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Michael P.M. Fox et al., eds., " Framing the First World War: How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with all three editors of a book titled Framing the First World War, How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict, published by the University Press of Kansas in 2025. This book brings together a whole bunch of different scholars looking at a really key war in military studies as a discipline, obviously world One, but looking at it in a particular way. And we're going to get into kind of what that approach is and why it's so important. I don't want to give too much away at this point, but I'm very pleased to have all three of the editors with me. So we have Dr. Michael Finch, Dr. Amy Fox, and Dr. David Morgan Owen, all here today. Thank you, all three of you, for being here.
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C
Hi, Miranda. Thank you so much for having us. We're really glad of the opportunity to discuss the book and we really appreciate all of the fantastic work you do for the New Books Network.
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B
Thank you for that and for all of you being here. Before we get into the book, though, I think we want to do a bit of introducing each of you and kind of what brought you into this. So, Amy, maybe you'd like to start.
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D
Yeah. Sure. Thanks so much, Miranda. So, I'm Amy Fox. I'm a historian of war, specifically the First World War, unsurprisingly. And a lot of my research has considered military organizations, how they change, how they innovate and I suppose more recently thinking about the relationship between organisations and the individuals within them, whether that's commanders or people on the periphery of those organisations. In terms of my academic background, I'm a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews.
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B
Lovely, thank you for that intro. David, do you want to go next?
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C
Hi everyone, thanks for having us again. Miranda. My name is David Morgan Owen. I am also a Senior Lecturer in the School of IR at St Andrews. I'm a historian, historian primarily of the First World War, particularly interested in the history of strategy and also conflict in maritime contexts.
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E
And I'm Mike Finch, I'm Associate professor of the History, War and Strategy at Deakin University, which is a university which is based in Victoria in Australia. Although I actually live in Canberra and most of my job involves working with the Australian Defence Forces in their military education programs. My work is, I guess, meandered around a little bit, but it's sort of unified by an interest in, in military and strategic thought. And I think probably until this book came out, I've often thought of myself as a First World War adjacent historian.
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B
That is a very helpful set of introductions then from the three of you, because that definitely establishes why you would all be working on this sort of topic. But of course we can be more specific than just saying this is a book about World War I like it is, but it's doing some very specific work in terms of the approach and intervention in the field. So maybe we can talk a bit about the goals for this project when you all came together and what that new approach is.
- [04:25]
C
Yeah, so I'll try and start answering this question, I suppose. Like, I think I'm always very impressed when I listen to historians talk about their work and their books and the ideas behind a project. And it all seems like this wonderfully organized, logical, coherent explanation for what happened. Hopefully we'll move towards coherence in answering this question. But probably the honest beginning of an answer is that the book really stemmed from a series of kind of conversations that we were having basically during the pandemic when we were all spending a lot of time zooming, teamsing, whatsapping each other with a lot of uncertainty in the world. And we were just kind of looking for a project to kind of bring some focus to things that we were doing. And so, you know, we obviously all previously worked together in military education in the UK at King's College London. So we knew each other. And this kind of was the genesis of some of the conversations that we were having around this in a more intellectual sense, I guess. I think a really clarifying kind of contribution for us that catalyzed our thinking towards this project was an essay written by a very prominent historian of the First World War called John Horn and published in the journal Past and Present. And he posed a question in the title of that essay, the End of a Paradigm, and talked about the cultural turn in First World War studies. So maybe just to unpack that kind of a little bit, First World War studies as a discipline is this incredibly sophisticated, rich, large and incredibly accomplished body of scholarship that surrounds the First World War. And probably the key defining feature of it since the 1980s has been what's historians refer to as the cultural turn, which is really a kind of concern with the study of everyday experience of representation, values, codes, and how those were shaped and reshaped and informed the war. In this essay, John Horne, who is a key kind of mover within the cultural history of the First World War, kind of did a, a tour de horizon of what the contribution of this turn has been and where it might go in future. And he made some really, we thought, kind of provocative and thought provoking and very generative observations about it that spoke to our kind of experience. So one of one of the phrases that he used was that cultural history is operated in a semi parallel universe from what he termed the causal history of the First World War. And he remarked and unpacked on that in great kind of scholarly depth. I would encourage anyone interested to go and read the essay. It's a very valuable, thought provoking contribution. But I guess that kind of sparked in all of our minds some thoughts that really spoke to our experiences as people who had a background in primarily military history and who were not themselves deeply within the cultural turn. And I think it was a very intellectually honest observation to make in the sense that the cultural history of the war has made such a huge contribution to our understanding of the First World War. But there's a number of, I guess, subjects, a number of approaches that really have not been kind of cross fertilized by it. And that opened up a kind of wide range of vistas that I think speak to wider trends in military history. You know, how do you integrate culture approaches that are primarily concerned with things that cultural history might be concerned with? You know, the Centrality of everyday experience, history from below, people's values, identities with what I think Horn very elegantly referred to as causal history. Why things happen the way they do, how decisions might shape outcomes and those kinds of issues. And I think that that was a kind of important starting off point, as I recall it, anyway. The others might have. Might have other recollections.
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D
I'll jump in here. I think it's. That's a very eloquent way of putting it. I think it was to make use of idle hands during the pandemic. But Horne's essay was incredibly thought provoking. And something that I was really keen to explore in the project is this idea that actually cultural military histories are. Whether it's in parallel or they're just kind of talking past each other. And some of the predilections, some of the imperatives within cultural history, as Days pointed out, not necessarily being applied to, you know, key concerns within military history, whether that is, you know, the decision making of commanders and politicians. So I think for me, this notion of disciplines or sub disciplines almost being quarantined or firewalled from each other was very much something that was a key goal of this project, was to try and, you know, break down those silos, as it were, and see how productive the dialogue could be between cultural, but even social histories of the First World War, along with what we might call more sort of traditional military histories of the First World War.
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B
Okay, that makes a lot of sense as goals. Mike, do you want to jump in?
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C
Yeah.
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E
It's interesting as well, in the context of, you know, this is First World War, the First World War studies as a field in history. Talking about this because, you know, John Horn's take on this is the. Is essentially that, you know, even when the aspirations have been there, there isn't necessarily enough product to show for it, if you like. And that's an interesting thing when you think about the First World War studies community, because actually that. I tend to see that that group of scholars is often quite collegiate in terms of, you know, the willingness of, especially through organs like the International Society for First World War Studies to actually have fora. In which that dialogue between cultural and military historians can actually take place and that that's been ongoing for some time. And yet, you know, the. How far methodologically, have you actually managed to sort of move things forward and, you know, use method, use that kind of methodology to produce something that incorpor. So both sides of the equation. So in a way, it's a sort of. It was A challenge as well as a thought provoking set of arguments by John Horne that we could sort of latch onto in the way that we thought about how we would approach the book.
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B
So it's exactly on that point that I'd love to discuss further because realizing that there's kind of this problem prompted by the Horn article perhaps, and then deciding to do something about it, I mean, those are both massive decisions, as you've all all described. Then figuring out exactly how you're going to tackle the taking apart of silos, I mean, that's a really big task. There are a lot of silos. Is it methodological? Is it which countries we're talking about? There's a bunch of ways that could be approached. And obviously, yes, you want to do it, but you don't want to write a book that's like, I don't know, thousands and thousands and thousands of chapters. There is sort of some amount of limit that has to be put in place. So how, within these goals that you sketched out for us, did you all approach the project and decide that framing was going to be a key concept to enact some of these goals?
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C
I think that's a good question. So I think we went around for a while before we settled on what kind of terminology was going to give us the flexibility to do what we wanted. So we were using words like perception or outlook or experience. And I think we ultimately settled on framing because it seemed like a relatively accessible way for people to be able to examine some of the themes that we were concerned to talk about on different levels while still using a kind of common register. I guess readers will be able to determine whether that has. Has necessarily kind of worked. But I think that the challenges that you mention are very material ones and are probably worth us unpacking a bit, because in certain respects this book is a testament to how far the historiography of the First World War has come in the previous 20, 30, 40 years. The fact that we were able to recruit people to write chapters on all of the major belligerents was, you know, is a fantastic testament to how much amazing work has been done and continues to be done on so many different facets of the war. But at the same time, I suppose you could make the criticism of what we've accomplished in the book that could it have been more comparative if we were trying to find ways of making people explicitly bring the national or imperial context that they are primarily familiar with into communication with multiple others of those. But that is just such a hard thing to do. In terms of the practicalities of achieving it. Because how frequently is it that you have people that are able to have the resources, whether that's financial, economic, linguistic, institutional, to be able to do archival research in 3, 4, 5 different countries, to be able to be simultaneously familiar with all of those historiographies, and to be able to then really fluently kind of make a case about how different contexts may relate to one another. So I guess in many respects, I think that what we've sort of achieved is kind of like a. A first. A first step down the direction that we were hoping to go in. And we're really thrilled with how many fantastic contributors we were able to engage in that and. And with what they produced. But it. It really speaks to the challenge, I guess, of operationalizing some of the intellectual consequences of kind of what. What we've been thinking about and I guess the agenda that's been laid out by some of the pioneering works in. In First World word war studies as a whole.
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E
I think also that when we settled on the framing idea, it was because that seemed like the best way of finding something that expressed that sort of nexus between perception and thought and action. Because a lot of the discussions we were having around this project stemmed from that kind of place of trying to really. And it's a bit of a fool's errand in some respects, but really trying to get into the minds of the people and the groups that we wanted to look at in a more meaningful way than we had been able to hitherto, I think. Does that sound about right?
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D
Yeah, I think that's probably fair. And I think the use of framing as a concept is. I think it enabled us to do a lot of different things. So it enabled us to kind of reframe things that people might have already known or to, you know, unframe particular moments, particular theaters, for instance. So in the book, we were really keen to expand the coverage beyond quite sort of Western front, Eurocentric conceptions of the First World War. So actually being able to move that frame to incorporate other perspectives, I think was really important and something I know collectively, obviously, we're really proud of in the book. But I think thinking about framing, it enables us to reflect on the object of the study, so the particular, you know, focus of our chapters, but also the activity of. Of writing history itself. So I think it was. It's quite a lively frame to use. And as. As David said, you know, it's for our readers to determine how successful we've deployed that. But I suppose to pick up on a second point which you touched on there, Miranda, about maybe some of the challenges of trying to break down those silos without being sort of in politic. Here is actually some of the challenges we encountered publishing the book as well, in that talking to particular editors of lists this view that they quite liked the cultural history part of it, but maybe weren't too keen on the military history part. And we had obviously vice versa with some editors very keen on the military history, maybe be less so on in the cultural side of things. So I think, as Dave puts out, this is, you know, an initial sort of indicative first step, one that we hope will generate far more, you know, productive dialogue between these sub disciplines. But it feels that, you know, the at least the publishing side of things is, you know, finds maybe that sub disciplinary conversation a little bit harder to sort of listen to at the moment.
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C
I think that political economy is a worthwhile one. So we should obviously thank the fantastic support that we got from Joyce Harrison at Kansas, who really got what we were trying to do as soon as we spoke to them about it and gave us a lot of support and backing that we're very, very appreciative of. I guess another thing worth mentioning though is that when you deal with a subject like the First World War, so much has been written that is obviously not true to say that people have not considered the issue of how the ways that certain groups thought might have shaped aspects of the war. So, you know, most people listen to this broadcast will probably be familiar with some of or all of of what I'm about to say. But whether you're talking about James Joel's classic idea of like unspoken assumptions or the history of mentalities or whatever it might be, there is so much scholarship that has touched upon, explored in particular ways many of these kind of subjects that we wanted to recognize the debt that we paid to important things that informed what we did. But to differentiate what we were seeking to do maybe from some of the approaches, assumptions, techniques that those previous scholars had used in their work as well. So I guess there's an element of seeking to build upon some of what has gone before in profitable ways, but without necessarily adopting the full implications or lexicon that might have been necessary if we wanted to take a more sort of mentalities based approach, for instance, that.
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B
All makes a lot of sense. Mike, is there anything you want to add?
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E
No, I was just going to. On Dave's point, it's also quite interesting because that goes right to the heart of even how we had to begin introducing the book in the first place. Part of what you end up unraveling with these kind of things is the ways in which actually, you know, attempts to try and grapple with the enormity of the subject have been ongoing. And like attempts by. By historians to try and think about, well, not just think about, but to practice history in a very expansive way, mean inevitably that we end up having to even begin the book by talking about things that are happening in the era of the First World War itself. So, you know, like, to Dave's point, it's not. It's. It's certainly not the case that we're not aware of the fact that actually there's been an ongoing struggle, if you like, amongst some groups of historians trying to grapple with the. The enormity and strive for a sort of total way of incorporating the war into history as much as there has been in terms of how historians have tried to think about how you encapsulate the. The history of war in the practice of the discipline.
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B
Right, so I think that gives us a bunch of things then to discuss more specifically with some of the chapters. Right. I think we've got a good sense now of kind of the overarching goals and why they're needed in the discipline. So that's really helpful to kind of understand what you're aiming to do and why it matters. That's always a good start. So I'm going to pick out, I suppose, some of the points from various chapters I think we can discuss. Obviously, some of these are chapters you wrote, some of which are ones that others contributed to. So we'll see how this all sort of develops. But thinking about, for instance, Britain and France and what they're doing in this approach to World War I. Mike, to take you up on the point that the book isn't just about kind of once the war starts, but sort of the wider context around it. Britain and France obviously have a really long history. Even before that, there's all sorts of entanglements between them, which isn't. Isn't always something I think we have in looking at the immediate approach to the conflict. How does focusing on those entanglements, whether that's kind of old military history directly or that sort of imperial competition, how does adding that understanding to the sort of lead up to the war change maybe our understanding of kind of how they relate to each other at this key moment?
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E
I suppose. I mean, I was thinking about this in terms of if I was to try and simplify that one as much as possible in a Sense, I'm not sure it fundamentally reshapes our understanding of what then happened, but it helps us to better understand how that could have taken place. I mean, some of this, it comes also from places and. And other pieces of work that I've done that have been in that realm of thinking about imperial dynamics and imperial interactions and the way in which actually there's elements of sort of cooperation as well as competition happen at the same time. But I suppose in a broad sense, one of the things I think with respect to the chapter that Dave and I wrote is that understanding these kind of entanglements and even ways in which there's kind of a sort of compatibility in the way that the elements of the British and French militaries and navies actually thought about things, you know, it doesn't have to override the competitive element between the two nations, but it can still be something that helps us to understand how they get to a place of, you know, concordance, ultimately, that if you understand that there are actually even bound up within a broader national and imperial rivalry, there are elements between the two that provide some kind of sympathetic grounding, if you like, even if it's just on an intellectual level, then it becomes easier ultimately to see why you have two nations on a path towards convergence.
- [24:15]
C
Yeah, I guess what was in our thoughts, in kind of writing this chapter was. I think this subject matter is one of the ways in which you can see ideas about culture being present in the history of war and the history of strategy, in the sense that there's an idea that particular nations or potentially particular empires have culturally distinct forms of practice or ways of thinking about warfare or conflict. And Mike is very interested in one of the key movers in that debate in the British context, who's Basil Little Heart, whose work in the 1920s, 1930s and afterwards really generates the basis of an idea that has now gone on to inform the kind of notion of strategic culture within strategic studies, that there are particularly specific, culturally rooted ways in which different nations, particularly Britain and the continent, think about and prosecute war. And this is an idea that's very present in the First World War scholarship, in debates about what might be referred to in Anglophone literature as, like, continentalism. The idea that Britain should make a particular form of military intervention in Europe or potentially should not do that. And I guess what we were seeking to do really is to try and challenge the coherence of that idea. The idea that being a particular nation, a member of a particular nation, a citizen of a particular nation, makes you think about war in a particular way is something that didn't really coincide with. With our understanding about what actually informs the way that people think about war, the way that people make strategy. And Mike's background relates more to kind of irregular warfare in imperial contexts. Mine relates more to kind of maritime approaches to conflict. And those are two particular areas that we kind of brought together, I think, to make a challenge to that idea that there is a kind of coherent British or continental or Clause Mitzian or otherwise way of war that was dominant in shaping what approaches the two sides then went on to take in the First World War. And I think Mike's probably going to want to say more about this. But speaking to the wider themes of the book, I think it's one of the ways in which the history of war and cultural history, there are ideas about culture that are very present in the history of war, but not in ways that would be credited as coherent by a cultural historian. In the same way that there are particular ideas about war and strategy that may manifest in cultural history that would not necessarily coincide with mainstream opinion amongst people primarily interested in war. And I think we were trying to drive at that kind of delta, as it were.
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E
It's interesting because part of this as well, none of this is to deny that there weren't sort of national elements to some of this thinking. I don't think we were trying to sort of say none of that counts. We're trying to produce a more complex picture. But one of the things that doing that, doing the work involved in this actually kind of shoulders the way in which the. When, you know, Dave's talking about the deep impact that sort of ideas of people like Little Heart have had, particularly in the British sphere, it kind of makes you realize when you're actually doing the legwork for it, how deeply ingrained some of those ideas even within yourself as a researcher, because they can lead you in certain directions. You know, you, you, you. If you've already got these, these leading ideas in your mind, then, you know, you may be more inclined to miss some of the evidence that points in slightly different directions, which is often kind of hard to find because it, you know, but once you start to look for it is kind of there, especially when we, we're talking about the, you know, things. Things that I know better in terms of things like the imperial stuff, where there's this notion that empires are just purely about rivalry. But if you look at the agents of imperialism themselves, and this is known, you know, beyond, like beyond the, the military sphere, there's a fair amount of really interesting research about there, about the ways that there are trans. Imperial networks between, you know, British Empire, French Empire, that kind of stuff. But even right down to the level of who's reading what in this, in this particular era and the way that if you dig into the, the sources and the examples that are being used to support something like Caldwell's Small wars, you know, the, the late 19th century, early 20th century compendium of colonial warfare for the British, that actually it's replete with foreign examples. I mean, Alexander Morrison wrote a really good article about the Russian examples, but the French examples within Caldwell's book are, you know, just as a common, if not perhaps even more so, I think.
- [29:55]
B
I mean, I think this is obviously something we could talk about for hours, but there are other chapters of the book. So I want to move our conversation perhaps towards other aspects of these questions of kind of what sorts of ideas are being shaped around sort of the role of the military. Right. This is of course to some extent military history. Though obviously, as you mentioned, you're doing lots of things with expanding out and not, not fitting into silos. But these questions of kind of what is the military supposed to be and do, and what are soldiers within it supposed to be and do? Especially given with World War I, so many of the combatants had other roles in society. Right. They joined up for the war, but they weren't necessarily going to be your lifelong soldiers sort of before and after. So what sorts of ideas do we see discussed in the book around kind of what it means to be a soldier and a good citizen, or what it means to be a doctor and save life, but also then be part of the military? Like those all look like they could be kind of contradictions that need to be sorted out. So what sorts of ideas are we talking about here?
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D
I might have a first pass at that question. As you say, like it's.
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B
It.
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D
It operates, I think for me on, on multiple levels. So the military organization itself and of course the individuals within that, and I think something that seemed to come through in several chapters is what we might call the informal organization of the military. So the things that are maybe not captured in your wiring diagrams in your hierarchies, for example. So certainly my own chapter in the book, which looked at gossip, was thinking about the very notion of how do we draw parameters around the military organization? How can we problematize those? Because as you say, you know, the military organization is, is part of society, but in some respects is seen as apart from society. So how do we try and, you know, render porous or diffuse the edges of that in order to actually, you know, explain and explore how individuals operate within it and without it. And so I think that ucl, Yannick Dauf's chapter on some of the military literature in the Ottoman army, this idea of a military nation, is a really good example of some of this. Like how do you create soldiers as such? And of course, Alina Enzensberger's chapter on German doctors, that idea of the, I suppose, civilianization of the German military medical authority. So I think there's something really interesting here in about the interplay between the military and society, but also individuals within the military organization itself.
- [32:44]
C
Yeah, maybe, just maybe just to add to that, I think this was one of the ways in which we thought that framing was an interesting way to open up the discussion about the variety of thought that was present within and around militaries and what forms of thought were kind of valued and mattered to the ways in which what Horner first it was causal history, then kind of played out because I think it's quite easy to, I suppose, think about the knowledge that matters to militaries is basically being knowledge about war, about how to be a manager of violence on behalf of the state. But actually, in many ways, existing forms of military knowledge were profoundly challenged by the First World War. And it was a continual feature of civil military relations that military claims to authority were predicated upon the idea that they had some sort of. Of zone of professional expertise within which their views should be listened to, I. E. War. But increasingly there were so many other aspects that the war touched on, whether that was the production of food, the mobilization of society, the management of transport, where they were highly relevant to military contexts. But the military really did not have a firm grasp or a solid basis of expertise to manage those things. And on the flip side, those areas that you might think were the realm in which the military and its knowledge kind of regimes reigned supreme were actually really heavily shaped by a series of ideas that could really not accurately be described as military knowledge at all. So you will see lots of comments and reflections in kind of high level military policy documents about the war that would be of massive interest to, for instance, a gender historian, a historian of youth, all sorts of social history in the sense that they reflect ideas about what the basis of masculine virtue is, about what the relative role of or how to define a citizen within the nation, and how service in the military should correspond to that. And a whole set of ideas about the future of the nation and how we should potentially conduct the war with a view to preserving, improving, supporting that. So there's all sorts of ideas that are very politically consequential that are really just the ways in which people see the world. And they might be adjacent to something you might think about in terms of expertise, but they are not really expertise. And I think that framing was a really interesting way of kind of opening that discussion up and, and seeing the world of the military as a much more diversified, interesting, poly vocal kind of contested space. In many ways it is sort of microcosm of society, but also sort of not. There are people who identify very strongly on the basis of being a professional soldier, but increasingly as the war goes on, there are not. Soldiers have lots of ideas about politics. They have often very bad ideas about things like economics or how these various things that might shape the conduct of the war might work. But that kind of whole breadth of outlook was something that we were trying to really access within this. And I think those chapters that Amy mentioned, particularly by Alina and you still really spoke to those themes really vibrantly.
- [36:51]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Lots of questions around the polyvocal and kind of who gets to be in charge of information? Right. Who gets to have a perspective and thought. So definitely that chapter is relevant. But Amy, can we talk a little bit more about the gossip chapter please? And how this fits into kind of questions around like how contribution behaviours and militaries are framed and thought about, like yeah, obviously things like official training and drill sergeants yelling at you, but there's other stuff going on.
- [37:20]
D
Right, yeah, thank you, Miranda. I mean, I suppose to be a little bit self indulgent, maybe I'll take you on a little journey as to how I got to this point. So my previous or at least past research project focused on notions of organizational learning, specifically in the British army in the First World War. And a key part of that for me was what we might call informal or non formal learning. So as you point out, we have, have training pamphlets, we have doctrine, but we also have those, you know, conversations that might happen, whether that's on a training course or because you served in the same regiment. So those, those forms and modes of exchange were really important in my past project. But for me I was thinking a little bit more about, well, what about something like gossip, you know, why, what stops us or what prevents us from thinking about gossip or taking gossip seriously as a form of sense making, as a form of learning and indeed as a form of military knowledge in and of itself. So those were some of the Sort of imperatives and the driving questions behind that. And you know, to be frank, gossiping is just like everyone does it, right? It's a guilty pastime. We all do it, unsurprisingly, military officers and soldiers do it as well. But I think what was really striking to me was how dismissed and underrated and undervalued gossip has been. And that is partly due to the challenges of identifying it and actually finding it, because it's never supposed to be written down, because it can be compromising. But also this, I think, in military history more generally, almost a kind of a preoccupation with, with the tangible, with the archive, with things that are perhaps less ephemeral. So that's kind of how I got to this. But in terms of thinking about gossip as a frame, I think for me it does three things, really. So I think thinking with gossip enables us to reframe the very nature of the military organization. So as I mentioned in a previous contribution, it actually renders quite porous the boundaries of this organization. It requires us to reframe who that organization includes and excludes. But I think gossip also reveals to us what I refer to as the unmanaged spaces of the military organization, the power of corridors, as it were, where all of those that tittle tattle is being exposed. So there's a really important sort of spatial and organizational element to this, but there's also one about how it enables us to reframe military power. So where military power lies not just in military organizations, of course, and I think this is where some of the really important work in, say, feminist international relations and critical military studies has come in, is how domestic sites and individuals who might operate predominantly in the private or the domestic realm are also sites or reproducing military power. So it shows that something like this cannot be confined. And so I think using something as everyday as it were, as gossiping can actually invite us to ask quite wide ranging, deep questions about the very nature of power and organizations.
- [40:59]
B
I think these questions about kind of how organisations function and how knowledge is transmitted are absolutely fascinating. And do in that sort of conception make a lot of sense, right? Because as you said, everyone gossips, right? So like, of course, we should be thinking about what happens in the corridor when people pass each other and that having an impact in many ways, because kind of we know those spaces have to exist, right? Like we know regardless of which military headquarter building people were hiding in, that these interactions would definitely have been happening. So we should definitely, you know, factor that into our Thinking. David, is there something you want to add?
- [41:36]
C
I think this might be a point where the fact that all of us have worked for periods in military education is kind of relevant or helpful because very frequently statements would be made that would start to the effect of do you know person X in place Y or have you spoken to whoever? Or just the ways in which one would observe even information that was inaccurate. Very often relating to something like an essay or a word count or a deadline or something like that could spread like wildfire through a body of students. It kind of opens up a window, I think, think into just seeing the incredibly human quality of any organization and many of the sort of serendipitous but incredibly powerful ways in which non formal forms of communication, knowledge management, information sharing have really impactful roles that can be very, very beneficial in the sense that they develop a shorthand, they speed things, they cut around corners, but can also be problematic in various ways as well, whether that's because they are exclusionary, inaccurate, connected to particular cliques, whatever it might be. So I guess maybe that's an area where kind of our shared experience might have contributed that. I don't know if Mike has any thoughts about that.
- [43:08]
E
Yeah, obviously I would agree with what Dave's saying. I think also it's worth dwelling on not just the informality, but the stuff that Amy's also alluded to in terms of the gendered aspects of military thinking and like what, what this kind of work can do to open up vistas and also to. To ram home the point that actually there are things within this informal world, whether it's to do with colleagues or husbands and wives and those kind of things that actually, it reinforces that these are actually like valid and actually important parts of things that are incorporated into things to do with, with, you know, how, how professional, how intellectual things actually get thought of that are, you know, the endeavor is worth it because they, they add so many elements to what could easily become quite a thin, you know, absent these things, quite a thin understanding of, you know, what are the sort of the repositories of military thought, if you like.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah, and I think we can actually take that a few steps further. Right. Because the implication of what we've been mentioning is that these are important things to understand within how a military works. Right. Within the British military or within the French or whatever. But in the book, I mean, yes, that's part of it, but we do go beyond that. To look at interactions, including these informal ones between militaries, even during the actual war is happening. And that might seem, seem more surprising because we may not be thinking about kind of, well, how are French and Russian soldiers? They're not walking in the same corridors, are they? How are they sort of encountering each other? Or the US is all the way across the ocean, how are they involved in this? And kind of what leads different militaries to be better or worse at learning from each other in this sort of context? The Habsburg army doesn't turn up particularly well in the book. Right. Whereas the Italians are trying to switch around which side they're on. So can we extend this discussion around sort of formal and informal learning and how it functions within militaries to talk about it between militaries as well?
- [45:22]
E
Yeah.
- [45:22]
C
So I think, I think Amy probably has some thoughts about the learning dimensions of it, but I think there's maybe a couple of ways in which this connects or connected in our mind quite powerfully to widely things we were seeking to achieve in the book. So I guess the chapters we have that are relevant to this are a fantastic chapter from Sofia and Isimova about Franco Russian interactions. Brian Lynn and Mark Groenichen wrote about the U.S. army and Vander Wilcox wrote a fantastic chapter about the Italians observing the first 10 to 12 months of the war before they became to participate in it. And I suppose I think it highlights a couple of things that are really resonant and interesting. The first of which is just what a cosmopolitan space militaries are in the sense that they are constantly encountering and responding to the outside world in a huge range of ways. Whether that's observing through things like attaches or military observers, whether that's reading different manuals, whether that's studying different campaigns. And so almost the starting off point of seeing a military through a primarily national lens, all the more so in the age of imperial warfare, is maybe an assumption that it's worth challenging from the start, not necessarily to overturn the idea that the nation is irrelevant. I think Yusof's chapter is a really interesting counterpoint to that. But the idea that that information is flowing very freely, I think is one that we should, we should definitely sort of embrace. And I guess a second one is that I think these chapters speak really interestingly to the the limits of understanding military organizations solely or primarily from the perspective of the right ideas. So many of these armies encountered what we, with the benefit of hindsight, would look to see as quite obvious problems, something like trench warfare or how to organize a defensive line in the First World War, and came up with solutions that retrospectively appear difficult to, to explain. And we're obviously a long way past a historiography that just critiques those military people as being inadequate generals or as having intellectual limitations that precluded them from being able to see these things that were obvious. But what's almost so interesting in a number of these chapters is what all of the barriers to making changes, even when you have quite a clear, clear sighted view of a problem might be. But also the diversity of ideas that exist within militaries about how and why something may or may not work in a particular context, even if it's worked somewhere else. And I think it kind of speaks to almost like in the history of innovation, the majority of innovations go nowhere or fail. In the history of military ideas, we probably treat ideas that were not adopted, were ignored or failed in a particular set of ways. And perhaps unfairly because many of the ideas that are kind of touched upon or established in these chapters played a really major role in shaping how these armed forces behaved.
- [49:07]
D
It's supposed to build on that to kind of go from the macro to the Microsoft is thinking about, particularly Alex Watson's chapter, Vander's chapter and Sophia's chapter. You know, these are three militaries, the Habsburgs, Russian and the Italian militaries that have not had a particularly great reputation when it comes to, you know, military effectiveness, for want of a better word. And I think there's a really interesting point here about which military experiences we use as case studies or as whether we call them as success stories that have featured as our exemplars. And overwhelmingly in the scholarship on military learning, particularly in the First World War, the focus has very much been on the British army. And there's a whole point here about why navies and air forces aren't necessarily included in there. This, but of course also the German army. So this idea that it was this incredibly effective learning organization but you know, somehow still managed to, to lose the First World War. So I think these three chapters, I mean all of the chapters are wonderful, right? But as some of you works on learning, you know, these are really offering a point of, of difference. But yet there are, as, as Dave's alluded, there are commonalities of experience. When we look at these three chapters and including I suppose here, Brian and Mark's chapter on the US army, when we look at them alongside each other, we can see recurring themes, things like how sticky right or contextual specific experiences and knowledge are, how actually they resist translation. And that can be, you know, translation as understood literally as Sophia points out, you know, particular words not necessarily being translated very well between forms French and Russian, but the stickiness in terms of geographical context, how the situation on the Western front is very different to that on the Eastern front. And I think a couple of things that come out in Alex's chapter on the Habsburgs, but also in Sophia's as well, is what we might call notions of prestige. So what does it mean for your military to have to adopt practices from another foreign power, as it were? How much can your national pride and prestige tolerate without it looking like you're subordinating your intellectual thought and ideas to another nation? And I think Alex makes that point really well in terms of how towards the end of the war, when German military officers take greater control over the Habsburg army's tactical doctrine, is actually this intellectually hamstrings, or they become intellectually hamstrung by stormtroop tactics, for instance, that are imported from the German army into the Habsburg. So there's some really, really interesting dynamics that perhaps when we think about learning in just purely national silos, we don't necessarily see the similarities that are at.
- [52:14]
E
Play between them, I think also, I mean, this is going to sound like a pretty basic point, but what these chapters tend to show as well is the. They sort of dispel the notion that no one's really trying. Like, there's such enormity of effort. You often see across these national examples of actually trying in a very genuine way to get to grips with the problem, even if you don't end up in a place where you get the right solution. And there are other things besides, you know, things to do with just. I think they give us a better vista for trying to think about the perennial challenges of trying to turn a vision into reality within the cause of a conflict. Or, for example, the one that springs to mind on this is Vanda's chapter as well, thinking about the enormity of the individual challenges, of the national challenges faced by specific countries in the case of some of a country like Italy, but that spent all of this time prior to the First World War, basing all of its plans around fighting against a country that then becomes its ally, and having to then fundamentally reorient the way that its military thinks about what it's going to do and how it's going to do it as well, within a very short space of time.
- [53:34]
B
Yeah, there's lots of really interesting things around interactions and learning in many chapters of the book, so I'm glad we got to highlight that aspect of it. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to talk about every chapter in the book, but I do perhaps, as a final discussion point on it, want to make sure we don't quite fall into the trap. Amy, I believe you just mentioned of kind of ignoring the naval side of World War I. So can we talk maybe a little bit about the processes of naval blockades during the conflict and how that changed sort of the way that naval blockades as a tool were maybe framed going forward?
- [54:09]
C
Yeah. So I think one of the forms of diversity that we were keen to pursue in the book was at least bringing some of the maritime into the war. Because I think very frequently, I think you could say this about debates about military learning. It's a very army centered discussion. But in many aspects of the war, the war sea has proven kind of like stubbornly peripheral and really, where it appears, is often connected to this word called blockade. Right. And so we have a pair of chapters by Gabrielle Lefray and Louis Haylewood, both of whom are kind of leading the way in deepening and broadening our understanding of what we might actually be talking about when we use this word blockade. But again, to link us back to core themes of the book, I think blockade really is one of the ways in which there's so much profit to be drawn between bringing the military, the social and cultural history of the war together in these ways. Because at almost every level, the debate about the blockade is much more about representation and experience than it is about any serious attempt to grapple with the causality of it. So the blockade is a hotly contested political issue at the time, with it becoming essentially a metaphor for should Britain and France prosecute the war more vigorously by clamping down on this thing called a blockade that is apparently available. And it then becomes a really central part of the debates that we've already alluded to in the 1920s and 1930s in the hands of people like Little Hart, who make economic warfare central to their idea about perhaps how Britain could or should have conducted its strategy during the war and as connected to that argument, actually say, really it was economic warfare that ultimately won out. And that blockade was central to that. And Louis and Gabrielle are both, in a variety of places, have made some really valuable contributions about how this shaped ideas about world order and international politics into the 1920s and 1930s. People begin to come up with ideas to link this idea of a kind of the international sanction of blockade to nascent projects of international order like the League of Nations, and see this as A kind of. Of the tool of sanctions is basically a way to enforce measures of international cooperation and ultimately of world peace. The problem with all of this is that it is based upon perceptions really. We still lack any good understanding about even things like the casualties that were caused by the blockade. Some really important research by Mary Cox, amongst others, came out during the centenary that calculated infant mortality in Germany. But we still lack an overall understanding about many aspects of the blockade. And I guess this is an area where even the causal history of the war, in the sense of military history has really not been successfully integrated with other forms of causal history of the war, particularly the economic history of it, in the sense that we really know surprisingly little about how actually what we refer to as the blockade caused effects in the war via which mechanisms and how that actually happened. So there's a really major new international project going on about the blockade that I think is going to be extremely profitable by bringing some of these issues of perception, representation, propaganda together with that more kind of economic history approach to it. But I think both these contributions speak to that. As to some of the other work, I don't know if you have any thoughts, Mike, on the kind of interwar way this is written because it comes so central to some of Little Heart's contributions to this.
- [58:15]
E
Well, yeah, the only thing I really was going to say was it's sort of basil striking again, really, isn't it? I mean, I'm tempted to say that it's. It's one of those things that, you know, hinges on a way that that kind of Little Heart inflected understanding of the First World War is seductive because it simplifies something that, as Dave's pointing out is, and Dave obviously knows this in huge amounts of detail, is vastly more complex. Complex than actually those sort of guiding notions suggest. But I don't have much to say beyond what you did, Dave.
- [58:58]
B
I mean, it sounds like this is very much an area of further research to kind of pay attention to, which is always intriguing. Right. We love to know kind of what's coming next. So I think that's in fact a good place for me to ask my final question of each of you, which is what each of you might be working on now that this massive collection and project is out in the world. Anything on your desks you'd like to give us a sneak preview of?
- [59:22]
C
I guess maybe building off there, off the last answer. So I'm currently. I think it's probably dangerous for any historian to use a word like finishing or finished or completing work on or. I. I am coming to what I aspire to be the final stages of work on a book about sea power in the First World War that tries to examine some of the aspects of how the sea matters to Britain in the First World War that were not the blockade. So it's much more concerned with how Britain used the sea in the First World War, kind of bringing together some of those interests in maritime history and the history of strategy and say. The chapters that we were just discussing have been very generative for me in thinking about the.
- [60:12]
E
That project, I should say I've read some of the drafts for that as well, and it's very impressive.
- [60:18]
B
Well, then, Mike, I think you volunteered yourself to go next on Future.
- [60:21]
E
Yeah, I feel like we've all sort of, in one way or another, alluded to where we're sort of heading in the context of the answers that we've already given to some of these questions. And Dave keeps nudging me towards Little Heart, and the reason for that is because I'm myself falling into the trap of becoming overly interested in Little Heart. So I. I'm working on a. A book project which is. I'm a little bit hesitant to say too much and give too much away at this point, but it's about the legacy of Little Heart and the creation of that legacy. It's sort of quasi biographical, I guess you could call it. So, yeah, it's been very interesting. I'm so deep in the research and in writing on that one.
- [61:13]
B
Well, that sounds cool. Amy, what about you?
- [61:16]
D
Mike's getting super modest. So we've had many conversations with Mike about his project, and I think what he's trying to do is intellectually just really ambitious and just incredibly interesting. So we're all waiting with bated breath for more draft work to look over. Yes. Might refer to what he's doing as kind of like a quasi biography, I suppose. My current book project is very sort of squarely in what I would call collective biography. I'm owning biography here as a historian. I'm reclaiming it is writing a collective biography of four military couples in what Robert Gerwarth and there, as Manella would call sort of the greater war chronology. So going back to 1909, 10, and then all the way through to the early 1920s. And, you know, I have. I suppose one can always be, you know, a little bit difficult to refer to something as a complete archive, but having correspondence from both husbands and wives and also children, so actually trying to, if not write a total history, at least trying to bring together as we've discussed in the book book some of those themes around intimacy, empire, military organizations, learning and weaving those through this kind of collective story and gossip is not too far away either but yeah maybe that's a project for a few years time.
- [62:47]
B
Well it certainly sounds like you are all keeping very busy and sort of intellectually ambitious and making interesting contributions is clearly a theme including in the book we've been discussing. So while you are all off working on those projects listeners can get into all the topics we've covered and the ones we didn't quite manage to fit in without obviously taking 12 hours of your time or something like that. So for any listeners who want more the book is titled Framing the First World How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict published by the University Press of Kansas in 2025. Mike Amy David thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [63:24]
C
Thanks Miranda.
- [63:25]
D
Thanks Miranda.
- [63:27]
E
Thank you very much.