The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2013, Margaret MacMillan)

Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended Peace was among the many books written for the centennial of the First World War, trying to explain how Europe's different superpowers backed into the world's most destructive conflict (up to that point) without fully intending to. MacMillan's book has most of the same strengths as her earlier work on the Paris Peace Conference: an eye for sharp character sketches and an ability to convey broader political-diplomatic context with finesse. The book's sharpest passages lie in her assessment of Europe's prewar statesman, from the bellicose military leadership of Britain and France who foresaw war as inevitable, to the hopelessly reactionary Tsar Nicholas and his court, to Germany's erratic Kaiser Wilhelm, whom she portrays with some sympathy as a well-meaning monarch whose personality flaws unwittingly antagonized his fellow statesmen. MacMillan dutifully recounts the escalating crises, imperial rivalries and power clashes that led to war, culminating in the "damn thing in the Balkans" that exploded the powder keg in 1914. It's here that the book starts to lose interest; MacMillan presents these events fluently enough, but her analyses and dramatization adds nothing to earlier works by Barbara Tuchman (The Proud Tower), Robert K. Massie (Dreadnought) and others, which explore them with more color and insight. From the crop of contemporaries, War That Ended Peace is easily bested by Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, which has a more controversial thesis (blaming the war principally on Serbia, with some unwitting assistance from a belligerent Kaiser) than MacMillan's rehash of the "collective responsibility" thesis which long dominated popular discourse on the Great War's origins, but is increasingly debatable. Thus MacMillan's book is readable and conversant in its subject matter, but at nearly 700 pages of text one wonders about the need to revisit this well-worn topic, if she has very little new to say.

Rating: 3/5