Download or read book The Shadow of the Past written by Gregory D. Miller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Shadow of the Past, Gregory D. Miller examines the role that reputation plays in international politics, emphasizing the importance of reliability-confidence that, based on past political actions, a country will make good on its promises-in the formation of military alliances. Challenging recent scholarship that focuses on the importance of credibility-a state's reputation for following through on its threats-Miller finds that reliable states have much greater freedom in forming alliances than those that invest resources in building military force but then use it inconsistently. To explore the formation and maintenance of alliances based on reputation, Miller draws on insights from both political science and business theory to track the evolution of great power relations before the First World War. He starts with the British decision to abandon "splendid isolation" in 1900 and examines three crises--the First Moroccan Crisis (1905-6), the Bosnia-Herzegovina Crisis (1908-9), and the Agadir Crisis (1911)-leading up to the war. He determines that states with a reputation for being a reliable ally have an easier time finding other reliable allies, and have greater autonomy within their alliances, than do states with a reputation for unreliability. Further, a history of reliability carries long-term benefits, as states tend not to lose allies even when their reputation declines.

Download or read book The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898 1914 written by Zara S. Steiner and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1970 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Germany and the Modern World 1880 1914 written by Mark Hewitson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-assesses Germany's relationship with the wider world before 1914 by examining the connections between nationalism, transnationalism, imperialism and globalization.

Download or read book Dreadnought written by Robert K. Massie and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-06-27 with total page 1076 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century’s first great arms race, from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert K. Massie With the biographer’s rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittery figures: the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz; the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow; Britain’s greatest twentieth-century foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionized the British navy and brought forth the first true battleship, the H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting. Praise for Dreadnought “Dreadnought is history in the grand manner, as most people prefer it: how people shaped, or were shaped by, events.”—Time “A classic [that] covers superbly a whole era . . . engrossing in its glittering gallery of characters.”—Chicago Sun-Times “[Told] on a grand scale . . . Massie [is] a master of historical portraiture and anecdotage.”—The Wall Street Journal “Brilliant on everything he writes about ships and the sea. It is Massie’s eye for detail that makes his nautical set pieces so marvelously evocative.”—Los Angeles Times

Download or read book The Agadir Crisis written by Ima Christina Barlow and published by . This book was released on 1971-01-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Germany s Aims in the First World War written by Fritz Fischer and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 1968-09 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scholarly interpretation of Germany's policies and attitudes during the first World War and their profound effect on subsequent world events

Download or read book The Purpose of the First World War written by Holger Afflerbach and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly fourteen million people died during the First World War. But why, and for what reason? Already many contemporaries saw the Great War as a "pointless carnage" (Pope Benedict XV, 1917). Was there a point, at least in the eyes of the political and military decision makers? How did they justify the losses, and why did they not try to end the war earlier? In this volume twelve international specialists analyses and compares the hopes and expectations of the political and military leaders of the main belligerent countries and of their respective societies. It shows that the war aims adopted during the First World War were not, for the most part, the cause of the conflict, but a reaction to it, an attempt to give the tragedy a purpose - even if the consequence was to oblige the belligerents to go on fighting until victory. The volume tries to explain why - and for what - the contemporaries thought that they had to fight the Great War.

Download or read book The Marne 15 July 6 August 1918 written by Stephen C. McGeorge and Mason W. Watson and published by . This book was released on with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Origins of the First World War written by James Joll and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 1984 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations written by Michelle K. Murray and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How established powers can facilitate the peaceful rise of new great powers is a perennial question of international relations and has gained increased salience with the emergence of China as an economic and military rival of the United States. Highlighting the social dynamics of power transitions, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations offers a powerful new framework through which to understand important historical cases of power transition and more recently the rise of China and how the United States can facilitate its peaceful rise.

Download or read book The Genesis of the War written by Herbert Henry Asquith and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The First Moroccan Crisis 1901 1906 written by Eugene Newton Anderson and published by . This book was released on 1930 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War written by David G. Herrmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Herrmann's work is the most complete study to date of how land-based military power influenced international affairs during the series of diplomatic crises that led up to the First World War. Instead of emphasizing the naval arms race, which has been extensively studied before, Herrmann draws on documentary research in military and state archives in Germany, France, Austria, England, and Italy to show the previously unexplored effects of changes in the strength of the European armies during this period. Herrmann's work provides not only a contribution to debates about the causes of the war but also an account of how the European armies adopted the new weaponry of the twentieth century in the decade before 1914, including quick-firing artillery, machine guns, motor transport, and aircraft. In a narrative account that runs from the beginning of a series of international crises in 1904 until the outbreak of the war, Herrmann points to changes in the balance of military power to explain why the war began in 1914, instead of at some other time. Russia was incapable of waging a European war in the aftermath of its defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904-5, but in 1912, when Russia appeared to be regaining its capacity to fight, an unprecedented land-armaments race began. Consequently, when the July crisis of 1914 developed, the atmosphere of military competition made war a far more likely outcome than it would have been a decade earlier.

Download or read book Britain Russia and the Road to the First World War written by Marina Soroka and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates the role of Count Aleksandr Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London between 1903 and 1916, in setting Russia on the road to war. Fearing the loss of Britain's friendship, he opposed all Russia's efforts at improving Russo-German relations and when the Sarajevo crisis struck, there was now no hope of appealing to German goodwill to help defuse the situation. Instead Russia's status within the Entente depended on a show of determination and strength, which lead inexorably to a disaster of the Great War.

Download or read book Planning Armageddon written by Nicholas A. Lambert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the First World War, the British Admiralty conceived a plan to win rapid victory in the event of war with Germany-economic warfare on an unprecedented scale.This secret strategy called for the state to exploit Britain's effective monopolies in banking, communications, and shipping-the essential infrastructure underpinning global trade-to create a controlled implosion of the world economic system. In this revisionist account, Nicholas Lambert shows in lively detail how naval planners persuaded the British political leadership that systematic disruption of the global economy could bring about German military paralysis. After the outbreak of hostilities, the government shied away from full implementation upon realizing the extent of likely collateral damage-political, social, economic, and diplomatic-to both Britain and neutral countries. Woodrow Wilson in particular bristled at British restrictions on trade. A new, less disruptive approach to economic coercion was hastily improvised. The result was the blockade, ostensibly intended to starve Germany. It proved largely ineffective because of the massive political influence of economic interests on national ambitions and the continued interdependencies of all countries upon the smooth functioning of the global trading system. Lambert's interpretation entirely overturns the conventional understanding of British strategy in the early part of the First World War and underscores the importance in any analysis of strategic policy of understanding Clausewitz's "political conditions of war."

Download or read book July 1914 written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict -- much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events. As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand's murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war's outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved -- from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré- sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe's countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain's final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month -- and a handful of men -- changed the course of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Prelude to Modern Europe written by Llewellyn Woodward and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1972, Prelude to Modern Europe provides a political narrative, the social and economic background of events in Europe from 1815- 1914. Woodward's own deep sense for social values and the quality of life emerges conspicuously in his long introductory chapter on European civilization. This is followed by chapters on the major powers, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and the Habsburg Empire. Finally, there is an epilogue describing and discussing the breakdown of the ‘great power’ system. Throughout the book, the author deploys all his unrivalled skills in historical and philosophical commentary, and the result is a tour de force of equal merit with his one volume History of England. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of European history, modern history, and history in general.