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THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A DOCUMENTARY RECORD

Series One: European War, 1914-1919, The War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE)

from Cambridge University Library

Part 7: Economics, Finance and Socialism

Part 8: Russian Affairs, Bolshevism and the Eastern Front

Editorial Introduction by Professor J.M. Winter, Department of History, Yale University

The economic and social history of the Great War has gone through a transformation in recent years.  From a history of economic institutions, written by administrators and participants, we have moved to a history of societies at war.  The material basis of victory and defeat is now configured differently than it was in the 1920s and 1930s, but the questions remain just as vivid and the interpretations remain just as contested.

This collection of materials deposited in the Cambridge War Collection is an essential guide to the original phase of participants’ writing on the economic war.  Here we have a very wide cross-section of material comparing the way the German economy waged industrial war with the ways its adversaries did so.  Inevitably, this story is told both from within Europe and with respect to the imperial holdings of the Allies.  From much of this material – very hard to find even in major research libraries – we can see clearly the structure of the first ‘military-industrial complex’.  Here are accounts in pamphlet and book form of war revenues and taxation, of food supply on both sides, of labour problems, of trade with the neutrals, and of the American factor both before and after the United States entered the war in 1917.

Any student of ‘total war’, understood as the totalizing capacity of war machines to expand in such a way as to touch every sector of society, must approach the issues documented in this part of the collection.  From reports of the Imperial Bank of Persia to accounts of German trade with Argentina, to liquor restrictions in Britain: here we find the reach and spread of the economic war throughout the world.

Much of the material contained in this part of the collection reflects the optimism and buoyancy of the pre-war economic order.  The information presented is about a deflection and dislocation of a viable economic structure, not as we now know, its rupture and incipient destruction.  The language of economic analysis betrays this contradiction: a war which tested capitalism to its limits, appeared to suggest that capitalism could withstand anything.  A decade after the Armistice, everyone knew that such an assumption was wildly unproven, and probably wrong.  From these documents we can glimpse the beginning of the end of the nineteenth century European domination of the world.  Less clear are the harsh outlines of the twentieth-century world economy, which only a visionary like Keynes could foretell.  But even he was imbedded in the world described here, and it took a great intellectual effort for him to move beyond it.  To know the European capitalist order at its apogee is to see much about its transformation and partial decline.  That story, so essential to an understanding of contemporary history, unfolds in this body of rare material, which no serious collection of documents on the past can afford to be without.

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