Beyond 1917

If one happens to have been born in Europe, it is almost impossible to escape the First World War. Go to any small village in France or any town square in Britain and look at the memorials there and you soon get a sense of the loss and the impact which the war had on these two countries. The war is also annually commemorated, no more movingly perhaps than in Great Britain on the nearest Sunday to 11 November when the Cenotaph along Whitehall in London becomes the focus of a national day of mourning and remembrance for all those who gave up their lives for ‘King and Country’. Significantly, one of the more popular plays on the London stage over the past few years, War Horse, also happens to be about the war, or, more precisely, about the role a horse played during the conflict. And, of course, a century after the war had begun in 1914, there were books and conferences galore debating the reason why the conflict had broken out in the first place, and now, with the anniversary of 1919 and the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty, there will no doubt be an equal number of books and conferences debating what happened in Paris in those crucial six months between January and June of that defining year—one which not only saw the signing of the peace in June but its speedy denunciation a few months later by one of the most influential books ever written in the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Ancient history · Denunciation · Economic history · Peace treaty · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Treaty · African history and culture studies · Classics · History · Law · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact