A fresh and fascinating reappraisal of the first half of the 20th
century from one of our foremost historians.
'War, comrades, ' declared Trotsky, 'is a great locomotive of history.'
He was thought to be acknowledging the opportunity the First World War
had offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia in 1917.
Twentieth-century warfare, based on new technologies and mass armies,
certainly saw the locomotive power of war geared up to an unprecedented
level.
Peter Clarke explores the crucial ways in which war can be seen as a
prime mover of history in the 20th century through the eyes of five
major figures. In Britain two wartime prime ministers - first David
Lloyd George, later Winston Churchill - found their careers made and
unmade by the unprecedented challenges they faced. In the United States,
two presidents elected in peacetime - Woodrow Wilson and Franklin
Roosevelt - likewise found that war drastically changed their agenda.
And it was through the experience of war that the economic ideas of John
Maynard Keynes were shaped and came to exert wide influence.
When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, President
Wilson famously declared: 'The world must be made safe for democracy.'
This liberal prospectus was to be tested in the subsequent peace treaty,
one that was to be bitterly remembered by Germans for its 'war guilt
clause'. But both in the making of the war and the making of the peace,
the issue of guilt did not suddenly materialise out of thin air. As
Clarke's narrative shows, it was an integral component of the
Anglo-American liberal tradition.
The Locomotive of War is a forensic and punctilious examination of
both the interplay between key figures in the context of the
unprecedented all-out wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 and the broader
dynamics of history in this extraordinary period. Deeply revealing and
insightful, it is history of the highest calibre.
