A review by beataf
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914; Barbara W. Tuchman's Great War Series by Barbara W. Tuchman

4.0

The premise of this book is to identify the major features of the quarter century before WW1 in Europe and the US, but its exposition details life as it was, rather than life as it led up to and contributed to the war. I think this is a really helpful structure - of course looking at trends and causations is really important, and there was a general expectation of the coming war, but people weren't living with a countdown clock to battle. For me, this time always seems skipped over in survey-level history - we jump from cursory discussions of the (first) Gilded Age or the Prussian wars right through to World War 1, though this period was, I think, transformational in these regions. The book is organized in chapters by country and sometimes by actor, ie a chapter on anarchism and one on socialism, and to be clear, this is an exclusively western, geographically and conceptually limited history. It was written in the 60s and it is quite clear that she had access to more sources in some discussions, which can get tediously detailed, than others, and the anarchism chapter was particularly painful. But it is a fascinating, accessible portrait that helps ground my understanding of the top-down and grassroots political economy of the time - and guess what, we're having a lot of the same fights today.