Sunday, November 11, is the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day, which ended the war that was “to end all wars.” Less than a year later, however, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of the next world war, with its humiliation of Germany, its heavy reparations, and its signatories’ horror of taking early military action.
I have not formally studied the war, but my interest in its causes helped motivate me to study history in more depth. The war was pivotal in European history, so I have read several books about it. Probably the most helpful is The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark.[1]
Clark is a British historian who tries to look at big topics without letting the known outcome influence his description (in a similar vein, he also wrote The Iron Kingdom about the history of Prussia). He begins his 698-page book by saying that others’ explanations for the war include “remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization.”[2] He takes a somewhat different tack, holding back on the “why” in favor of the “how it came about,” especially once the crisis—the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne—took place on June 28, 1914.
My class on English history this fall touched on the witch craze that spread through Europe for about a century following 1570. Six hundred “witches” were executed in England, and 1500 in Scotland (a much smaller country).[1]
What caused this persecution, which occurred in the supposedly modern century after Protestantism appeared? Typical explanations, says Derek Hirst, are patriarchal misogyny (four-fifths of those executed for witchcraft were women), feuds and disputes among neighbors, even failure to help the poor, which led to imprecations and presumed maleficia. But to Hirst, ”the role of the elite was crucial.” Bishops, divines, and other luminaries became convinced that there was an active devil unleashed in the world. “The state put machinery in the hands of local persecutors, but the impetus came from the intellectuals,” says Hirst.[2]
Hirst does not elaborate on this power-elite theory, but R. I. Moore does, in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society.[3] Moore didn’t write about seventeenth-century witches, but about the Church’s rooting out of heretics, Jews, and lepers in the Middle Ages in Europe. Those efforts, he believes, established a machinery of persecution that operated almost automatically.
One of the enduring historical questions is why the Industrial Revolution started in England, rather than somewhere else. One theory—that of Robert Brenner—gives a lot of credit to England’s agricultural revolution.
Thanks to agriculture, England developed the ability to provide enough food for a growing population (famines ended completely by 1700). At the same time, the changing agriculture reduced the need for so many people on farms. The former manor tenants moved to the towns and cities and became the human engines of the industrial revolution.
For a class this fall, I read a 1976 article by Robert Brenner explaining how this agricultural revolution came about.[1] By the way, I may have earlier overstated the case when I said that historians don’t take Marxism all that seriously. Brenner was either a Marxist or a neo-Marxist, and his paper is laced with Marxist references to “class,” “class consciousness,” and “surplus-extraction.”
I hadn’t planned on studying the Middle Ages, but one semester the only European course that looked good to me was History of the High Middle Ages, the period from 1000 to about 1300. (For climate aficionados that was the time of the Medieval Optimum, when it was warm enough to grow grapes in England and Greenland was temporarily settled.)
One thing I learned was that our romantic “Sir Walter Scott” fantasies about knights, castles, chivalry, and jousts are—largely true! There really was a courtly world. Lords built scores (perhaps hundreds) of castles across western Europe; the move to primogeniture (inheritance by the first-born male) meant that a lot of younger sons (“cadets”) were looking for rich heiresses; and jousts were a way of keeping young knights busy and in good shape without actually engaging in wars (of course, they had plenty of those, too). The aristocrats may have represented only 2 percent or so of the population, but they had chroniclers and poets to commemorate them.
