Dr Alex Mayhew

This course is available on the BA in History, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in History and Politics, BSc in International Relations, BSc in International Relations and History, BSc in Politics and History and BSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

May be taken by 3rd years where regulations permit.

Historian Jörn Leonhard has described the First World War as the 'elemental crisis' of the twentieth century. On this module, we will trace the crises that precipitated the conflict, underpinned its events, and spiralled in its aftermath. Significantly, scholars now agree that the war can only truly be understood by adopting a global (and comparative) lens. This is, therefore, going to be a global (and comparative) history of the conflict; one that analyses its military, diplomatic, political, economic, social, and cultural features. Amongst other things, we will investigate the origins and outbreak of the war; the military campaigning on the European and extra-European fronts; the war at sea and in the air; the intervention of neutral powers; the belligerents' home fronts; the war's economic and social effects; the experience of combat; the road to the Armistice; the global pandemic of 1918-19; and the struggles of peace making. Fundamentally, though, this is a course about how individuals and social groups made sense of the Great War as it raged and after it ended.

10 x 1-hour lectures and 10 x 1-hour classes in the Autumn Term; 10 x 1-hour lectures and 10 x 1-hour classes in the Winter Term; 1 x 1-hour revision lecture in the Spring Term. There will be a reading week in the Autumn and the Winter terms.

Students will be required to write three essays of 2500 words: two in the AT and one in the WT, and a mock examination in the ST.

Holger Afflerbach, On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 2013); Robert Gerwath and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911-1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Robert Gerwath and John Horne, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Susan Grayzel and Tammy Proctor, Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Anna Maguire, Contact Zones of the First World War: Cultural Encounters across the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); David Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (London: Penguin, 2004); Hew Strachan (ed), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (London: Penguin, 2014); Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours) in the spring exam period.