The Ordeal of Peace goes a long way in clearing up our misperception of the end of a war as an event rather than a process. Seipp's detailed and scholarly comparison of the conditions in Munich and Manchester during and after World War I shows us that, as the author aptly puts it, while warfare may have ended on Armistice Day, the war clearly did not. For his transnational history of World War I demobilization, Seipp chooses to compare two important industrial cities. Both cities served as counterweights to national power centred elsewhere (in London and Berlin), and their histories of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century closely resemble each other. After a brief introductory chapter on the growth and development of the two cities in the century leading up to the war, the book chronologically describes each city's demobilization experience. Seipp takes a long view of demobilization arguing that it began as early as 1917 when Britain and Germany began to devote considerable bureaucratic resources in planning for the war's end. The bureaucracies continued to function until almost three years after the armistice.

The first section of the book, dealing with the last year of actual warfare, more than adequately describes how urban populations in both Britain and Germany were becoming restive and were beginning to weaken under the strains of war. There are striking similarities in the two urban scenes during this period including food shortages and labour unrest. Seipp gives us fascinating descriptions of how the triangular relationship of the national governments, city governments and the citizenry dealt with a variety of issues. Almost half the book is a look at this period and, while Seipp's theory of the ‘long’ demobilization is well taken, it is not clear why so much attention needed to be focused on this preliminary period. The year immediately following the end of hostilities is the subject of the second section. This is the period of perhaps the greatest contrast between the experiences of Manchester and Munich. For Munich it was a time of political unrest and radical challenges to the post-war order. In contrast, largely because Britain had won the war, Manchester avoided violent conflict even though many leaders feared such outbreaks. The final section looks at the last two years of demobilization where the political life of both cities began to stabilize and most wartime instructions and restrictions were finally brought to an end.

The Ordeal of Peace is a monument to careful scholarship. Seipp has scoured the collections of a score of archives both in Britain and in Germany. His work also benefits from a number of contemporary newspapers and periodicals as well as a vast array of secondary sources. One of Seipp's more fascinating concepts is what he calls the ‘crisis of reciprocity’. In both Manchester and Munich, Seipp has discovered that populations’ hopes for eventual victory and the sacrifices they were willing to make for such a victory during the conflict itself had a profound effect on public discourse during demobilization. Seipp convincingly shows that this ‘language of reciprocity’ framed the entire debate about how the two urban areas were to transform their wartime social order to that of peacetime. Paradoxically, Britain's victory actually made demobilization in Manchester more difficult because the people had trouble understanding why the government could not deliver on its wartime promises

For the most part, the book meets up to its claim that patterns can be seen in the experience of the two subject cities that can inform us ‘about the transnational character of demobilization, mass industrial war, and European society in the twentieth century’. Writing transnational history makes for a notoriously difficult task. Seipp recognizes and understands that the key to a successful one is finding ‘units of analysis’ that can be reasonably compared. While it is true that The Ordeal of Peace identifies some of these units and makes some productive comparisons, particularly in its identification of forces acting upon public policy before the end of hostilities, the work still has to grapple with the overwhelming point that Britain won the war and Germany lost. The experiences of Munich and Manchester are remarkably similar before and during the war. After the war, the similarities begin to fade. To his credit, Seipp recognizes that with Germany's defeat, the similarities of experiences of the two cities are difficult to discover. Nevertheless, Seipp has produced an admirable work that not only broadens our understanding of demobilization, but also shows the promising possibilities for transnational comparisons of urban experiences in war or peace.