Book Review: Istoriia rossiiskogo gosudarstva. Tsar’-osvoboditel’ i tsar’-mirotvorets. Lekarstvo dlia imperii [History of the Russian State. The Tsar-Liberator and the Tsar-Peacemaker. Medicine for the Empire] by Boris Akunin

Abstract

identity-formation as a key factor in the development of total, global war. If the war was about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, who or what was part of ‘us’? Here lies the greatest strength of the book. It tells a mostly familiar story, but does so by illuminating just how pervasive and how far-reaching some of the transformations wrought by the war were, and how deeply they impacted ordinary lives. From the neutral Liberian economy destroyed by blockade to the Ngati Porou tribe of New Zealand saluting the Belgian flag following its invasion by Germany, from the desperate letters from an Indian soldier begging his brother not to volunteer for war in ‘civilized’ Europe to the parallel imperial war waged by the French in Volta Bani (current-day Burkina Faso and Mali) in 1915–1917, their tales stay with the reader long after they have finished reading. What is more, these stories serve to illuminate the book’s central argument: that the total, global First World War produced, enhanced or illuminated so many contradictory hopes, fears, claims, expectations and hatreds that no post-war settlement could ever hope to satisfy them all, producing a world with glaringly visible and globally connected inequalities ‘infused with the grief and anger that the violence of the war had unleashed on the world’ (173). I do wonder, however, whether the book completely succeeds in making its point. Firstly, the book’s conscious focus on ‘outlier’ examples from places often very far from the familiar Western Front occasionally makes it harder to see the contradictions in the responses to the war that are so central to the core argument Abbenhuis and Tames are making, especially since many of those examples point in similar directions. Moreover, in replicating the familiar structure of many older and decidedly less ‘global’ First World War surveys, it runs the risk of instilling in the reader the sense that the First World War was something that ‘radiated’ out of Europe, rather than a truly worldwide event that was experienced and interpreted using local interpretative frameworks. A more ‘provincialized’ approach to the war is, perhaps, the next milestone for the ongoing quest to understand total and global war. In the meantime, this book is impressive in its breadth, elegantly written, and provides a short and succinct introduction to the state of the art of research into an ever more global First World War.