Book review

In blending economic, diplomatic and social history, Maartje Abbenhuis and Ismee Tames convincingly demonstrate that the gradual shift from a European war to a global conflict dramatically affected neutral states and communities alike, and subsequently destabilized their economies and everyday activities. Both historians show how the unfolding of the conflict reconfigured neutral societies’ perception of and reaction to the First World War. In doing so, the book distances itself from a Euro-centric (not to say Western-centric) analysis of the conflict. Far from claiming to offer a definitive global history of 1914-1918 (if such thing exists), the authors humbly but powerfully offer an indispensable historiographical contribution and impose themselves as thought-provocative European intellectuals.