HY226      One Unit
The Greater War c. 1912-1923

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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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.

1 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

One 2000-word essay in the AT and one 2000-word essay in the WT. An exam preparation workshop will be offered as part of exam revision arrangements.

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 (50%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Course participation (15%)

Essay (35%, 3000 words)