Reviewed by Barbara Taylor.
To understand how and why the First World War started it essential to understand how the regimes of the main empires involved operated. The Emperors, Gareth Russell’s first non-fiction book, tells of the protocols and administrations in the three autocratic monarchies; Germany, Austria and Russia.
Russell’s work shows that these three nations lacked diplomatic ability and judgement. None had recognised how industrialisation and urbanisation had changed the attitudes of the workers, many of whom had swapped agricultural life for the cities and, now, demanded greater rights.
Once you start reading this book, it is so easy to see disaster lurking around the corner, particularly after 1870. Russell asserts that the fall of the monarchies destabilised Europe after ‘centuries of stability’. Here the causes of the Great War are writ large in an enlightening, if unchallenging, book.
The Emperors: How Europe’s Rulers were destroyed by The First World War by Gareth Russell
Amberley Publishing, 2015, £9.99, 227pp, soft covers; illustrated plus notes, bibliography and index. Also available in hardback.