What we now call World War I was known at the time, and for several decades afterward, simply as the “Great War.” It wasn’t until the arrival of World War II that World War I was re-christened. The Great War ended 100 years ago on November 11, 1918.
Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison have edited a collection of 20 essays called The Economics of the Great War: A Centennial Perspective
(November 2018, free registration needed). It’s a VoxEU.org Book published by CEPR Press, The useful approach of these books is to focus on short and readable essays, often 6-10 pages in length, in which the authors bring out some of the key points from their previous or ongoing research. Thus, the books offer a gentle introduction to a broader swath of the literature. I’ll list the full table of content below. Here, I’ll offer a few tidbits.
As the editors point out, many of the modern discussion so the Great War focus on changes that happened in the aftermath of the war, many of which are hot topics again a century later. Examples of such topics with echoes for the present day include:
The Great War marked the end of a period that had shown a strong rise in economic inequality. Walter Scheidel writes: “In the years leading up to World War I, economic inequality in many industrial nations was higher than it had ever been before. In the early 1910s, the highest-earning 1% of adults in France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US received approximately one-fifth of all personal income. Income inequality then was much greater than it is now, except in the US, where the level of the 1910s has returned. … Personal wealth was even more concentrated. The UK, where the richest 1% owned almost 70% of all wealth, led the pack. Today’s figure is closer to 20%. The corresponding French, Dutch, and Swedish shares of close to 60% were the highest ever recorded for these countries and between two and three times as large as they are now. Uncharacteristically, the US was lagging behind, even though its wealth concentration was also – if only moderately – greater than it is today … ”
The Great War brought the first great deglobalization of the world economy. David Jacks writes: “I document the evolution of world trade up to the precipice of World War I and the implosion of world trade in the initial years of the war, along with important changes in the composition of trade. Chief among these was the dramatic erosion in the share of Europe in world exports in general, and in the share of Germany in European exports in particular. Turning an eye to more long-run developments, World War I emerges as a clear inflection point in the evolution of the global economy. The diplomatic misunderstandings, economic headwinds, and political changes introduced in its wake can be discerned in the data as late as the 1970s.”
