The First World War put unprecedented strains on the economic, social and political systems of all the combatant nations. A year after the war ended, the Great European Empires had collapsed, and new, extremist ideologies, from fascism to communism, had emerged to disturb the postwar political world.
This lecture explores the reasons for the radical political changes that made the First World War the seminal catastrophe of twentieth-century Europe.


The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...

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