A well written multi-disciplined approach. ( )

This book offered several excellent essays on seemingly diverse subjects, with a lot of context available and good advice to examine the historiography of the historian you are reading. The downside of reading this anthology was the juxtaposition of questions and themes introduced in the Introduction create difficulty in being able to assess what issues were being addressed, let alone what sort of narrative is created by these selections. Certainly Arthur Marwick and company have put together an excellent volume, and while I would recommend anyone read the chapters by Hew Strachan, Mark Harrison, and especially Anna Bravo, there are a number of articles (Mayer, Williamson, Maier, Browning) I didn't feel really added anything to points about Total War and social change, and I think could have been left out without any great loss.
The focus of the articles, especially at the end, suggests that the editors are most concerned with the move towards towards “total war,â€? an event that involves the civilian base through the bending of an entire society to the purpose of war on one hand, and made necessary due to the use of war to prove ideology. While this could suggest a move towards totalitarianism, the point made by Harrison of the necessity to “softenâ€? Soviet society in order to better motivate their citizenry in the Second World War perhaps points to a seemingly strange parallel of actual social progress accompanying horrific Total War. Indeed, (as Overy shows) the need of the Nazis to minimize the impact of the war upon their own populace underscores this point. The gains are often temporary (as Bravo points out), but often confidence is given to various sections of the populace (minorities, women, trade unions) to be able to get a better lot in post-war years. Sometimes, even the geo-political outcome leads to entirely new focuses on governance, as in the Hoffman chapter on post-Vichy France.
The construction of a narrative will always be a challenge when assembling an anthology. But in terms of presenting arguments, it seemed that sometimes the selection process was more concerned with getting the widest array of methodologies, subject matters, and ideological agendas rather than anwering the questions presented. For example, the questions “What is the relationship between Great War & revolutions?â€? and “Between Great War and rise of Fascism?â€? felt as if they were only covered as secondary or tertiary points in the articles they were even mentioned in (Bessel & Maier, respectively). When looking at the third theme “war’s relationship to revolution, civil war and genocideâ€? there is only Browning’s rather unsatisfactory essay to add to the above criticism. Despite the fact that the questions and themes posed in the Introduction didn’t always seem to fit with some of the selections, and that either the questions or the selection could have used some tweaking, I did enjoy and feel enriched by reading this book. I think “Total War and Historical Changeâ€? is a great book to read to get some ideas on the relationship war and social change have, and what level of involvement war might demand from the civilian population. ( )