It were after all not (only) nations that went to war in 1914, but foremost multi-ethnic empires. “Empires at war” edited by Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela argues that we have to take the global dimension of the First World War much more serious than historians have did before. One of the major advantages of this volume is that it gathers more than a dozen experts of global history, who look at the war from the angle of their case study.
Putting empires at the forefront of historical analysis of the First World War, the book offers a perspective that helps us to de-provincialize our understanding of this historical period. For Gerwath and Manela, we cannot simply subsume events in Africa, Asia and the Americas as minor theatres of the First World War as it was done by many historians who based their analysis on the events and outcomes of the Western Front in Europe. For long, historians gave up the idea that Empires are built upon a simple center-periphery relationship.
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