Everyone who worked with memoirs, letters, and diaries of the First World War will have encountered how food, the lack thereof, the search for it, the skyrocketing prices, the difficult decisions made to obtain it, … occupied people's thinking on a day-to-day level. Hunger was a decisive experience for the people who lived through the Great War, changing the relations between people and communities, shaping the decision-making of state authorities, and contributing greatly to popular protest and revolution. Hunger, indeed, redrew the maps of Europe and the Middle East. This wonderful volume, edited by Mary Elisabeth Cox and Claire Morelon, centers the phenomenon and experience of hunger, demonstrating the countless ways in which “it restructured societies and reshaped the continent” (1).

Samuël Kruizinga sets the scene of a world economy that had been increasingly integrated in the years prior to the outbreak of the Great War; an integration that within a few days and weeks collapsed, leading to entire populations and economies previously dependent on food imports suddenly being cut off. To this came the policies of siege and blockade as Hew Strachan shows. Principally remembered for the Allied blockade of Germany, the chapter demonstrates the widespread, indeed, central, practice of blocking food supplies and the use of hunger as a weapon that in itself contributed to the totality of the war in which “distinction between munitions and food, and between combatants and non-combatants, were in a very real sense artificial” (71). All this forced European and Ottoman governments, both in belligerent and neutral countries to adjust their policies: they tried to purchase food, controlled production, introduced price ceilings and rationing regimes, altogether implementing policies that, as Francesco Frizzera shows, lasted well beyond the war and into the 1920s. These measures, of course, proved to be highly inadequate in responding to the depth of the crisis, forcing individuals in turn to develop their own strategies of survival. Citizens came to raise livestock and plant vegetables in their gardens and on their balconies, developed strategies for queuing for bread, went to the countryside to barter the family valuables for food, traded on the black market or even stole. Frederike Kind-Kovács demonstrates the profound erosion of society that came with this—collectively, as people were forced to compete for the little food that was available, in the relations to the state as police intervened sometimes violently, and individually through a loss of status and the “moral trauma” (135) experienced by law-abiding citizens suddenly forced into criminality to feed themselves and their families. To this came the quality of the food that for many came to be increasingly abysmal. Not only did people in many countries come to starve because of the war, but diets became increasingly worse—through shortages, substitution, and falsifications. Bread, the principal food for most , became “war bread” (in addition to similar sausages, soups, etc.) and almost inedible, making the entire experience of eating, once treasured, a horrendous experience that stuck with many throughout their lives. Food, and hunger, in fact, then came to take center stage in how people perceived themselves and their societies, the representation of them, as Nicholas Siekierski shows, offering a perspective for understanding people's experiences.

From these developments came deep erosions of societal cohesion and solidarity. A central part of this was the traditional blaming of rural citizens as responsible for the shortages by city dwellers and vice versa. Mary Elisabeth Cox convincingly shows that this was a myth. Rural citizens also suffered hunger and deprivation. Her chapter shows that “a civilian's ability to obtain food depended on access, and that physical location in a rural or urban area was not a guarantee of access. Wealth and social connections, which were not particular to one specific geography, were vital” (230). In addition to the urban-rural divide, deep societal conflicts emerged around access to food in all societies. As Claire Morelon shows: “The meaning of social class itself was thus in flux and threatened through wartime shortages.” (231) While workers and the poor suffered the most, many middle-class families experienced deep social decline that added to the hunger the shame and humiliation of queuing for bread or soup or bartering treasured status symbols, whereas minorities—principally Jews—were accused of hoarding and speculating, contributing greatly to the waves of anti-Jewish violence seen from the end of the war. People responded to these crises, as Melanie Schulze Tanielian and Mustafa Aksakal show, with petitions, protests, riots, and eventually revolution. Their chapter aligns the civic action of people with the degree to which hunger became unbearable and the expectations and disappointments vis-á-vis the governments.

The crisis of war and hunger also meant new ways for science to try to grapple with it, make sense of it, and prepare policy recommendations for governments. Joël Floris and Kaspar Staub analyze the efforts of scientists to measure hunger and need, whereas Mark Harrison studies the biological science of nutrition and hunger itself that went through rapid transformations during the First World War and its aftermath, shaping scientific understanding for decades. Stephen G. Wheatcroft then focuses on the famine in the Russian Empire and some other parts of Europe during the war and up to the early 1920s, showing regional differences in a country and region that for a long time had been one of the principal grain exporters on the continent. The hunger catastrophe of these years underwent different phases with respect to different localities and relations to food production and consumption. These famines were one of the main areas of humanitarian activism during the war and well into the interwar period. Indeed, as Ēriks Jēkabsons shows, “many of the international aid organizations that exist today had their genesis in the era of the First World War” (360). Relief activities, principally coming from the United States, were essential, not only for people's survival but also for political reasons, such as halting the spread of revolution, with the chapter showing the complexity of these many overlapping fields of motivations and interests. Finally, Mary Elisabeth Cox and Claire Morelon return to the December 1918 map that gave the book its title and cover, critically engaging with it as a prime example of “freezing the temporal into an intemporal form” (395), helping to organize relief work, visualizing hunger, need, and support, and at the same time shaping the image of Europe in the eyes of the relief activists who produced it.

It is rare to have an edited volume in which contributing chapters truly speak to one another in such an effective way. The chapters, while sometimes employing regional expertise and foci, are truly transnational in their perspectives, telling the story of war and hunger through a continent- and sometimes worldwide comparative lens. The chapters build on each other and together construct a coherent story and argument about hunger as a key factor in the remaking of European and Middle Eastern societies during the First World War and its aftermath. The book—and not only some individual chapters—will be standard reading for everyone wishing to understand the First World War and the tremendous changes it brought to the people, societies, and maps of Europe and the Middle East.