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The Locomotive of War : Money, Empire, Power and Guilt

A fresh and fascinating reappraisal of the first half of the twentieth 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 twentieth 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.

Lokalʹni viĭny ta zbroĭni konflikty druhoï polivyny XX stolitti͡a : istoryko-filosofsʹkyĭ aspekt : monohrafii͡a

The labour party, war and international relations, 1945-2006

Questions of war were not central to the founding of the Labour Party, yet questions of war - specifically, under what circumstances the party would support the dispatch of British military forces to fight abroad - have divided and damaged the party throughout its history more deeply than any other single issue. "The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006" opens by identifying and examining the factors that have influenced the party's thinking about war, before considering the post-1945 Cold War context and analyzing a range of cases: the Korean War, the party's response to the 1956 Suez crisis, the Wilson government's approach to the Vietnam War, Labour's response to the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands, the crisis over the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, culminating in the 1991 war, the wars of the 1990s over Bosnia and Kosovo the case for war in Iraq developed by the Blair government during 2002-03. This is a timely book that both illuminates approaches to past wars and helps us understand the basis of current military commitments. As such, it will be of great interest to students across courses in politics, history, and war studies.