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Summary
Summary
1917 was a year of calamitous events, and one of pivotal importance in the development of the First World War. In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution, leading historian of World War I David Stevenson examines this crucial year in context and illuminates the century that followed. He shows how in this one year the war was transformed, but also what drove the conflict onwards and how it continued to escalate.
Two developments in particular - the Russian Revolution and American intervention - had worldwide repercussions. Offering a close examination of the key decisions, David Stevenson considers Germanys campaign of submarine warfare, America's declaration of war in response, and Britain's frustration of German strategy by adopting the convoy system, as well as why (paradoxically) the military and political stalemate in Europe persisted.
1917 offers a truly international understanding of events, including abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the disastrous spring offensive that plunged the French army into mutiny, on the summer attacks that undermined the moderate Provisional Government in Russia and exposed Italy to national humiliation at Caporetto, and on the British decision for the ill-fated Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele).
David Stevenson also analyzes the global consequences of the years developments, describing how countries such as Brazil and China joined the belligerents, how Britain offered "responsible government" to India, and how the Allies promised a Jewish national home in Palestine. Blending political and military history, and moving from capital to capital and from the cabinet chamber to the battle front, the book highlights the often tumultuous debates through which leaders entered and escalated the war, and the paradox that continued fighting was justifiable as the shortest road toward peace.
Author Notes
David Stevenson holds the Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics & Political Science, where he has twice been Head of Department and teaches and lectures on the history of international relations. He is the author or editor of seven books about the origins, course, and consequences of the First World War. His publications include Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914 (OUP, 1996), 1914-1918: the History of the First World War (Penguin, 2004), With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Penguin, 2011), and (co-edited with Thomas Mahnken and Joseph Maiolo), Arms Races in International Politics: from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (OUP, 2016).
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Stevenson (Arms Races in International Politics), chair in international history at the London School of Economics, adds a distinguished volume to his half-dozen major works on WWI. He focuses on the war's forgotten year, when the nations of Europe desperately sought to escape the "war trap" they had dug since 1914. Stevenson presents this process as a study in contingencies: the hows and whys of decisions over whether "to intervene, to repudiate compromise, and to attack." Each nation's responsible decision-making parties were held in high regard, yet though their decisions weren't uniformly disastrous, Stevenson writes, none fulfilled expectations. As the year opened the war "remained Germany's to lose." One Entente army after another "wasted itself in vain offensives": France in Champagne, Britain in Flanders, and Italy on the Isonzo, while Russia's post-czarist Provisional Government sought to prove it still deserved Allied support. But between January and November, unrestricted submarine warfare brought the U.S. into the conflict. The Bolshevik revolution then transformed Russia into a denier of Europe's prewar order. Initiatives for a compromise peace collapsed and the war's consequences spread far beyond Europe. Stevenson's comprehensively researched and perceptively reasoned analysis stands apart from similar histories by showing that the conflict's outcome was determined "not through blind impersonal forces but through deliberate will." Illus. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Thoroughgoing study of the year that gave at least a hint of promise that World War I would indeed be the war to end all wars.By 1917, writes Stevenson (International History/London School of Economics; With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, 2011, etc.), the fighting on the western front had bogged down into mutual slaughter. In the battles surrounding Verdun alone, for instance, there were well over 1 million casualties, and the generals kept throwing bodies at the other line without a hope of winning. Even so, the German kaiser and British prime minister, among others, kept at it. Two signal events occurred to shake things up in 1917: the Russian Revolution occurred, soon to remove Russia from the fight, and the United States entered the conflict, pouring men and materiel into combat and ending the stalemate. Before this happened, however, the Central Powers and Allies were desperately seeking ways out of what Stevenson calls the "war trap""on one level the story of 1917 is of their efforts to escape it." But there was no real way out, leading to "the collapse of initiatives for a compromise peace" and the slaughters at Verdun, Caporetto, Passchendaele, and elsewhere. Ironies were attendant; by Stevenson's account, the U.S. might have done better to continue supplying the Allies with war goods than enter the fight itself, since the war industry lifted the country out of recession into an economic boom, and things might have turned out very differently in the Middle East had German overtures to the Zionist leaders been successful. American entrywhich Woodrow Wilson took pains to say was to help France, not Britainintensified at least some of the slaughter, too, since the German army was determined to break the European Allies before American troops could enter the theater.Stevenson examines the deeper implications of strategic and diplomatic decisions during the penultimate year of the conflict, casting a new light on events. Of considerable interest to students of the war and its tortuous aftermath. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations, Maps, and Table | p. xi |
List of Abbreviations | p. xiii |
List of Principal Personalities | p. xv |
Introduction | p. 1 |
Part I Atlantic Prologue | |
1 Unleashing the U-boats | p. 13 |
2 Enter America | p. 36 |
3 Britain Adopts Convoys | p. 67 |
Part II Continental Impasse | |
4 Tsar Nicholas Abdicates | p. 91 |
5 France Attacks | p. 115 |
6 The Kerensky Offensive | p. 145 |
7 The Road to Passchendaele | p. 170 |
8 Collapse at Caporetto | p. 205 |
9 Peace Moves and Their Rejection | p. 234 |
Part III Global Repercussions | |
10 The Spread of Intervention: Greece, Brazil, Siam, China | p. 273 |
11 Responsible Government for India | p. 299 |
12 A Jewish National Home | p. 326 |
Part IV Conclusion | |
Towards 1918: Lenin's Revolution, the Ludendorff Offensives, and Wilson's Fourteen Points | p. 365 |
Notes | p. 399 |
Bibliography | p. 451 |
Image Credits | p. 467 |
Index | p. 469 |