Lectures

Final_BlackVisions_2018

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Prof John Horne

War as Revolution, 1904-1923

Thursday, 28 September 2017, 16.15, Ellen Wilkinson A3.7

At the end of the 18th century, Revolution (both in political thought and also in practice – in America and France) became a new, dominant category. It redefined much else, including War. Revolution has remained important. But in the early 20th century, the political, industrial and technological capacities of western societies combined in the capacity for conducting war on a hitherto inconceivable scale of violence. At its core, World War One was the revelation of this new reality, which explains why it unleashed the forces that helped shape the rest of the century. War became the new dominant category, and it redefined much else, including Revolution. Between the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and 1923, when the cycle of violence surrounding World War One finally ended, War had become the Revolution of the 20th century.

John Horne is currently Leverhulme Visting Professor of History at Oxford University. He is emeritus Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he was Professor of Modern European History until 2015, and the founder of the Centre for War Studies in 2007. A Member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is also on the Executive Board of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. He has written extensively on modern France and the transnational history of the Great War. Among his books are: (with Alan Kramer), German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven, Yale, 2001); (ed.) A Companion to World War One (Oxford, Blackwell-Wiley, 2010); (ed.) Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914-1915 (Paris, Tallandier, 2010); and with Robert Gerwarth, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is working currently on a history of the French experiences of the Great War.

Poster Casson Oct 2017-page-001