Reviewed by: The Economics of World War I Peter Temin The Economics of World War I. Edited by Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 345 pp. $80.00 World War I marked the end of an era. Three great empires collapsed in the East: the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman. The spirit of conflict never died in the West, leading to World War II after twenty years. This book surveys the economics of the war. It is the sequel to a similar book on the later conflict, and it looks forward to World War II for parallels rather than looking back to see the end of an era.1
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A great strength of this survey is that it extends from the usual suspects in Western Europe and America to the collapsing empires in the East, offering essays on the war economy in Austria-Hungary (by Max-Stephan Sculze), the Ottoman Empire (by Sevket Pamuk), and Russia (by Peter Gatrell). These essays collectively offer a portrait of agrarian societies caught up in industrial conflict. It is not a pretty picture; poor military efforts produced great costs to domestic society. The pretension of these countries' leaders that they could play in the league of the industrial countries may well have led to their demise.
All nine of the country essays report the progress of gdp, trade, government finances, and (where observable) income distribution, during the war. They also attempt to measure the cost of the war for each country as well as possible. The heavy hand of the editors is evident in the introductory paragraphs of each essay that list the topics considered. The essays on Germany (by Albrecht Ritschl) argues that Germans started during the war to shift their imperialist aims from extra-European colonies to Eastern Europe. The essay on the United States (by Hugh Rockoff) explores the institutional innovations of the war, also examining a legacy of the war more complex than its cost.
Second, economics mattered for the outcome of the war of attrition that followed the absence of a quick victory. The Allies in both world [End Page 595] wars had the greater resources, and they eventually won. (The advantage appears to have come chiefly because of the participation of the United States, although the data do not make this reasoning easy to discern.) A sense of economic inevitability haunts this conclusion, although wars are never so predictable. As Overy has demonstrated for World War II, economics is only one aspect of a complex historical process, albeit an important one.2
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