The aims of John H. Morrow's history of the First World War are grand: to mesh the military history of the war with the political, social, economic, and cultural (xi); to “broaden the knowledge of all readers”; and to provide them with “a new perspective on the war” (xiii). The book's rationale is essentially a dissatisfaction with other histories. They are too Eurocentric, neglecting what he calls the “imperial” element of the war; they are thematically or topically organized, compartmentalizing the war to the extent that the interrelatedness of total war is lost. What results is a book that has two broad-brush chapters, one on the origins of war and the other on the aftermath, and one chapter for each year of the war. These “war years” chapters each contain sections on the major theaters—Western Front; Eastern Front; Southwestern Front; “Ottoman Fronts,” including the Middle East, Africa, and the war at sea; and the Homefronts (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan, and the United States)—yes, all this in 323 pages!

Morrow's history is a rollicking ride through the war, yet by incorporating significant material on Africa and Africans, he expands the idea of the war beyond France and Europe. Indian troops too are reasonably prominent. This raises the question of what Morrow meant by an “imperial” history of the war. The notion of an “imperial history” calls for discussion of some length about what “imperialism” means in this context and how this approach might shed further light on a fairly well-trodden history. It is not possible to wave “imperial” in the faces of historians, especially cultural historians, and not be rigorously questioned about its use. A cynic might conclude from Morrow's book that in this context, “imperial” has simply been a matter of “add Africa/African and stir.” There are many questions of imperial relationships, the quest for suffrage, “national identity,” independence, and self-determination, as well as of the anxious postwar metropolis that were not addressed here. Morrow relies heavily on the excellent studies of Senegalese troops by Joe Lunn, and of Indian soldiers by David Omissi, and yet given the implicit intention of the book to highlight the colonial troops, a surprising omission is substantial reference to the British West Indies Regiment and the very useful studies of this regiment by Glenford Howe (which do not even appear in the bibliography). It was also curious to me, perhaps idiosyncratically, that while African-American troops were the focus of a large part of the sections on the United States, Native American troops were not mentioned at all, and yet one-third of all Native American men (not merely those who were eligible) enlisted.

Given the scope of the book and the necessity of covering the key military events, Morrow pays admirable attention to some of the nuances of class and race. He is careful, for example, to allow for some resentment of women on the part of upper-middle-class British soldiers, as reflected so memorably in the words of the war poets, but to also note that for the “mass of peasant soldiers” (174; and, as is demonstrated so ably in Joanna Bourke's work, for middle- and working-class soldiers) domesticity and womenfolk became the objects of yearning and the source of emotional sustenance. Glibness, however, is a hazard of this kind of text. The condensation of so much material necessitates skirting over complex and contested material. It inevitably leads to simplification and the perpetuation of myths. The oft-repeated idea that men from rural backgrounds made “naturally” better soldiers is repeated here (120–21) even though this has been debunked by a range of historians from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (whose national war myths rested on this idea), and although there is solid evidence that men from rural backgrounds were very often struck down with illness upon arriving in Europe because they had grown up in relatively isolated conditions. Glib generalizations and myths were particularly noticeable (perhaps owing to my familiarity with this area) in Morrow's treatment of women and gender more generally. The myth that all men were at the front and women, apart from some hardy nurses, were on the home front kept the line between soldiers and civilians firmly drawn in this book. All men were not soldiers, and indeed, the majority of men were not soldiers; the “home front” is not a given, especially in the French context where the word does not exist, but rather it is l’arrière (the rear); and one only has to peruse the rates of venereal disease among soldiers to see that the line between soldiers and civilians was so often crossed as to perhaps erase it.

Morrow has deftly summarized a large number of major works on the war. In doing so, readers, particularly students, can glimpse the wide variety of scholarship on aspects of the war. There is, for example, an aside about the composition of crowds who celebrated the outbreak of war and said farewell to the first contingents (38–39) and a very brief mention of the advances in medicine that were one of the ironically beneficial side-effects of the war (71–72). (Shell shock and war neurosis, curiously, rate only a few lines and no entry in the index.) To add to this function of the book, however, the bibliography could have been more extensive, going well beyond other general histories of the war.

My broad dissatisfaction when reading this book was that the purpose of it seems confused. I doubt that scholars of the war will find anything new here and, indeed, will be irritated by the simplifications and many errors. These will be particularly annoying to military historians, I fear, who may find more than I did. So, while the book is feted by the publishers as a “landmark new history,” I do not think that it is. If, on the other hand, the purpose of this book is that of an undergraduate text that serves to free students’ images of the war from the grip of Western Front trenches, then, errors aside, it succeeds quite well. Students using this text will certainly emerge with a sense of World War I as a multinational, multicontinental conflict involving troops from a vast array of linguistic, national, and ethnic backgrounds.