The First World War was the moment modernity turned against itself. The imperial rivalries and capitalist expansion of the late 19th century reached a crisis point, but instead of the socialist revolution Marxists had anticipated, Europe descended into industrialised slaughter. The scale of the disaster—10 million dead, three empires collapsed, one revolution triumphant, another aborted—has ensured its historiography remains permanently unsettled. As Perry Anderson reminds us, the debate over the war’s origins alone had generated some 25,000 books and articles by the late 1980s, with no sign of exhaustion. Yet while histories of 1914 proliferate, surprisingly few reflect on how these histories themselves have been shaped.
Anderson’s Approach
Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War is an attempt to address that imbalance. Anderson, for decades the most rigorous historian of European statecraft, offers a critical survey of six historians who shaped the study of the war’s origins, from Pierre Renouvin to Paul Schroeder. Each, he argues, exemplifies the national and epistemological divisions that have defined the historiography of the war, between event and structure, contingency and inevitability, national self-justification and the search for deeper causes. Yet if the book is a survey, it is one conducted with Anderson’s characteristic forensic detachment. These are not merely expositions of different historical positions, but dissections of their ideological function.
Historiographical Battles
It was the historiographical battles over the First World War that first drew me to modern history at university. The war itself, the mud, the horror, the annihilation of an entire European generation, was obviously compelling. But what fascinated me more was the instability of its meaning. Unlike the Second World War, which had been fixed into an almost scriptural moral narrative, 1914 and the start of the First World War remained, in some ways, an open question. Was it the product of imperialist competition, of diplomatic miscalculation, of mass nationalist fervour? Or was it, an idea I found particularly arresting, an almost systemic inevitability, built into the mechanics of European capitalism?
The war, of course, did not end in 1918. That much was clear from reading Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, which followed his trilogy covering 1789–1914 and treated the interwar years not as an uneasy peace, but as the opening act of an unfinished crisis. Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent offered a similarly stark perspective, showing how the destruction of 1914–18 created an era where democracy was only one of several possible futures. And then there was Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory1, which broke away from the high politics of origins and consequences to show how the war had been internalised, reshaped and mythologised in literature. If Hobsbawm made the war part of a longer history of capitalist crisis, and Mazower showed how its aftermath narrowed Europe’s political possibilities, Fussell’s book made clear that the war’s meaning was also something personal, contested, and endlessly reinterpreted.
Fischer vs. Clark
One part of the course highlighted just how live these historiographical battles still were. The focus was on Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht2, the book that shattered the postwar German consensus by arguing that the Reich had deliberately sought European domination in 1914. The prevailing wisdom before Fischer had been that Germany had blundered into war like everyone else, miscalculating, misreading the intentions of its rivals. His argument provoked outrage, was fiercely resisted, then absorbed. Just as the Fischer thesis became conventional, a counterattack emerged. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, newly published at the time, argued that responsibility for the war was dispersed across all the great powers.
I was a later university student, studying history with the Open University, whose faculty included the distinguished historian of the period, Annika Mombauer. Her work on Helmuth von Moltke and the military strategies of the German General Staff exposed the internal tensions within the Reich before the war, adding further weight to the view that Germany bore primary responsibility. But her research extended beyond military decision-making to the broader diplomatic and political origins of the conflict. Her book The Origins of the First World War provided a rigorous analysis of the July Crisis and the structures of European power that shaped it, while her more recent The Causes of the First World War: The Long Blame Game explores the evolving historiography of 1914, tracing how different nations and historians have assigned responsibility over the past century. Clark’s revisionist arguments, which were gaining traction at the time, sat uneasily with her forensic dismantling of German war planning and her insistence that both structural and contingent factors must be taken into account. To study the war’s origins in this context was to be immersed in a debate that had not settled, but which remained, a century on, fiercely contested.
Anderson’s Historians
Anderson’s first subject is Pierre Renouvin, the architect of the dominant French interpretation of the war. His Les Origines immédiates de la première guerre mondiale (1925) established the view that France was an innocent party, reluctantly drawn into the war by German aggression. Anderson, however, takes apart Renouvin’s silences. His institutional position—working at a library “initially funded by money assigned to the secret service”—placed him within a historiographical tradition unwilling to acknowledge France’s role in encouraging Russian mobilisation. Anderson is unambiguous: “Complete silence met evidence that France had actively encouraged Russia to stand firm.”
Renouvin’s counterpart in Italy was Luigi Albertini, the editor of Corriere della Sera and an ardent proponent of Italy’s intervention in 1915. His Origins of the War of 1914 (1942–43) is one of the most exhaustive studies of the war’s outbreak ever produced, but its sheer scale, Anderson suggests, ultimately works against it. The book, he argues, accumulates “a vast mass of detail” without drawing larger theoretical conclusions.
Germany’s historiography is a different matter. The question of war guilt, imposed by Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, shaped all subsequent German debates. In 1961, Fritz Fischer detonated the postwar consensus by arguing that Germany had deliberately pursued a policy of European domination. Anderson describes the reaction: “At first fiercely resisted by the historical profession and political authorities of the day alike, Fischer’s findings received growing media support, eventual public and professional acceptance, and ultimately decoration by the state, becoming integral to a new West German identity cleansed of its past.” But Anderson is careful to note that Fischer’s own past complicates his legacy, archival research later revealed “youthful connexions to the far right after 1918, and a record of collusion with Nazi ideas and institutions under Hitler.”
Paul Schroeder, the last historian examined in Anderson’s sextet, offers the most ambitious scope. His Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered, released by Verso, takes a panoramic view, situating the war’s origins in the longue durée of diplomatic history. He critiques A.J.P. Taylor’s balance-of-power determinism, arguing that Taylor reduced diplomacy to a crude contest of national strengths, without recognising deeper shifts in international structures. Yet Taylor’s influence lingers, his Struggle for Mastery in Europe remains synonymous with diplomatic history, and he was perhaps the first historian in Britain to transcend academia and become a true public intellectual. His television lectures made history a mass spectacle, a legacy that no serious historian has replicated. If his provocations are now out of fashion, his clarity of argument remains enviable.
Anderson does not engage with Taylor directly, but his broader critique of historiographical traditions suggests that Taylor’s model, like the nationalist frameworks Anderson dissects, ultimately constrained historical understanding. That Taylor remains readable today while many of his conclusions have been superseded is a reminder that how history is written can be as important as what is written. Yet if historiography is shaped by national traditions, as Anderson argues, then what about those accounts that never gained institutional recognition? One of the more striking absences in Disputing Disaster is Anderson’s lack of engagement with explicitly Marxist interpretations of the war.
Missing Marxist Interpretation
Given his own intellectual lineage, his long-standing commitment to historical materialism, his meticulous analyses of European state formation, one might have expected a more direct reckoning with how capitalism itself shaped the war’s outbreak and aftermath. Yet in a book that so carefully dissects the ideological function of nationalist historiographies, the class dynamics underlying 1914 barely receive mention. Anderson never states outright why he chooses to avoid them, but the omission is conspicuous.
There have, of course, been Marxist interpretations of the First World War, but these have largely remained outside the historical mainstream. Unlike Christopher Clark or Niall Ferguson, whose books have been widely reviewed and prominently placed in bookstores, Marxist accounts have tended to emerge from smaller publishers, written for an audience already inclined towards their conclusions. They have never achieved the same level of recognition, nor shaped the public understanding of the war in the way that Fischer or Clark have. There is no single canonical Marxist history of 1914, no equivalent to Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes or even Ernst Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War. The dominant interpretations of the war have remained rooted in diplomatic history, strategic analysis, and national narratives rather than in any sustained materialist critique.
That absence is striking because a Marxist approach to 1914 offers something fundamentally different. There has never been one single interpretation, but four broad frameworks have emerged over the past century, each offering an alternative to the national histories Anderson dissects.
The first, and most well-known, is the Leninist argument that war was an inevitable consequence of imperialism. By 1914, the major European powers had exhausted the easy spoils of colonial expansion. Capitalist accumulation had reached a stage where further growth required a redivision of the world. War, in this reading, was not a diplomatic failure or a tragic accident but the logical result of a system that had outgrown itself. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism remains the most famous expression of this argument, though as subsequent historians have noted, its sweeping determinism leaves little room for contingency or agency.
A second approach focuses on the failure of the European socialist movement. The Second International had vowed to resist any imperialist war, yet in 1914 its constituent parties overwhelmingly sided with their own governments. The result was the most significant collapse of international socialism in its history, one that Rosa Luxemburg saw as a catastrophic betrayal, ensuring that the working classes of Europe would be turned against each other rather than against their own ruling classes. In this reading, the war’s true significance lies not in its outbreak but in its political consequences: the Russian Revolution, the failed revolutions in Germany and Hungary, the fracturing of the international left. The war, in this sense, was both a disaster and an opportunity, one that Lenin seized and the German communists let slip.
A third interpretation, more structural in its approach, sees the war as marking the transition to what would later be called state-monopoly capitalism. In this view, the war was not just a struggle between empires but a moment in which capital and the state became fully intertwined. The unprecedented scale of industrial mobilisation, the extension of state control over production, and the centrality of arms manufacturing in the war economy all signalled a transformation in capitalist governance. War, in this reading, was not just a conflict between nations but a mechanism for consolidating a new mode of economic organisation, one that would shape the military-industrial complexes of the 20th century.
The fourth, more Gramscian, approach sees the war not as a singular event but as the opening of a long crisis. In this version, 1914 was the beginning of a revolutionary sequence that would run through 1917, 1919, 1933, and 1945. The collapse of the old imperial states—Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern—was not the birth of a stable new order but the prelude to a far more protracted struggle. The war, in this sense, was not just the consequence of imperialist competition but the moment in which bourgeois liberalism ceased to function as an effective system of rule, forcing the development of new forms of coercion, whether through fascism or through the expansion of the bureaucratic state.
That Anderson does not engage with any of these perspectives is, at first glance, surprising. His own body of work has been shaped by the fundamental insights of historical materialism. His past critiques of European historiography have frequently exposed the ways in which historians treat the state as an autonomous actor rather than as a structure shaped by class interests. And yet here, in a book devoted to how the war has been explained, those concerns are notably absent.
One possible explanation is that Disputing Disaster is not an attempt to explain the war but to chart the ways it has been explained. Since no explicitly Marxist reading of the war has ever been dominant in national historiographies, it may simply not fit within Anderson’s chosen framework. But that in itself raises a further question: why have Marxist interpretations remained marginal? If nationalist frameworks have shaped historical explanation, as Anderson persuasively argues, then it would seem only logical to explore what alternatives might exist beyond them. A book about historiography that does not engage with class is still, in the end, making an argument about what is and is not important.
It is also possible that Anderson finds the existing Marxist explanations unsatisfactory. Lenin’s account of imperialism, though foundational, has been criticised for its rigid economic determinism, treating the war as an inevitable consequence of capitalism’s inner workings rather than a contingent event shaped by political actors. The focus on the Second International’s collapse, meanwhile, risks reducing the war to a crisis of political organisation rather than of economic structure. And yet, despite their limitations, these frameworks at least attempt to place the war within a broader historical logic, something that Anderson himself has often insisted upon in his own work.
Historiography and Its Limits
What is missing from the historiography of the First World War is a work like Ernst Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War. Mandel, unlike many Marxist historians of his generation, did not treat war as merely an epiphenomenon of deeper economic structures. Instead, he sought to explain it as a specific historical phenomenon, one rooted in capitalist competition but shaped by political struggle, ideological formations, and military strategy. His book remains one of the most compelling materialist analyses of the Second World War, precisely because it refuses to reduce war to an automatic consequence of economic contradictions. No equivalent book exists for the First World War.
A history of historiography need not be separate from a history of ideology. Anderson, of all historians, has spent his career making precisely that point. And yet here, in a book that scrutinises the ideological function of war historiography, that insight is left unexplored. Perhaps this is deliberate, an acknowledgment that the historical materialist account of 1914 has yet to be written in a form that can displace nationalist and diplomatic explanations. Or perhaps it is an evasion. Either way, the absence of class in Disputing Disaster is not just an omission. It is an argument in itself.
However, I want to make clear this is not a book only for the specialist reader. If the past matters, then so too does the way it is written, and the frameworks within which it is interpreted. The art of writing history should not be confined to an academic exercise, but understood in relation to the broader ideological and political concerns of its time. Anderson’s book makes this clear, showing how histories of 1914 have been shaped as much by national mythologies as by archival discoveries.
Disputing Disaster is a work I found utterly absorbing, and it now sits alongside Hobsbawm, Schroeder, Taylor, Mazower, and Fussell in my collection. Its forensic dismantling of historiographical traditions reaffirms why history is never a neutral record but a contest over meaning. The war’s origins will continue to be debated, but Anderson’s book forces a more fundamental question: not just why war broke out, but why historians, across generations, have insisted on explaining it in the ways they have.
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Footnotes
- The New York Times had a recent interesting review of the work ↩︎
- The English title is Germany’s Aims in the First World War. ↩︎
