#Napoleon total war the great war plus

In 1916 the Central Powers were joined by Bulgaria and the Allies were joined by a second wave of countries including Italy, Portugal and Romania (though Italy defaulted on its treaty obligations).

#Napoleon total war the great war plus

In 1914 the Triple Entente of the UK, France, and Russia was augmented by Serbia and Japan plus the British and French colonies and Dominions, while the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany were joined by the Ottoman Empire. Quality is measured by GDP per capita expressed in international dollars at 1990 prices. Table 1 shows how the balance of resources between the Allies and the Central Powers changed over time, taking account of quality as well as quantity. For Britain, control of the vast but impoverished territory of India mattered little compared with access to the rich markets of the US.Р”Р„llies versus Central Powers: The quantity and quality of resources, 1914-1918 Richer countries were able to mobilise production, public finance, soldiers, and weapons in disproportion to their economic size the level of development acted as a multiplier of size.

The main factor in quality was the level of peacetime development, which can be measured by the average real income per capita. He sees the Allies as squandering their advantage through mismanagement, with economic factors only coming into play after much time had passed.Р”В«ut the quality as well as the quantity of national resources mattered. He also concludes that given the scale of their advantage, the Allies should have won quickly. Ferguson (1998) argues that given the overwhelming size advantage of the Allies in terms of population and production in 1914, the outcome of World War I was inevitable. Some economic historians stress the importance of size. The Total War era lasted only between 19, after which point it became impossible again as nuclear weapons made devastating military force available to any small rich or large poor country. Too many people were required to labour in the fields and workshops just to feed and clothe the population, and it cost too much for government officials to count, tax, and direct them into mass combat. Before 1914, Total War was not possible because people lived much closer to subsistence. In these circumstances of РІР‚Вtotal warРІР‚в„ў, numbers of men and the volume of supplies played the decisive role (Chickering and FР“В¶rster 2000).

In WWI, multi-million man armies took the field and remained there for years, giving and taking appalling losses without disintegrating. Leadership and psychology clearly did matter, but less so than in previous eras. The opposition between cold figures and hot blood is to some extent false.

Military historians object that this leaves no room for factors such as leadership, discipline, heroism, or villainy. They emphasise things like numbers of tanks, guns, ships, airplanes and ammunition, or aggregate indices of munitions production. How much power do economic factors have in deciding the struggle for global power? To explain the outcome of WWI economic historians stress the increasingly mechanised nature of warfare, waged for years on end by massed forces.