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Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War Hardcover – January 1, 2012
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Before the First World War, the British Admiralty conceived a plan to win rapid victory in the event of war with Germany--economic warfare on an unprecedented scale. This strategy called for the state to exploit Britain's effective monopolies in banking, communications, and shipping--the essential infrastructure underpinning global trade--to create a controlled implosion of the world economic system.
- Print length662 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2012
- Dimensions6.37 x 2 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100674061497
- ISBN-13978-0674061491
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Editorial Reviews
Review
--G.C. Peden (American Historical Review Dec 2012)
Lambert argues that to understand Britain's strategy in the First World War, historical engagement needs to develop beyond continental land operations and the movements of navies and expeditionary forces, to encompass a broader economic dimension which he posits underpinned Britain's real strategy for a world war. [He} has achieved an impressive feat of scholarship. His close reading of a vast array of private and official papers brilliantly illuminates the working of Cabinet government in wartime.
-- W. Philpott (Twentieth Century British History, June 2013)
In this formidable book, [Lambert] develops the thesis that between 1905 and 1912 the British Empire adopted a maritime strategy of economic warfare that was designed to bring down its major potential enemy—Germany—rapidly, efficiently and on its own. With meticulous scholarship he traces the emergence of this strategy and its 'envisioning,' exposition and endorsement... What is especially impressive about the book is the author's mastery of the contemporary global financial situation whose dynamics, based on shipping, credit and cables—and whose potential fragility—he explains very clearly... [Lambert] has produced a book of high-quality research and analysis, which is truly a landmark in the historiography of the First World War. The place of the British Empire in that conflict cannot be fully understood without exploring its accessible pages. Despite its weight, in all senses it is a book hard to put down. (Eric Grove Royal United Services Institute Journal 2012-08-01)
Lambert's Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution, which took the story [of British naval history] to the outbreak of the First World War, left readers thirsty to discover how he might transform our understanding of the war itself, having opened a completely new perspective on the pre-war years. We have waited thirteen years, but this massive book and the prodigious research it rests upon, fully justify the time it has taken... Nicholas Lambert's subject is not naval history at all in the classic sense but British grand strategy; how the British planned to fight before 1914, and why in the event they found themselves making war in ways they had previously decided were undesirable, unthinkable or fatal... Contrary to what almost all other historians have written, Lambert shows that the Cabinet had drawn sharply back from what in 1911 had briefly looked like committing the bulk of the British army to a Continental campaign. From 1912, Britain's war strategy was a form of economic blockade, based less on the physical interception of merchant ships at sea than on the exploitation of Britain's dominance of shipping and finance. Not the least important and original part of this book is its reconstruction of this strategy from the fragmentary and ambiguous evidence which has led so many other scholars in different directions... Time alone will tell whether Nicholas Lambert, who has demolished the ideas of so many other scholars, is himself vulnerable to revision. Few will match the massive scope and depth of his research. (N. A. M. Rodger Journal of Maritime History 2012-06-01)
No modern book has changed the terms of the discussion of the character of the conflict as decisively as that written by Nicholas Lambert... He puts together an amazing range of documents, as part of an exercise in rediscovering a history that was deliberately obfuscated in official histories after the War. The book rests on a mastery of two sorts of literature that have normally been quite separated from each other. book is more than just very good history: it is a quite compelling and alarming cautionary tale for the present. (Harold James, H-Diplo, Jan 2014)
Review
-- Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., University of the South, emeritus
Lambert sheds important new light on why British politicians agreed to go to war in 1914, how the management of economic warfare and blockade was instrumental in transforming the government, and why we need to rethink Washington's relations with London. With a "what-happened next" quality that makes the reader keep turning pages, this book is a major contribution that will completely revise how we understand Britain's role in the First World War.
-- Keith Neilson, Royal Military College of Canada
A remarkable academic achievement. By restoring economic theories of victory to their central place in the planning and early operations of World War I, Lambert reminds us how much of fundamental importance remains to be learned about that conflict, even after nearly a century.
-- Arthur Waldron, University of Pennsylvania
Readers of British naval strategy in the Fisher era will be seduced and provoked by this admirably engaging, significant, and persuasive book. It is a work of meticulous scholarship, based on exhaustive exploration of sources, and challenging in its interpretations. Lambert is an outstanding scholar at the height of his powers.
-- Cameron Hazlehurst, FRSL, FRHistS, Australian National University
This massive, comprehensively researched work asserts Britain's attempt to solve a strategic problem by economics. A plan to destroy the German economy in the initial stage of World War I was modified only when its initial implementation threatened a global financial panic. Lambert's controversial and persuasive description of a British counterpart to the Schlieffen Plan, challenging a century's conventional wisdom, is a page turner.
-- Dennis Showalter, Colorado College
The story of how tensions during World War I took a different course from the Napoleonic era illuminates economic warfare's limitations with broader lessons for what it can and cannot accomplish. In Planning Armageddon, Nicholas Lambert meticulously reconstructs the process by which Britain developed and then implemented plans for economic warfare against Germany. His well-written, though detailed, account provides a revisionist interpretation of British strategy which calls into question received opinion on how the Royal Navy aimed to fight a European war.
-- William Anthony Hay Policy Review
In this formidable book, [Lambert] develops the thesis that between 1905 and 1912 the British Empire adopted a maritime strategy of economic warfare that was designed to bring down its major potential enemy―Germany―rapidly, efficiently and on its own. With meticulous scholarship he traces the emergence of this strategy and its 'envisioning,' exposition and endorsement… What is especially impressive about the book is the author's mastery of the contemporary global financial situation whose dynamics, based on shipping, credit and cables―and whose potential fragility―he explains very clearly… [Lambert] has produced a book of high-quality research and analysis, which is truly a landmark in the historiography of the First World War. The place of the British Empire in that conflict cannot be fully understood without exploring its accessible pages. Despite its weight, in all senses it is a book hard to put down.
-- Eric Grove Royal United Services Institute Journal
Lambert's Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution, which took the story [of British naval history] to the outbreak of the First World War, left readers thirsty to discover how he might transform our understanding of the war itself, having opened a completely new perspective on the pre-war years. We have waited thirteen years, but this massive book and the prodigious research it rests upon, fully justify the time it has taken... Nicholas Lambert's subject is not naval history at all in the classic sense but British grand strategy; how the British planned to fight before 1914, and why in the event they found themselves making war in ways they had previously decided were undesirable, unthinkable or fatal... Contrary to what almost all other historians have written, Lambert shows that the Cabinet had drawn sharply back from what in 1911 had briefly looked like committing the bulk of the British army to a Continental campaign. From 1912, Britain's war strategy was a form of economic blockade, based less on the physical interception of merchant ships at sea than on the exploitation of Britain's dominance of shipping and finance. Not the least important and original part of this book is its reconstruction of this strategy from the fragmentary and ambiguous evidence which has led so many other scholars in different directions... Time alone will tell whether Nicholas Lambert, who has demolished the ideas of so many other scholars, is himself vulnerable to revision. Few will match the massive scope and depth of his research.
-- N. A. M. Rodger Journal of Maritime History
This is a very important book. It questions a series of orthodoxies that have dominated the diplomatic, strategic, and naval history of the period from 1900 to 1916...Anyone writing about the development of British grand strategy, diplomacy, politics, civil-military relations and inter-service rivalries of this period will need to study this book. The resulting debate will affect how the First World War is understood, and how it lives in the present. The myth of a 'Continental commitment' has been dealt a major blow.
-- Andrew Lambert War in History
Lambert has given us the definitive history of the planning and administration of the [British] blockade through the first 18 months of the war.
-- Hugh Rockoff Economic History Review
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Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 662 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674061497
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674061491
- Item Weight : 2.48 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.37 x 2 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,206,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,851 in World War I History (Books)
- #2,481 in Military Strategy History (Books)
- #11,885 in World War II History (Books)
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No one with any knowledge of British political or military history should be surprised in the slightest that British war planning 1900-1914 included a large dose of economic warfare, by which the British intended and hoped to utterly cripple Germany's trade and economy. It would be shocking if Britain had NOT planned to use various forms of "economic warfare" -- including cutting off the enemy's exterior trade; embargoing the transfer of goods including foodstuffs; destroying the enemy's access to credit markets etc. This has always been the way of war. (Probably still is.) To take only Britain's strategy in the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, this was obvious -- not only to leaders back then, but to readers of WW1 history since. What did Britain do as a sea power to counter France as a land power under Napoleon? It attempted to deny continental Europe access to trade, goods and food; it isolated France in international communications by occupying key islands and ports on the way the non-European world; it economically subsidized allies like Austria, Portugal and others. (Whether the blockade proposals of the Committee on Imperial Defense in the 1910-11 period went way beyond the Orders-In-Council imposed in the Napoleonic period is, frankly, beside the point; technology had moved so much since 1805
it would be surprising to anyone but an Admiralty lawyer that different measures were conceived.)
So my problem with the favorable reviews (and much of the author's self-representation) is with the somewhat breathless claims that this is a major "new perspective" and that the economic warfare plans were covered up. But the wildly popular pre-WW1 books (e.g. Ivan Bloch, Norman Angell) arguing that a major war was "impossible" based their theory on the expectation of economic collapse of the belligerents. Moreover, once the war began both sides
engaged in highly visible attempts to deny the other side foodstuffs, industrial imports and other resources.
If this was a secret, as the author and positive reviewers contend, it was hiding in plain sight. The fateful German decision to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare was directly caused by Germany's (perceived) inability to feed its population and troops, in large part because of the British blockade. Is this news? Is it news the British planned for it?
To me, the lesser-order but still interesting questions posed by this book are (1) did the economic planning give the British a false sense there would be a short victorious war and therefore contribute to the Cabinet's decision to join the war? and (2) was anything really "suppressed" from public view after the war? As to the first question, the author does not claim that any of this planning influenced the Cabinet in August 1914. He is fair and clear on this on page 219 ff, citing Asquith as telling the Cabinet during the decision-making that full-on economic warfare was not a great idea because of the repercussions on relations with the US. As for the post-war "suppression" narrative, to which Lambert devotes many breathless words, it is quite simple -- in the post-war climate, having the Official History say that Britain intended to attempt to starve the Germans into defeat was not good public relations. But by then the Germans were screaming bloody murder about how they HAD been starved by the Allies,
so no one missed the point.
Nonetheless, even if the book does not rank as a "complete rethinking" of British war strategy, as Prof Williamson blurbs it; even if the book does not really "shed new light" on the Cabinet's decision for war, as Prof Neilson blurbs it; it is still solid good book if you want to follow the in's and out's of just how far Britain was willing to go to antagonize the US and other neutrals, and when.
Planning Armageddon debunks conventional understanding of British history. While there are many sharp criticisms of the book, none have address Lambert using primary sources. Simply put, Lambert's arguments are thoroughly supported by unmatched archival research.


