1916
A Global History
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
So much of the literature on the First World War centers on the trench warfare of the Western Front, and these were essential battlegrounds. But the war was in fact truly a global conflict, and by focusing on a sequence of events in 1916 across many continents, historian Keith Jeffery's magisterial work casts new light on the Great War.
Starting in January with the end of the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign, Jeffery recounts the massive struggle for Verdun over February and March; the Easter Rising in Ireland in April; dramatic events in Russia in June on the eastern front; the familiar story of the war in East Africa, where some 200,000 Africans may have died; and the November U.S. presidential race in which Woodrow Wilson was re-elected on a platform of keeping the United States out of the war--a position he reversed within five months.
Incorporating the stories of civilians in all countries, both participants in and victims of the war, 1916: A Global History is a major addition to the literature and the Great War by a historian at the height of his powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jeffery (MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909 1949), of Queen's University Belfast, shifts the focus of the Great War's pivotal year, 1916, away from the conventional milieu of the Western Front, instead depicting the global dimensions of the metastasizing conflict. Jeffery moves from region to region, event to event, to demonstrate "the astonishing range, variety, and interconnectedness of the wartime experience." Interconnectedness is a crucial point for him; the human element is his focus. Jeffery establishes the integration of "local loyalties, differences, and antagonisms" into the framework of a worldwide crisis of legitimacy. The war stressed systems on one hand and loyalties on the other. By 1916 the able-bodied adults of whole populations were being mobilized for a conflict with seemingly inexhaustible demands, yet no apparent end was in sight. Taxes, supply shortages, conscription, and casualties generated and exacerbated national, ethnic, social, and economic fault lines from the British Isles to Asian Russia. Yet from state and public perspectives alike, the efforts and sacrifices legitimated violent repression of domestic dissent and extinguished halfhearted efforts to secure a compromise peace. "Mobilizing ideologies in support of war aims" sustained the conflict but generated "bitter antagonisms and unrealized ambitions" whose present-day traces, Jeffery concludes, remain surprisingly vital.
