James Ellis The History Factor Renata Didiano Eriks Bredovskis Wallace Foster William Patrick Langille Niall Ferguson Anass Lemzouak Leonardo Reuss Nassim Nicholas Taleb Henry Law William Monie Bauer Christopher Zardo Conrad Huang Dan Carlin David Stewart Len Gurr John Cockshutt John Stoneman Sean McMeekin is an amazing historian on the origins of the First World War. Having read his book July 1914: Countdown to War (which this lecture covers), I am now reading his fascinating book called The Russian Origins of the First World War, which deals with St. Petersburgs ambitions to seize control of Istanbul and the Bosporus straights (so as to monopolize control of the trade routes between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which was so vital to Russias exports) and Russias participation in the wider scramble among the European empires to carve up the rapidly decaying Ottoman Empire, which 19th and early-20th century statesmen called The Eastern Question. As McMeekin rightly argues, although the wars real origins were short term shocks to the international geopolitical system centred on Europe and in turn although the outbreak of world war did truly come like a bolt out of the blue for those in the global economic markets (see Niall Fergusons The Pity of War and The War of the World), this did not mean that the war exploded out of a vacuum. As McMeekin argues, many who read newspapers in London, Paris, Berlin, New York and other major cities around the globe were certainly expecting the volatile Balkan Peninsula (increasingly unstable as the Ottoman Empire rapidly broke apart in this region since defeat by Russia in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and even more so with the Italian-Turkish War of 1911 and the subsequent Two Balkan Wars of 1912-1913) to blow up at some point. But they believed that it would be a Third Balkan War (or as McMeekin wittingly calls it, a Third War of Ottoman Secession), possibly between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, not one between Serbia and the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many did not believe that the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian imperial heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist terrorist Black Hand member, Gavrillo Princip, in Sarajevo, capital of formerly multi-ethnic Ottoman province of Bosnia (occupied by Austria-Hungary since 1878, which in turn annexed it in 1908) and its subsequent diplomatic July Crisis between all the European empires (the Great Powers) would necessarily trigger a war between all the European Great Powers, many of which had global empires, thus unleashing a possible world war. Oh the tragic irony of history: https://youtube/watch?v=0mw6UJc6tYA
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:23:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015