Edited by Alexander Anievas, University of Cambridge
Cataclysm 1914 brings together a number of leftist scholars from a variety of fields to explore the many different aspects of the origins, trajectories and consequences of the First World War. The collection not only aims to examine the war itself, but seeks to visualise the conflict and all its immediate consequences (such as the Bolshevik Revolution and ascendency of US hegemony) as a defining moment—perhaps the defining moment—in 20th century world politics rupturing and reconstituting the ‘modern’ epoch in its many instantiations. In doing so, the collection takes up a variety of different topics of interest to both a general reader, those focused on Marxian theory and strategy, and leftist and socialist histories of the war.
Contributors are: Alexander Anievas, Shelley Baranowski, Neil Davidson, Geoff Eley, Sandra Halperin, Esther Leslie, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Wendy Matsumura, Peter D. Thomas, Adam Tooze, Alberto Toscano, and Enzo Traverso.
Biographical note
Alexander Anievas, Ph.D. (2011), University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the “Thirty Years Crisis”, 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014).
Readership
All interested in the history of the First World War and its impact on the trajectory of modern world politics. Subjects: History, International Relations, Marxism, Historical Sociology, Political Thought.
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Alexander Anievas – The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics1
PART I. ‘KLADDERADATSCH!: CAPITALISM, EMPIRE, AND IMPERIALISM IN THE MAKING AND AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I
1. Geoff Eley – Germany, the Fischer Controversy, and the Context of War: Rethinking German Imperialism, 1880–19141
2. Shelley Baranowski – War, Defeat, and the Urgency of Lebensraum: German Imperialism from the Second Empire to the Third Reich
3. Adam Tooze – Capitalist Peace or Capitalist War? The July Crisis Revisited
4. Alexander Anievas – Marxist Theory and the Origins of the First World
5. Wendy Matsumura – The Expansion of the Japanese Empire and the Rise of the Global Agrarian Question after the First World War
6. Sandra Halperin – War and Social Revolution: World War I and the ‘Great Transformation’
PART II: RECONFIGURATIONS: REVOLUTION AND CULTURE AFTER 1914
7. Enzo Traverso – European Intellectuals and the First World War: Trauma and New Cleavages
8. Esther Leslie – Art after War: Experience, Poverty and the Crystal Utopia
9. Alberto Toscano – ‘America’s Belgium’: W.E.B. Du Bois on Race, Class, and the Origins of World War I
10. Domenico Losurdo – World War I, the October Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East
11. Peter Thomas – Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution
12. Neil Davidson – The First World War, Classical Marxism and the End of the Bourgeois Revolution in Europe
13. Lars T. Lih – ‘The New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the Outbreak of World War I
Bibliography
Index
