Beyond the Great War: Making Peace in a Disordered World, ed. Norman Ingram and Carl Bouchard

Abstract

Historians have written extensively about the end of the First World War and the birth of the new international order, ranging from Arno J. Mayer’s Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) to Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers (2003). The centenary of the Great War has added to this vast historiography. We now know more, for example, about the global implications of the war and its aftermath. Most studies, however, still focus on a fairly narrow set of actors and spaces, and a brief period of time. Six months changed the world, the subtitle of MacMillan’s book suggests. But was 1919 really a fresh start? Can we reduce the sortie de guerre to the negotiations in Paris, and the effect that President Woodrow Wilson had on them? The editors and contributors in this volume reject the dominant view of the peace process. 1919 was not a zero hour, they argue, nor a moment of order. Instead, the chapters emphasise the disorder and discontent that shaped the peace well into the 1920s, including voices that went unheard by contemporary decision makers. The book is the result of a 2018 conference by a group of French and Anglo-American scholars and consequently focuses on France and the anglophone world. It has eleven chapters divided into three sections, which address the emergence of internationalism, the post-war discourse in France, and the perspectives of women and non-state groups. The authors draw on a range of archival records, some of them previously untapped, as well as recent scholarship, notably the influential studies by Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela.