Fascinating chapters on the media purveyors of wartime propaganda, enthusiasm on the home front, and soldier motivation humanize other chapters that depict army recruits as little more than another item on the British government’s grocery list for war material.įerguson deserves praise for a book that is unique in scholarly insight, rigorous in its treatment of the secondary literature, and accessible to a non-academic reader. This would have been construed as an outdated approach – most recent scholars of empire have stopped writing books centered in the City of London – if not for the innovative mix of social and cultural history added to Ferguson’s standard economic and military analyses. In his eyes, a proper explanation of World War I must dedicate a significant portion of its narrative to Great Britain. The Pity of War offers not quite a history of the First World War, but rather a history of Great Britain and the First World War for Ferguson, the two are inseparable. This assessment colors each of the book’s chapters and leads the author to put forth many bold, unorthodox, yet startlingly fresh arguments about a topic that many of today’s historians have written off as overdone.Īfter finishing the book, the reader will realize that its subtitle, “Explaining World War I,” is far more clever than it appears at first glance. The question that informs Ferguson’s analysis is: who is to blame for the war? Ferguson is unambiguous in his belief that British statesmen overestimated their alliance obligations and the extent of the German threat, which led them to mistakenly intervene in and transform a regional conflict into a global war.
The final chapter, on the Versailles Treaty, advances the controversial argument (one that rests on a long-winded condemnation of John Maynard Keynes) that the peace terms were not unprecedented in their harshness and that German hyperinflation was due to irresponsible fiscal policies adopted by the Germans themselves. Overt militarism, Germany’s ascent to power, alliance-based foreign policies, arms racing, and British intervention are issues covered in the first part of the book, while wartime enthusiasm, propaganda, economy, and military strategy are discussed in the second. In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson dedicates fourteen essays to addressing the major historical issues associated with the First World War.The essays fall into three broad categories: war origins, execution, and aftermath.
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