Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics

Summary

The First World War hardly ended with the formal Armistice in Europe on November 11, 1918, amid the continuing violence of blockades and epidemics, amid numerous forms of reconstruction and revolution. For many at the time, the outbreak of what would become the First World War was an inevitability, the result of rising tensions over decades, whether due to the dynamics and systems of international politics within Europe, or a result of the competitive logic of imperial politics as practiced by Europe outside its borders, rebounding back upon it. That the tyranny of victory was a danger recognized by many of the leading analysts of the First World War at the time, helped to foster a continued search for ideas that might keep the worlds of politics and economics open to alternative futures. Those hopes paved the way for the wide variety of anti-imperial, federal, diasporic, and revolutionary forms of political and economic arrangements.

From the invention of the world economy, to the reality of multiple war economies, from revolutionary conjunctures to ideas of democracy and climate catastrophe in the Anthropocene today, Worlds of Wartime tells the story of just how strongly modern politics in general, and modern ideas about political and economic possibility, were fixed by the intellectual turbulence wrought during the First World War.