The Origins of the First World War

James Joll was one of the 20th century’s most eminent historians of international history. In this now classic text he produced a careful, clear and concise evaluation of the multitude of explanations that had been advanced to explain the causes of one of the most significant events in modern history.In this new edition Gordon Martel has seamlessly weaved into the original text the enormous amount of new research on the subject that has been conducted by historians over the past twenty years. New arguments and the new debates that this research have generated have been integrated, and the bibliography expanded and updated. The Origins of the First World War is an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis of the historical forces at work in the Europeof 1914, and the very different ways in which historians have subsequently attempted to understand them.