Stevenson, David 1954-

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STEVENSON, David 1954-

PERSONAL: Born 1954. Education: Cambridge University, undergraduate degree and Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Office—London School of Economics, Houghton St., London WC2A 2AE, England. E-mail—d.stevenson@lse.ac.uk.

CAREER: London School of Economics, London, England, began as lecturer, 1982, became professor of international history, 1998.

AWARDS, HONORS: Leverhulme research fellowship, 2004–05.

WRITINGS:

French War Aims against Germany, 1914–1919, Clarendon Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(Coeditor) British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, University Publications of America (Frederick, MD), Series F, Part I: Europe, 1848–1914, thirty-five volumes, 1987–91, Series H, Part II: The First World War, 1914–1918, twelve volumes, 1990–96.

The First World War and International Politics, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

The Outbreak of the First World War: 1914 in Perspective, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

1914–1918: The History of the First World War, Penguin (London, England), 2004, published as Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, Cambridge University Press, 2000, and The Short Oxford History of Europe: Europe 1900–1945, Oxford University Press, 2002. Contributor to scholarly journals, including Contemporary British History, International Security, Historical Journal, International History Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Past and Present.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Organization of Victory: The Sources of Allied Success in World War I, for Penguin.

SIDELIGHTS: David Stevenson is considered one of the premiere historians of World War I. Specializing in the political rather than the military history of the war, his books on this subject are frequently praised as comprehensive, detailed, and well researched. For example, his Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914, had 2,123 footnotes. Charting the history of the arms race the European powers engaged in during the first years of the twentieth century, that decade, Armaments and the Coming of War was proclaimed "the new standard against which all other work on prewar military preparations will be measured" by Lyle A. McGeoch in History: Review of New Books. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures contributor Steven J. Corvi also praised the book as "groundbreaking," and advocated that Stevenson's work "has a place in the library of any serious scholar of twentieth century European and diplomatic history."

Stevenson looks at the origins of World War I from a different viewpoint in The Outbreak of the First World War: 1914 in Perspective. This "brief but very dense analysis," as Bullitt Lowry described it in Teaching History, covers the historiography of the commencement of the Great War—in other words, it studies the development of the historical record as it relates the outbreak of the war. In the interwar period, scholars generally thought the war had been caused by a broadly based, structural failure in the international system. Beginning in the 1960s, however, historians placed an increased emphasis on the choices made by the individual countries involved in response to their own domestic situations. During the 1970s researchers examined technical factors, including the quality of the intelligence each side possessed, but by the 1990s the actions of individual governments were again the most common focus of study. The Outbreak of the First World War "is a splendid summation of the current state of scholarly opinion on the outbreak of World War I," Lowry concluded.

One of Stevenson's best-known books, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War, was published in the United States as Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. In writing this "definitive work," as Jim Doyle described it in Library Journal, Stevenson creates a "monumental synthesis of just about every scholarly inquiry into the events of the Great War." As William L. O'Neill wrote in New Leader, "although the author presents a wealth of information and a huge bibliography, it is the freshness and rigor of his analysis that makes Cataclysm the best history of the Great War to Date."

In Cataclysm Stevenson begins by recounting some of the arguments about the causes of the war set forth in Armaments and the Coming of War, then moves on to examine how these and other cultural and political factors allowed the immensely destructive war to drag on for as long as it did, with so few of the players being willing to give in and negotiate a peace without victory. Cataclysm describes events in all of the belligerent countries. As Malcolm Brown noted in History Today, this is "not an Anglo-centric but a genuinely international history." Stevenson then analyzes the armistice and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, as well as discussing some of the reasons why the treaty eventually failed. "The author's arguments are very fine in both senses of the word, being intensely detailed and very persuasive," Gilbert Taylor wrote in Booklist, while Chicago Tribune reviewer Matthew Price declared Cataclysm "as good a one-volume history of the conflict as now can be had."