Jay Winter - The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 1, Global War

This first volume of The Cambridge History of the First World War provides a comprehensive account of the wars military history. An international team of leading historians chart how a war made possible by globalisation and imperial expansion unfolded into catastrophe, growing year by year in scale and destructive power far beyond what anyone had anticipated in 1914.

Adopting a global perspective, the volume analyses the spatial impact of the war and the subsequent ripple effects that occurred both regionally and across the world. It explores how imperial powers devoted vast reserves of manpower and material to their war efforts, and how, by doing so, they changed the political landscape of the world order. It also charts the moral, political and legal implications of the changing character of war and, in particular, the collapse of the distinction between civilian and military targets.

JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University. He is one of the founders of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the International Museum of the Great War, in Pronne, Somme, France. In 1997 he received an Emmy award for the best documentary series of the year as co-producer and co-writer of The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century , an eight-hour series broadcast on PBS and the BBC, shown subsequently in twenty-eight countries. His previous publications include Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995); Remembering War (2006) and Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2006).

The Historial is an internationally acclaimed museum that presents the First World War in a unique way. Located on the battlefields of the Somme, the museum presents and compares the presence of the three main belligerent nations on the Western Front Great Britain, France and Germany. It unfolds the story both of the front and of civilians under the pressure of war. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 caused over a million casualties in less than five months of fighting. The ground would be fought over again in 1918. By the end of the war, combatants from well over twenty-five nations had fought on the Somme, making it the place where the war truly became a World War.

All illustrations are from the Collection of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Pronne (Somme), unless otherwise stated.

Photography: Yazid Medmoun (Conseil Gnral de la Somme), unless otherwise stated.