making of liberal internationalism. Apart from their significance as global conflicts, he argues, the two world wars fundamentally altered the nature of Anglo-American capitalism, ushering in an era of full employment and decreasing inequality among classes in other words, reform, not revolution. To Clarke, fully understanding this transformation involves rethinking the relationship between militarism and the political liberalism that flourished in the first half of the 20th century. Readers prepared for an exploration of these subjects will be disappointed, as Clarke instead embarks on a whistle-stop tour of the lives of prominent Anglo-American liberals, including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, John Maynard Keynes, and Woodrow Wilson, detailing their roles in the First and Second World Wars. While Clarke's tightly coiled prose is as incisive as ever, the focus on great men means the book falls short of its ambitious aims. It succeeds as a reassessment of several historiographical tropes namely, German war guilt but never teases out the implications of the dalliance between liberalism and militarism. War, it turns out, is apparently the locomotive of biography.
