Stealing Horses to Great Applause : The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered

Schroeder, Paul W./ Anderson, Perry (INT)

Verso Books（2026/06発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 384 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781836745563
• DDC分類 940.32

Full Description

Stealing Horses to Great Applause is arguably the finest consideration yet of the origins of the First World War. Breaking with accounts focusing on the actions of a single state or the final countdown to hostilities, Paul W. Schroeder analyzes the systemic crisis that engulfed the Great Powers in 1914. Increasingly, they had become more interested in colonial expansion abroad ('stealing horses to great applause', in the old Spanish adage) than in the traditional conventions of European peacemaking. They forgot the rule that a balance of power required the preservation of all its essential actors, including the weakest of them, Austria-Hungary. This the British too failed to heed. The Central Powers may have started the war, but that does not mean they in any real sense caused it.

Stealing Horses includes appraisals of Niall Ferguson and A. J. P. Taylor as well as an extensive unpublished final work rethinking the First World War as 'the last eighteenth-century war'.

With an introduction by Perry Anderson.

Contents

Introduction, Perry Anderson

PART I
1. World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak
2. International Politics, Peace and War, 1815-1914
3. Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War
4. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: Austria-Hungary's Decision in 1914 in Systemic Perspective
5. World War I and the Vienna System: The Last Eighteenth-Century War and the First Modern Peace

PART II
6. Romania and the Great Powers before 1914
7. Prudence vs Recklessness: Assessing Responsibility for World War I

PART III
8. World War I: A Tragedy, not a Pity
9. A. J. P. Taylor's International System

Acknowledgments
Index