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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered

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

Schroeder, Paul W.

Paperback

General European HistoryInternational RelationsWorld War I

Publisher Price: $26.95

ISBN10: 1836745567
ISBN13: 9781836745563
Publisher: Verso
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 384
Weight: 0.70
Height: 1.11 Width: 5.11 Depth: 7.71
Language: English
'How had the world by 1914 become susceptible to a disastrous systemic breakdown? The one American historian who rose to this analytical challenge was Paul Schroeder. These historical insights have an obvious urgency today'

Nicholas Mulder, Financial Times

Stealing Horses to Great Applause is arguably the finest consideration yet of the origins of the First World War. Breaking with accounts focusing on the actions of a single state or the final countdown to hostilities, Paul W. Schroeder analyzes the systemic crisis that engulfed the Great Powers in 1914. Increasingly, they had become more interested in colonial expansion abroad ('stealing horses to great applause', in the old Spanish adage) than in the traditional conventions of European peacemaking. They forgot the rule that a balance of power required the preservation of all its essential actors, including the weakest of them, Austria-Hungary. This the British too failed to heed. The Central Powers may have started the war, but that does not mean they in any real sense caused it.

Stealing Horses includes appraisals of Niall Ferguson and A. J. P. Taylor as well as an extensive unpublished final work rethinking the First World War as 'the last eighteenth-century war'.

With an introduction by Perry Anderson.

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