Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918

The First World War was the first large-scale industrialized military conflict in the world’s history, and it gave birth to the concept of total war. The essays in this volume analyze the experience of the war in light of this concept’s implications, in particular the systematic erosion of distinctions between the military and civilian spheres. With an emphasis on developments in Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States, leading scholars from Europe and North America locate the First World War along a trajectory that began in the wars of the middle of the nineteenth century and culminated in worldwide conflict in the middle of the twentieth. The essays explore the efforts of soldiers and statesmen, industrialists and financiers, professionals and civilian activists to adjust to the titanic, pervasive pressures that the military stalemate on the western front imposed on belligerent and neutral societies.