Stealing Horses to Great Applause The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered

Stand-out theoretical and empirical explanation of the origins of the First World War by one of the great historians of international diplomacy

Stealing Horses to Great Applause presents arguably the finest considerations yet of the origins of the First World War. Breaking with accounts which focus on the actions of a single state or the final countdown to hostilities, Paul W. Schroeder describes the systemic crisis engulfing the Great Powers.

They were more interested in colonial plunder overseas (stealing horses to great applause, in the old Spanish adage) than the traditional statecraft of European peace-making. Preserving the balance of power required preserving all the essential actors in it, including a tottering Austria-Hungary. This the British in particular failed to recognise. The Central Powers may have started the War but that does not mean they in any real sense caused it. In the end Schroeder recalls the verdict of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: All are punished.

Stealing Horses to Great Applause includes appraisals of Niall Ferguson and A. J. P. Taylor, and an extensive unpublished final paper rethinking the First World War as "the last 18th-century war."

With an introduction by Perry Anderson.

Paul W. Schroeder was professor of history and political science at the University of Illinois. His works included Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert and The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848. He died in 2020 at the age of 93. Verso is publishing two volumes of his writings, America Abroad and Stealing Horses to Great Applause.

Introduction, Perry Anderson

PART I
1. World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak
2. International Politics, Peace and War, 1815–1914
3. Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War
4. Stealing Horses to Great Applause: Austria-Hungary’s Decision in 1914 in Systemic Perspective
5. World War I and the Vienna System: The Last Eighteenth-Century War and the First Modern Peace

PART II
6. Romania and the Great Powers before 1914
7. Prudence vs Recklessness: Assessing Responsibility for World War I

PART III
8. World War I: A Tragedy, not a Pity
9. A. J. P. Taylor’s International System

Acknowledgments
Index