D'Agostino-2004-Journal of The Historical Society

A n t h o n y D ' A g o s t i no
The Revisionist Tradition in

European Diplomatic
History
Historical revisionism may be an advance on previous

knowledge, a political statement, or merely a professional temp-
tation. The art of diplomatic history, including its methods and
standards of judgment, seems to impel historians to view the ori-
gins of World War I and World War II through a single lens. In
the 1920s, criticism of the Versailles case for German war guilt,
based on collections such as Die grosse Politik der europaischer
Kabinette, attained an exalted level of literary achievement. Noth-
ing less would seem to do for World War II, and criticism of the
Nuremberg verdict was based upon the diplomatic documents re-
leased in the fifties and sixties, along with memoirs and other ma-
terials. Not simply politics, but also the style and characteristic
tropes of diplomatic history, may be responsible for the apparent
kinship of the revisionist schools. Once a deviant political trend,
revisionism has proved to be the motive force of diplomatic his-
tory and the source of its attraction for generations of students
and all who have been fascinated by its debates. Even in a time
of return to events,1 it may be easy to underestimate the fire-
works that have been set off by the diplomatic history of earlier
The Journal of The Historical Society IV:2 Spring 2004 255

Th e J ou r na l
generations, however much it has been disparaged, in G.M. Youngs

withering phrase, as the study of what one clerk wrote to another
clerk.
European diplomatic historians, whose works have been based
mainly upon correspondence among the permanent employees of
the various foreign ministries, have always had to weather the charge
that their doggedly empirical approach was too narrow, lacked dy-
namism, and failed to consider the bigger pictureeconomics, pub-
lic opinion, the class struggle, or the spirit of the time. Yet, since their
specialty began as an inquiry into the origins of the world wars, they
enjoyed a certain status outside the historical profession, thanks to
the momentous questions on which they focused and to the temp-
tation to think something could be learned from their work. The
hope is not entirely dead. The present condition of the worlds re-
maining superpower invites inquiry about the problem of primacy.
How did the last primus, Great Britain, lose her position in the first
half of the twentieth century? Did she deal skillfully with the ris-
ing powers, Russia, Germany, America, who challenged her? Was
an Anglo-German alliance possible at the turn of the century? Was
it preferable to entente with France and Russia? Would it not have
given the world a more pleasant century? Could British leaders have
handled the United States differently? Was Appeasement of Nazi
Germany a good idea, or perhaps an inevitable one? Could Hitler
have been deterred?2
During the first decade of the Cold War, a consensus formed on
the last of these questions: Appeasement of Nazi Germany had been
a bad idea. The lesson, usually expressed in Churchillian terms,
proved to be highly serviceable in waging the Cold War. But a re-
consideration of Appeasement during the last decades of the Cold
War overcame consensus, and some historians now say that revi-
sionism has become the new orthodoxy.3 In much the same way, the
official view of the origins of World War I was overturned by his-
torical revisionismmost of what is considered canonical in todays
textbook accounts of The Great War originated in the twenties as
256
The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History
revisionist history. Do these recurrences amount to a pattern or even

a revisionist family tree?
Orthodoxies Old and New

The last unchallenged orthodoxy on the causes of World War II
reigned at the height of the Cold War, in 19611962. At the same
time, a series of new books on the era of the world wars appeared.
These books contradicted the accepted canon on World War I and
provided the ground work for a new revisionist history of World
War II.4 An undergraduate class of that time was likely to be as-
signed Churchills Gathering Storm, in which his argument against
Appeasement was a case for deterring the aggressors. The prob-
lem of the origins of World War II was a good deal simpler then
than nowor rather, there was no problem at all. The origins of
The Great War, however, had produced a decade of intense con-
troversy among scholars. The Great War had resulted in disillu-
sionment so thick that one writer of a treatise on the post-war
mood, C.E. Montague, mourned the loss of an entire generation
of the survivors. He lamented that the young melancholiasts who
had fought would not be able to return to their pre-war lives and
loyalties: The plain man, so sick of the exhortations of clergy to
battle, emerges a Satanist.5 Disenchanted public opinion came to
reject with contempt the official explanation for why the boys had
fought. Regret about the effects of the war focused attention on the
mystery that shrouded its causes, although the secret might lie in
the various collections of diplomatic documents feverishly issued by
the Soviets and the Germans, who hoped to undermine the peace
imposed by the victors.
Compared with such scholarly confusion and unrest, World War II
left behind no mystery and no regret. The verdict of the Nuremburg
trials could never be submitted to the same critique as the war guilt
clause in the Versailles peace. Or so it was thought by those who
saw the lessons of the struggle to resist Hitler as applicable to the
Cold War. Confronting Nasser at the time of the Suez crisis, French
257
Th e J ou r na l
politicians called him a Duce of Arab nationalism. Eden told Eisen-

hower that Nasser was moving to exclude the western powers from
the Middle East just as Hitler had attempted to dominate Europe
and the world. Khrushchev was seencorrectly, in my viewas
the author of a dangerous international campaign to intimidate
the West and overthrow containment. The analogy with the thir-
ties haunted John F. Kennedy, who knew from the moment he took
office that confrontation with Khrushchev loomed. Kennedys 1940
Why England Slept had concluded that British capitulation at Mu-
nich might have been avoided by earlier British rearmament.6 His
unstated assumption was that Hitler could have been deterredand
Khrushchev then stood in the place that Hitler had occupied.
Kennedy was also impressed by the unique nuclear setting of
the confrontation, which for him called up the specter of 1914,
of accidental war precipitated by military timetables and which
might portend the end of everything. In those days, historians com-
monly taught undergraduates that the Great War resulted from a
mischance, a rut in the road, in the famous phrase of Virginia
Woolf. Kennedy read Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August and
admired it so much that he gave copies to Harold Macmillan and his
Ambassador to France, James Gavin. Of course, Tuchmans book
was not diplomatic historyshe did not believe that diplomatic his-
tory was of any use in considering the causes of the war, as she ar-
gued in her luminous later volume, The Proud Tower. The Grosse
Politik approach has been used up, she said, the diplomatic ori-
gins, so-called, are only the fever chart of the patient. They do not
tell us what caused the fever.7 In the 1960s, diplomatic history was
almost considered a form of mystificationat best useful to diag-
nose the fever, which provided a direction of further inquiry for the
rest of the decade and beyond as historians tried to describe the inner
crisis of European civilization, rent by class struggle, violent racial
nationalism, and every other kind of spiritual turmoil.8 Faced with
the mortal threat to their existence from below, states opted for a
fuite en avant, an escape forward, to restore their national unity.9
258
The interpretation had an understandable appeal during the 1960s,

when the anti-war spirit of the Vietnam period naturally called to
mind the pre-1914 anti-war agitation of Jean Jaures. That line of
research impulse would not last, but it performed almost as adver-
tised, broadening and supplementing diplomatic history rather than
displacing it.
Taylor and Fischer

A.J.P. Taylors Origins of the Second World War shocked every de-
cent sensibility. Taylor proposed nothing less than demoting World
War II from its privileged status and treating it in the same way
as World War I, by means of what he half-jokingly called hack
diplomatic history. For Taylor, the British and German documents
revealed that the causes of the war had been no less accidental than
those of its predecessor. Taylors claims challenged the most promi-
nent existing accounts of Lewis Namier, John Wheeler-Bennett, and
Elizabeth Wiskemann in English, and Maurice Baumont in French.10
Taylors Hitler, despite his undeniably wicked deeds, became not a
lunatic in a helmet but a German statesman with a German pol-
icy fully in tune with what he subsequently called the course of
Germanic history.
Taylors previous work laid out his case. During World War II, he
had started a pamphlet on Germany for the Political Warfare Execu-
tive under the joint control of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of
Economic Warfare. His prior book on the Habsburg Empire, after
a few false starts, had convinced his superiors that he should write
the chapter on Weimar in the handbook on Germany to be issued to
the British occupying troops.11 Taylors chapter, however, claimed
that Weimar had not been a real democracy and that Nazism had
been a natural result of German history, which could not suit the
purpose of a handbook designed to stress the case for a democratic
Germany groaning under the yoke of Nazism. The chapter was re-
jected, but D.W. Brogan, then working in the French section of the
BBC, suggested to Taylor that he expand it into a book on German
259
Th e J ou r na l
history, which became The Course of German History, his first

bestseller.12
Taylor examined the unique path of German political develop-
ment as compared to the British and French models. The book of-
fered a demonstration of the Whig interpretation of history, or per-
haps of the theories of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, but with an
important twistas Taylor spun out the argument, Germany could
only have cut out a path to a civilized political development by means
of the revolutionary overthrow of its old regime, as the British did
in the seventeenth century and the French in the eighteenth. Taylor
was influenced by German historians such as Eckhart Kehr and
Arthur Rosenberg, who emphasized the evil consequences of the
marriage between the Junkers and heavy industryevil, that is,
when judged against British constitutional and revolutionary expe-
rience. Hitler biographer Alan Bullock told Taylor Youre the last
of the Whigs.13
After the war ended, it became common to regard Taylors views
as overstated or even flippant, as my teachers did. But another
book published in 1961 seemed to reinforce them. Fritz Fischers
Griff nach der Weltmacht (Reach for World Power), translated
into English as Germanys Aims in the First World War, marked
the arrival of a new generation of German historians and stirred
a controversy as intense as Taylors book on World War II. The
Germans, said Fischer, had similar aims in both warsto break
into the club of great imperial powers and take a position com-
mensurate with their nations potential as the industrial leader of
the continent. German leaders must rally the nation and diffuse the
Social Democratic electoral threat by means of a foreign policy of
preventive war. Germany had actually plotted and welcomed war,
he concluded in Krieg der Illusionen (War of Illusions), and Ger-
man complaint about encirclement was really a device to unify
the nation behind a new naval policy. In terms similar to Fischers,
Hans-Ulrich Wehler later wrote of Germanys regarding 1914 as an
opportunity for an escape forward.
260
Taylor greeted the Fischer controversy as a vindication of his

own arguments, at least for those made in The Course of German
History, noting in his memoirs that the younger German historians
take much my line and even exaggerate it.14 Taylors idea of conti-
nuity supported the thesis of der deutsche Sonderweg, the unique
German path to disaster in the two world wars. Fischers book, how-
ever, underscored the difference between The Kaiser was as bad as
Hitler and Hitler was no worse than the Kaiser. My book can
be read two ways, Taylor told an English interviewer: In one way,
it may exonerate Hitler by saying the war was a mistake; in another,
by letting Hitler off, it may make all Germany responsible for the
war.15
Taylors Origins moved the controversy over the origins of World
War II to center stage. Here at last was the definitive demolition of
the Nuremberg trials, or so thought nationalist and neo-Nazi ele-
ments in West Germany. Elsewhere Taylor was subjected to a storm
of censure from critics. Hugh Trevor-Roper became the point man
in a critique from general principles, which A.L. Rowse found the
most devastating analysis that I have ever seen. Rowse flatly ac-
cused Taylor of scrubbing up Hitler. Elizabeth Wiskemann noted
the comfort Taylor gave to those who continued to feel that the
Fuhrer had been misunderstood, and G.F. Hudson complained that
Taylor had manipulated the evidence and dismissed the Hossbach
Memorandum of 1937, on which so much of the Nuremburg case
for Hitlers aggression was based. Gordon Craig called the Origins
perverse. Raymond Sontag professed to me his amazement that
Taylor could have distorted so much evidence in order to write
such a dishonest book.16
Taylor and Brailsford, Namier and Woodward

The provocative claims of Taylors Origins riled critics: to oppose
Hitler was a policy based on legitimacy, the argument of Metter-
nich and the Congress of Vienna. By contrast, Munich was the
moral course and a triumph for all that was best and most
261
Th e J ou r na l
enlightened in British life.17 The poisoned phrase that drew the ire
of the criticsMunich was a triumphwas a homage to H.N.
Brailsford, one of the leading lights of the Union of Democratic Con-
trol, organized shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914. The UDC,
led by such pro-Labour and Liberal intellectuals as E. D. Morel,
G. Lowes Dickinson, G. P. Gooch, and Bertrand Russell, included
such politicians as Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Ponsonby, and
Philip Snowden and took its cue from theories of Imperialism, partic-
ularly those J.A. Hobson had elaborated at the turn of the century.
Imperialism was held to have developed out of protectionist and
militarist tendencies in capitalism. Morel argued that the imperial-
ism of the great powers directly caused the war by promoting their
secret alliances and notions of the balance of power, and he con-
centrated fire on Greys pre-war policy for creating an unwritten
bond to France and Russia for support in an aggressive land war
against Germany.18 The Germans, said Morel, had not previously
been trying to dominate Europe. German complaints about encir-
clement were certainly as plausible as British complaints about the
violation of Belgium, which was simply, for the British leaders, a
means to an end in a general European war. The real fault lay with
the vicious philosophy at the root of European statecraft.19
Brailsfords War of Steel and Gold, for the most part an eloquent
update of the arguments of Hobson with an anti-entente twist, was
the most widely read of the UDC tracts. Taylor later remarked that
many a professor of history had the works of Gooch and Fay atop
his desk and Brailsfords volume in his first drawer. The British
anointed their victory with the holy water of the balance of power,
said Brailsford, but it was a metaphor of venerable hypocrisy
which serves only to disguise the perennial struggle for power and
predominance.20 British support for the Franco-Russian alliance
was a way of seeking to break up Austria-Hungary and striking a
blow to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway scheme. By these means Grey
succeeded in crushing the German idea of Mitteleuropa.21 Brailsford
traveled in Russia in the spring of 1919. He condemned the French
262
for their activities against the Bolsheviks and deplored their influ-
ence over the British and the United States. France in 1919, he
thought, was immensely more preponderant than was the German
military machine at the height of its power. All Europe now groaned
under the military hegemony of France.22 The whole critique of
the New Imperialism, gathering force since the Boer war, was em-
ployed to explain the Great War: France was the great beneficiary
of imperialism, and Germany was its victim.
In the thirties, Brailsford argued that the rise of Hitler would
have been impossible without the injustices of Versailles. So the
first element of a cure, he said, is to remove Germanys wrongs.
It was necessary, said Brailsford, to disarm to Germanys level and
then to give Hitler what we refused to Rathenau, Stresemann, and
Bruning.23 Coercing Germany in an attempt to defend Versailles
was unthinkable. It would not be a socialist position; even if one ac-
tually succeeded in bringing Hitler down, the spirit of outraged na-
tionalism influenced by fresh wrongs and new humiliations, would
remain. Brailsford changed course by 1940, however. In a pamphlet
designed for a broad audience in America, he appealed for British
support in the war and called the British navy Americas defense
against Hitler, and even joined FDR in invoking a Latin American
threat.24 Hitlers New Order, Brailsford wrote, has turned out
to be merely an inflated and reckless version of Mitteleuropa.25
The Brailsford line on the causes of the Great War remained rather
close to the Communist International, or Comintern, line.26 The
Bolsheviks had started the controversy over the causes of the war by
publishing the secret treaties and a stream of documents on Tsarist
foreign policy. The 1919 Manifesto of the Comintern charged that
the British and Entente imperialists were most guilty of bringing war
to Europe: In London they wanted war. That is why they conducted
themselves in such a way as to raise hopes in Berlin and Vienna that
England would remain neutral, while Paris and Petrograd firmly
counted on Englands intervention.27 The Manifesto first stated
the charge, later debated by scholars in a more genteel form, that
263
Th e J ou r na l
Greys policy in 1914 could have prevented war either by constrain-

ing France and Russia or by deterring Germany.28
No doubt Taylor also had a copy of The War of Steel and Gold
in the first drawer of his desk, perhaps with a book by G.P. Gooch
perched on top. Gooch was the most respected and, according to
Ramsay Macdonald, by far and away our ablest historian.29 Be-
fore becoming associated with the UDC, Gooch was an Asquithian
Liberal as M.P., 190610. He criticized the anti-German tone of
Lloyd Georges famous Mansion House speech of 1912, and soon
after the war he began to argue that the Kaiser in 1914 had shown
no will to war. Gooch believed the German historians with whom
he was personally friendly, men like Hermann Lutz, Friedrich Mei-
necke, and Hermann Oncken, had it right: the French had been more
fervent nationalists than the Germans before the war, and there had
been a chance during the Boer War for an AngloGerman entente,
which would have been sensible, but it was missed. The British en-
tente with France, on the other hand, was not a union of hearts but
a mariage de raison.30 Germany had not done much to provoke
war; its hand had been forced by the Russian mobilization. These
claims grounded the revisionist case.
When Ramsay Macdonald decided to publish the British diplo-
matic documents in 1924, Gooch was a natural choice for editor.
But it was thought that Goochs views needed to be balanced, and
so Harold Temperley, who thought Gooch inclined to say the best
for Germany, was brought in as a counterweight.31 Both of the
editors wanted British policy shown in a good light, of course, but
friction soon arose between them. The most attention-getting docu-
ment was the long 1907 memo on Anglo-Franco-German relations
by Sir Eyre Crowe, warning of the German threat, with extensive
critical commentary by Lord Thomas Sanderson and a rejoinder by
Crowe. The exchange personified the alternatives on German pol-
icy. Gooch agreed with the German historians about Crowe, the
evil spirit of the foreign office,32 like Holstein for the Germans,
while Temperley inclined toward the Crowe school of thought. The
264
dispute remained private, and it did nothing to dampen Goochs

exalted standing. C.K. Webster said of Goochs masterly narratives
that he so marshals his facts as to make the final decisions of the
several powers appear to be almost inevitable.
At Manchester in the thirties, Taylor began to liberate himself
from the UDC line and to come under the spell of Lewis Namier,
himself under the spell of Robert Vansittart and the Foreign Office.
As a citizen Taylor subscribed to ideas that he identified with the
working class and the Left. As a scholar and professional historian
he followed different influences. Since it has become usual to explain
Taylors historical views with reference to his English radicalism,
his reckoning in his scholarly writings with Brailsfordism and with
World War I revisionism has been overlooked.33 In 193334, Taylor
ploughed through all fifty-four volumes of Grosse Politik, which,
one of his most able and lucid biographers concludes, caused the
scales to fall from his eyes about the UDC anti-Entente line.34 More
likely Hitler, combined with Namiers tutelage and the encourage-
ment of E.L. Woodward, caused Taylor to reconsider his enthusiasm
for Brailsford and the Grosse Politik view of Imperial Germanys
foreign policy.35
Taylor wanted to use the GP, the British documents, and other
materials to strike a blow at William L. Langers impressive and com-
pendious interpretation of Imperial German policy.36 Like Taylor,
Langer had been a student of Pribrams, had been guided through
the German archives by Thimme and associates, and had ended
up, said Taylor, with a tendency to see things through German
spectacles.37 Taylor, for his part, was not immune to the under-
standable tendency to put a minus where Langer put a plus. He
insisted that Langer had paid too much attention to imperialism
and not enough to continental European circumstances. It was a mis-
take, said Taylor, to think, as did Sanderson in his famous exchange
with Crowe, that Bismarck had been driven by domestic forces into
his colonial ventures. Bismarck was not pressed. He was making a
complex continental maneuver.38 Taylor rejected Langers view of
265
Th e J ou r na l
German policy, which he said had been formed by Thimme.39

The European balance, not imperialism, was the key.
Taylor abandoned the Hobson-Brailsford theory of imperialism
in favor of the Namier-Woodward theory of the German threat.
Although Taylor left his pacifist work with the Manchester Peace
Council when Hitler occupied the Rhineland in 1936, he still clung
to a pacifist position and resisted rearmament. He suspected that
the National Government was really maneuvering to inspire Hitler
to attack the Soviet Union: I expected that Britain and France had
abandoned any idea of resisting Hitler and that when he attacked
Russia, as I expected him to do, they would either remain neu-
tral or cooperate with him.40 Even so, British Communists talked
about keeping faith in the League, which Taylor had come to reject
with contempt. He was anti-Communist but pro-Russianthat is,
he thought it best for Britain to court Russia. Like Churchill, Duff
Cooper, and the other anti-Appeasers, Taylor lapsed into inactiv-
ity during the next two years, and he said little about the Spanish
Civil War. The period before Munich was a strange lull, as he
later described it in the Origins. He was greatly cheered to hear
of the Nazi-Soviet pact, which ruled out a German attack on Rus-
sia and therefore in my opinion any likelihood of war. He drew
the provocative conclusion that, because the Nazi-Soviet pact had
driven a wedge between Hitler and the Appeasers, it was the Nazi-
Soviet pact that really finished Hitler.41 Even after the start of the
war Taylor remained convinced that the British and French were still
angling for a way to join with Germany, and they were trying to use
the Soviet campaign in Finland to bring about the union. But the
Nazi attack on Russia produced Churchills immediate declaration
of solidarity with the Soviets, which Taylor later called the greatest
act of statesmanship in modern history.
After the war Taylor wrote his strongly Vansittartist Course of
German History and an essay on the later career of the Habsburg
Monarchy. At the end of the latter, he drew the sobering conclu-
sion that Communist control of East Central Europe had been the
266
only alternative to the restoration of German hegemony, at first

economic and later military.42 He then set himself to his greatest
work, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 18481918, an attempt
to update the question of the deep origins of the war of 19141918
by improving on the work of all who had gone before on a topic
that was, even at the time, covered by a dozen or more scholarly ac-
counts. Taylor wanted most to improve on Langer and Goochhe
wanted to use the Grosse Politik and other documents to disprove
the received revisionist opinion on the Great War, which rested, he
thought, on these materials.
The Struggle for Mastery was original by design and by strenuous
effort. Taylor did not attempt to assert that Germany and Austria
had deliberately sought war in August 1914, yet the real issue in
British entry into the war was prevention of German hegemony over
the continenta threat regularly repeated by periodic attempts to
forge a continental league against Britain. Should the Great War
be considered a war for balance of power, a war of continental
coalition against a perceived potential hegemon? Taylor had begun
by speaking of a perpetual quadrille of the balance of power,
yet as his account came closer to 1914, he curiously denied the
influence of the balance of power and spoke ambiguously of its
having broken down, as if maintenance of the balance had never
required war. Taylor defended the French and discounted Poincares
encouragement of the Russians in 1912 and 1914. But, he insisted,
the French had urged not that the peace of Europe, but the balance be
maintained. Russian officials knew what that meant. Nevertheless,
the story of aggressive French action, said Taylor, was mythical; the
French had entertained only defensive thoughts.
Nor was Russian ambition what it had been made out to be.
Certainly not a drive for the Straits or warm water, as Gooch
thought. Russia feared Austrias drive toward the Straits. She was
not guilty of forming the Balkan League that started the Balkan
wars of 191213.43 Russia, said Taylor, had never taken seriously
Moltkes loose talk about an inevitable conflict between Slav and
267
Th e J ou r na l
Teuton. Only in Germany was policy based upon the cauchemar

of Greater Serbia, which had prompted the general staffs and
the Kaisers blank check to Austria.44 An authoritative statement
against the Grosse Politik line by means of the Grosse Politik. In
the celebrated bibliography, Taylor called the Grosse Politik not
the least of the factors that made possible Hitlers destruction of
the Versailles system.45 It had produced a version of European his-
tory created by seeing everything through German eyes, and he
lamented that it would probably never be eradicated.
In some ways, Taylors Origins of the Second World War pre-
sented a similar view of German policy. One might even find in
Taylors book some continuity with the work of Fritz Fischer. Yet
the opposite is no less true. Taylor on World War I is much differ-
ent from Taylor on World War II. The Struggle for Mastery is an
argument against the revisionism of the twenties on the origins of
the Great War; the Origins argues in support of a revisionist inter-
pretation of World War II. The real continuity in the two works is
in a disposition toward the trope of stumbling into war rather
than one of a war path. The war path can be seen by all, per-
haps even too well, in the march of events, but only the diplomatic
historian can reveal the stumbling as seen in the documents. And
having revealed it, the historian cannot easily reject the temptation
to think it decisive.
In Origins, Taylor doubled back for the views he rejected in the
thirties. Why? A number of reasons have been suggested: his quar-
rels with Namier, his losing the Regius chair to Trevor-Roper, his
feeling of having been slighted in his profession. Even so, he can-
not have been immune to a desire to do for the second world war
what had already been done for the firstto elevate it to the sta-
tus of a great historical mystery. Taylor had good reason to worry
that in doing so he would be considered a convert to the school
of discredited pre-war American revisionists. My nightmare, he
told an interviewer, is that Harry Elmer Barnes will write a favor-
able review of Origins.46 Few discoveries are more irritating,
268
Lord Acton once said, than those which expose the pedigree of
ideas.
Taylor and Barnes, Fay and Schmitt

Taylors nightmare came true. Barnes was delighted with the
Origins. Nothing like it, he said, since E.D. Morels attacks on
Grey. It was decisively Revisionist on all vital points . . . coming
from Taylor it will make Revisionism on World War II re-
spectable.47 Our friend, AJP Taylor, who was once, not the Verna
dot Schmitt of World War II revisionism but the Charles Downer
Hazen . . . has now brought out a book on the causes of World War II
that seems to go as far as Hoggan and much further than anything
in print.48
Barnes was the paramount figure in Revisionismhe generally
used the upper casein the twenties. He taught at Columbia dur-
ing the war, supported Wilson, advocated American intervention in
191617, and supported the League of Nations. Reading two arti-
cles published in 1920 by his Smith colleague Sidney B. Fay changed
him forever. Based upon the German policy documents Karl Kautsky
published, and the Austrian documents published by Richard Gooss,
Fay suggested that Austria, not Germany, bore most responsibility
for the war.49 Fay leaned toward Goosss interpretation, that the
Kaiser was a sacrificial lamb offered on the altar of Berchtolds
reckless perfidy and obstinacy.50 Britain had set German nerves
on edge in 1912 by naval conventions with France and Russia, in-
advertently giving life to the German nightmare of encirclement.
Russian policy, or rather the policy of the Russian military, had
duped the Tsar into a partial mobilization against Austria that was
really a disguised mobilization against Germanyand Germany
answered with war against France and Russia. Thus Germany had
war forced upon her not by England, as has been so commonly be-
lieved in Germany, but by her own ally (Austria) and by Russia.51
German leaders were not criminals plotting the World War, they
were simpletons putting a noose about their necks.
269
Th e J ou r na l
Barnes called the Fay articles a blinding flash on the road to

Damascus. During the next few years, in Barness capacity as the
first book editor for Foreign Affairs, he followed the literature on
the war and found it inferior to Fays. In 1924, Herbert Croly,
editor of the New Republic, asked Barnes to write a critique of
Charles Downer Hazens Fifty Years of Europe. Stating the ortho-
dox case for German war guilt, Hazen had defended the Russian
mobilization in 1914 as a natural response to the wanton attack
against Serbia.52 Barnes denounced Hazen in a sweeping defense of
Germany, blaming France and Russia, and, to boot, attacking
American entry into the war. Barnes summed up the Revisionist
case in his 1926 book, Genesis of the World War, less a chronolog-
ical narrative than an extended essay exploring German war guilt.
For Barnes, responsibility for the war lay in general with the en-
tente, but more specifically with Poincare, Delcasse, Izvolskii, and
Sazonov.53 Barnes drew on an array of materials, including the diplo-
matic documents, colored books, memoirs, and the already vast
secondary literature, to pronounce his allegiance to the Revisionist
cause.54
Fay viewed the Russian mobilization as an act of war. Barnes
wanted to widen the case in its political implicationswhich in-
sulted no one and even paralleled the Soviet view of Russian
imperialismto direct fire at the French and at those who saw
German war guilt as a rationale for the reparations regime that
was, in his view, bleeding Germany and Europe. Barnes relied upon
various authorities to make his case, including Gooch and Langer.
Gooch, Barnes felt, led the way as a guide to the Grosse Politik,
but for the special guilt of the French he relied most on Langer.
Poincare and Izvolskii, according to Langer, had begun their cam-
paign when Poincare became Premier in 1912 and the two had deter-
mined to build the entente into a military alliance against Germany
and Austria. In 191214 they strengthened the naval arrangements
between entente powers and presented a solid front to the central
powers.55 Barnes considered Langer a fellow revisionist, and Langer
270
supported Barnes against Hazen. Langer called the war guilt clause
the most stupendous hoax in history.56
Many critics toasted Barness The Genesis of the World War,
but not all the hostile reviewers claimed that Barnes was wrong.57
Charles Beard, Ferdinand Schevill, and Langer all expressed ap-
proval. Barnes even won a partial victory in the eyes of the most
influential critic, Bernadotte Schmitt, who accepted the case against
Germanys sole war guilt but rejected Barness claims about the guilt
of France and Russia. Schmitt complained that Barnes relied too
much on secondary sources, which shifted the whole discussion onto
a different plane. The last round of the controversy would be fought
on the ground of narratives that pretended to be grounded only in
diplomatic documentsa departure for diplomatic historians, who
were now assuming that they could write, definitively and with ab-
solute detachment, on contemporary events entirely from foreign
office archives.58
Fay and Schmitt soon geared up for their definitive retelling using
the full-scale scholarly apparatus. In 1928 Fay published Origins of
the World War in two volumesthe first on deep origins, 1870
1914, and the second on the immediate crisis of 1914. He built
upon his original argument that, based upon the Kautsky docu-
ments and the Austrian Red Book, one must conclude that the War
Guilt Clause was without foundation.59 In the new volumes, Fay
claimed that Poincare was the real culprit. His reckless behavior
had spurred the Russians into action, and the Russian mobilization
in effect meant war; the subsequent German attack on Belgium
and France must be seen as an unavoidable response.60 Imperialism,
doctrines of preventive war, or military timetables were not impor-
tant.61 Fay returned to the responsibility of Lord Greyno one
wanted war, and British policy could have prevented it, either by
warning France and Russia that Britain was not on board, or by
warning Germany that she was.62
Schmitt answered in 1930 with The Coming of the War, which
earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1916, prior to the release of the ocean
271
Th e J ou r na l
of documentary material that historians now had to digest, he had

published England and Germany, 17401914. As Barnes and his
friends were not slow to notice, Schmitts conclusions in his 1916
book substantially foreshadowed the conclusions he drew in 1930.
He had already said that Germany and Austria were resolved to
make war, and both wanted to force Russia to back down, which
explained why the Germans issued a blank check to Austria. They
both intended to take Serbia and Europe by surprise by issuing
the ultimatum to Serbia, all in the cause of re-arranging the Balkans
to their specifications. Schmitt had made these claims in 1916, and
The Coming of the War continued in the same vein. Germany was
precipitate in declaring war on Russiathe Russian mobilization
was not sufficient cause to prompt the German mobilization and at-
tack.63 Schmitt softened his earlier view by saying that Lloyd George
had been perfectly correct to say the powers had staggered and
stumbled into war. All the powers made terrible miscalculations
the Germans thinking that Romania was available, the Russians
thinking they could pull Bulgaria in, the British allowing themselves
to be entirely hoodwinked in fruitless negotiations with Turkey.
The powers thought they had been drawn into a crucial test of
strength. As to Greys responsibility, Schmitt allowed that British
policy had been uncertain, and he blamed a general paralysis of in-
decision in the British cabinet. In answer to Fays claim that Grey fell
between two stools, Schmitt countered that, in any event, whatever
the British did, the Germans had counted them out of their plans
and could not have been deterreda more chastened and nuanced
way of repeating the original analysis that German guilt for the war
stood out from others and of vindicating the existing international
order.64 Churchill called Schmitts work a masterly book, which
made the anti-Versaillists sick at heart.65
Fay and Schmitt had used the same materials to come to strikingly
different conclusions. Thirty years later, when I first studied these
works, the difference was said to indicate two facts about histori-
ans: first, they could honestly come to different conclusions from
272
the same evidence; and second, a mark of professional presentation

was that one could argue a case different from the presenters on
the basis of his own evidence. Evidence, apparently, did not speak
for itself. Fays and Schmitts narratives did not differ markedly, but
on the key political point of responsibility for war, they ended on
opposite sides. Even so, the confrontation between Fay and Schmitt
marked a triumph for the purest diplomatic history in the spirit of
the Grosse Politikthrough this lens, imperialism, along with com-
plaints about the perfidy of the alliance system and secret diplomacy,
receded into the background.66 The Soviets themselves soon stopped
talking about imperialism and turned instead to the cause of collec-
tive security, which they advanced with all the Wilsonian naivete
they could plausibly muster.
Barnes, of course, praised Fay, complaining only that he had been
too timid in pursuing the point to which his facts had led. Fay
was a moderate revisionist. For Barnes, the real experts became
Fay, Langer, Linglebach, and Cochran, whose opponentspeople
like Schmitt, Seymour, and Slossonmust now be considered anti-
German salvagers.67 It only remained for the academic world
to recognize the victory of the revisionists, which, Barnes believed,
had already been painfully won in the middle-brow press. He felt
somewhat vindicated with the appearance of Raymond Sontags au-
thoritative survey, European Diplomatic History, which treated the
powers before 1914 as haunted by fear of war but driven despite
everything into a storm they could not weather.68 Sontag argued
that both encirclement and exclusive German war guilt were mis-
conceptions, and in his glacial evenhandedness, he leaned slightly
toward the Fay-Langer position. Barnes, who was delighted to see
his Genesis of the World War commented upon favorably in Sontags
bibliographySontag called it the most important contribution to
the revisionist causenoted with satisfaction Sontags glowing
references to Fay and Langer and the observation that Schmitt was
hostile to Germany. Barnes congratulated Sontag on his splendid
achievement, which, he said, contained just as much scholarship
273
Th e J ou r na l
as Fay or Langer. Barnes wrote to him that Having been shabbily

treated by men who owe me a great deal, it is particularly gratifying
to be handled graciously by one who owes me nothing.69 Barnes
was not Sontags sort, however. Sontag was not a fierce polemicist
for the revisionist position. He saw the diplomats of his era and the
preceding one as having been charged by heaven with the task of
saving civilization from the destructive forces let loose by science,
irreligion, class conflict, national chauvinism. The world war was
evidence of their failure, and another world war would complete the
destruction of civilization begun by the first. In the crisis of 1914,
as in the crisis of the thirties, Anglo-German relations were at the
heart of the problem. Why had accommodation between them been
impossible?
Sontag sent a plaintive letter to Harold Temperley to ask for his
opinion on the negotiations of 18981901, when Sontag thought
accommodation had had its best chance, although he had found no
help for his theory in the British Documents. Could it have been
that the British aroused false hopes for a military alliance, which
the Germans came to expect as a minimum?70 Temperleys long let-
ter in reply did not satisfy Sontag, who took the matter up 1938
in a larger context in his Germany and England: Background of
Conflict, 18481894. Why had the natural allies, as Salisbury
called them, turned so passionately into natural enemies? Not
because of clashes of national interests; these differences were triv-
ial and easily composed. They only sharpened into war hysteria
because of ideas. Germany was driven by the idea of the nation as
a law unto itself, England by the idea of an expansionist Greater
Britain, and both passions were fed by the rise of Social Darwinism.
Curiously, Sontag found German ideas the more progressive. The
Germany of Bismarck, like the Germany of Hitler, seemed reac-
tionary to Englishmen, and yet in the field of ideas, is it not the
Germans who have been innovators? Sontag wrote. In all that
concerns the relations of the individual to the state, of the state to
the world community, and, more broadly, of law to force, the world
274
of today is far closer to the ideals of the German nationalists of

Bismarcks day than to the Gladstonian liberals. This fact, Son-
tag felt, might have seemed more impressive than the similarity
of the problem confronting the two Chamberlains. At any rate,
the problem of the two Chamberlains was how to make room
for Germany to grow in the world outside Europe by a policy of
concessions.71
Like Barnes and Langer, Sontag was in Fays camp, the moderate
scholarly revisionists, and so he had to brave Schmitts criticism of
Diplomatic History. He nevertheless judged the myths surrounding
the origins of the world war largely destroyed.72 Like some other
Catholics, Sontag was stunned and puzzled by the Spanish Civil
War, although more distressed by the shooting of priests than the
travails of the republic. Germany and England was full of hope,
widely shared, for the success of Chamberlains policy. Sontags
teacher William Linglebach, to whom he had dedicated Germany
and England, thanked him warmly and mused that the lesson about
the origins of the Great War was applicable to the appeasement
of current German appetites. Why should nearly all our colum-
nists lose their heads, asked Linglebach, after the Munich agree-
ment, because England did not fight over Czechoslovakia?73 As
to American policy in the period of British Appeasement, Sontag
remained a non-interventionist, but he was not prompted to take a
pacifist view of American entry into the Great War. The most influ-
ential revisionist works of the period on American entry had their
inevitable impact on his contemporaries.74 Millis and Tansill,
William Bundy later wrote to Sontag, largely obscured for a gener-
ation of susceptible readers (of whom I was one) the fact that in large
measure . . . any American President would have been hard pressed
to avoid the course Wilson took. Sontag winced at the analysis
of public opinion and propaganda in Milliss Road to War, but he
could not concur with its pacifism.75
When Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939 and the British
gave their guarantee to Poland, both Langer and Sontag quickly
275
Th e J ou r na l
dropped their attitude toward Appeasement. Langer had felt that

the basic policies advocated in Mein Kampf the liquidation of the
Jews and expansion to the eastdid not originate with Hitler, and
so he viewed the first of Hitlers measures with resignation. The
occupation of the Rhineland was a necessary counter to the Maginot
line, and the Anschluss with Austria was in line with Austrian pop-
ular sentiment, in the countryside if not in Vienna.76 Munich was
the last stand for accommodation, and soon confidence began to
wane. Langers January 1939 review of Germany and England noted
that the policy of concessions Sontag had endorsed did not seem
to jell. He prodded Sontag gently to write something more specific
about the present.77 With Britain seemingly committed to oppos-
ing Hitler, Sontag recognized that America would have to weigh in
eventually, and he took a more sober view of the revisionist cam-
paign against American intervention in 1917: Then as now, ideal-
ism concealed the cold calculation that American interests would be
jeopardized by a German victory.78 As with A.J.P. Taylor, Sontags
turn of mind affected his view of the origins of the Great War. He
rejected O.J. Hales revisionist view that Englands decision for the
entente with France in 1904 was to be regretted since this meant a
choice for the more dangerous group.79 The alternative to the
entente, said Sontag, was what Grey prophesied and has now
come to pass, the union of the continent under Germany against
Britain.
Barnes did not experience a similar conversion. He remained true
to his revisionist views, and he would probably have continued his
defense of Fay against Schmitt into the Hitler era, except that the
controversy lost steam in 1931 when Germany stopped paying repa-
rations. Barness attention turned to the larger question of peace in
Europe. In the column he wrote for the New York World Telegram,
The Liberal Viewpoint, he urged an even-handed attitude toward
German claims against their neighbors. He thought Hitler, despite
his other quirks, was a traditional German statesman in foreign
policy. Hitlers follies, mainly in secondary matters, he wrote,
276
so prejudice opinion against him that the commendable elements

of his program are frowned upon.80 Barnes warned that stories
about Hitlers domestic atrocities, which were trivialities, could
not be believed, especially by anyone who remembered the menda-
cious stories spread by British propaganda in the world war about
German horrors. Many readers of his column came to believe that
Barnes was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, or at least a mild partisan
of the Hitler regime, as the author of one letter of complaint put
it.81
Barnes directed most of his efforts to the writing of his consider-
able works of history and sociology, and he maintained his friend-
ship with Montelgas and von Wegerer and occasionally wrote some-
thing on reparations to be translated for the Berliner Monatshefte,
which had replaced the Kriegsshuldfrage after the end of the repa-
rations regime. Barnes also agitated on behalf of the histories of
Millis and Tansill, which aimed to expose the process by which
the Anglophilia of Wilson and his advisors had drawn the United
States into the war. When war broke out in 1939, Barnes called it
the direct result of the peace terms that ended the first war. War
guilt and reparations had made Hitlers career, and Barnes warned
that the United States might well end up repeating the same mistake
it had made in 1917. He urged that Americans put the interests
of the United States ahead of those of Britain or the Dutch East
Indiesit would not do for them to adopt for a second time the
pose of ersatz Englishmen. The idealism underlying this war,
he said, is even more bogus than that which supported the first
war.82 Barnes became a prominent member of the America First
Committee, and in 1941, at a Keep America Out of War Congress
at Berkeley, he spoke against Roosevelts policy alongside John T.
Flynn, A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas, Bertram Wolfe, and others.
After the war, Barnes made a determined attempt to initiate a con-
troversy about the American entry that featured the idea of a plot
at Pearl Harbor.83 He objected to the American bombing campaign
of 194445 and to perceived abuses, according to JCS 1067, in the
277
Th e J ou r na l
post-war administration of Germany. He opposed the Nuremburg

trials, whose verdict he considered a repeat of the war guilt thesis
of 1919, and he even doubted whether the Nazi extermination of
the Jews was to be believed, judging the whole thing in the light
of reparations payments, as in the past, now by Germany to Israel.
Maurice Bardeche and Paul Rassinier, who denied the Holocaust,
were, Barnes said, reviving some of the spirit and integrity shown
after the First World War by Alfred Fabre-Luce, George Demartial,
and their associates.84
Barnes greeted Taylors Origins of the Second World War as
one greets the return of a prodigal son, claiming that it was too
good to be true. Taylor, no doubt, cringed at Barness words.85
Despite Barness praise, he saw Taylors book as really only a
primer compared to David Hoggans 1961 Der erzwungene Krieg
(The Forced War). Hoggan, who had studied with Fay and Langer
at Harvard and later came under the spell of Porter Sargent and
Barnes,86 had been powerfully impressed by the case against Roo-
sevelts policy Tansill made in 1952 in Back Door to War. Hoggan
read deeply in German and Polish sources, and his booka sprawl-
ing account centered around a study of German-Polish relations
in 193839made the same case as von Wegerers and the edi-
tors of the German White Paper, and to a certain extent Taylors:
Hitler did not want war, even a local war with Poland, toward
which he was more moderate than Neurath or Rauschning. For
Hoggan, the real culprit was Halifax, whom Taylor found only
equivocal and inconsistent, muddling into war. No explosion
of British opinion occurred when Hitler invaded Prague in March
1939, Hoggan argued, but Halifaxs insistence made British policy
adamant about the guarantee to the Poles, stiffened them against
accommodation, and forced war upon poor Hitler.87 Hoggan was to
A.J.P. Taylor as Barnes was to Fay. Taylors nightmare was to be em-
braced by Barnes, but to be compared with Hoggan proved no less
macabre.
278
Conclusion
In the years immediately following the Second World War, it seemed
that revisionism could not stick. On the German side, it still has
not. Few historians say today that Hitler stumbled into war. On
the British side, however, Appeasement is no longer a motherless
child, and even accounts that are not particularly revisionist echo
the description of a British Empire embattled on many sides and
with no alternative but to attempt to buy off its enemies one by
one.88 The revisionist case has gathered steam with the appearance
of new material, Cabinet papers and other sources released after
relaxation in 1967 of the fifty-year restrictions on access to British
public records. But in 1965, before new sources emerged, Donald
Cameron Watt already finely argued the case. Chamberlain is now
usually considered to have been dealt a bad hand to play, and his
actions are regarded as reasonable, often realistic, and even shrewd.
Revisionist historians added greatly to knowledge of the climate
and background of British decision making. As Fay and the mod-
erate revisionists of the twenties showed, one could be educated by
revisionism even if one was not entirely convinced. Revisionism also
opened the flood gates before a greater torrentonce the nuances
of Chamberlains position were reconsidered, the next question to
ask was whether he, as opposed to Churchill, had not been right
all along. Perhaps it would have been prudent to seek a greater
Germany as a barrier against Soviet Russia; perhaps Churchill and
Eden had erred by their enthusiasm for a Grand Alliance.89 One
revisionist adds, if Chamberlain should have let Hitler pursue a
Teutonic crusade against the Slavs in 19389, then Stalin should
have been permitted his sphere of influence in East Central Europe
in 19457.90 Les revisionismes se touchent.
Is it fair, then, to say that revisionism has been the dominant
intellectual trend in European diplomatic history? Has the cause of
those who took us into the two world wars and the Cold War not
proved in the end to be meritorious in the eyes of the historians?
279
Th e J ou r na l
The interpretation of World War I as an accident, in keeping with

the revisionism of the twenties, has not lost its hold on the non-
professional reader, and this interpretation has continued to co-exist
with a Churchillian interpretation of World War II. The two models
were sometimes set against each other as alternative warnings, as for
John F. Kennedy in 196162. Is it useful to compare the origins of the
two world wars? When Taylor wrote his Origins, he meant exactly
such a comparison, which may have seemed to him a vindication
of hack diplomatic history. Watt, whose measured defense of the
Origins did much to bring about its eventual vindication, concluded
only that the parallels were closer than are admitted by orthodoxy,
but less than the revisionists like Taylor would claim.91
Unkind critics suggest the truly horrifying possibility that his-
torians, as a kind of deformation professionelle, tend to strive
unreasonably after originality, which may result in their over-
selling their analyses. Historians may be too ready to discard work
that is superceded. If so, H.W. Koch is perfectly right to rec-
ommend Fays Origins of the World War, a book published in
1928, to todays student.92 I would add Schmitt, Namier, Wheeler-
Bennett, and a good many others. It is useful for historians to re-
sist the pull of fashion and the allure of current definitive ac-
counts to try to appreciate how the story was once told. Such re-
sistance broadens perspectives and encourages sympathy for the
intelligent educated general reader, who refuses to embrace all
of the latest professional innovations. If the reading public re-
mains unconvinced about the latest trend in historical scholar-
ship, should it be taken as their fault alone? Or should historians
think again?
NOTES
My thanks to Jon Jacobson and Marc Trachtenberg for useful comments, and
especially to Gerhard Weinberg for our valuable exchanges and the suggestion that
I visit the Revisionist Archives at the American Heritage Center at the University
of Wyoming. The Sontag papers are at the library of the University of California,
Berkeley.
280
1. Arthur Marwick, All Quiet on the Postmodern Front, Times Literary Supplement
(23 February 2001).
2. Donald Cameron Watt, Could Anyone Have Deterred Him? Times Literary
Supplement (22 December 2000), 9.
3. Peter Bell is representative in calling Appeasement an intelligent response to in-
superable difficulties. Chamberlain, Germany, and Japan, 19331934 (London
and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), ix.
4. The pillars of the new history were Fritz Fischers Griff nach der Weltmacht and
A.J.P. Taylors Origins of the Second World War. One might also include George
Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston and Toronto: Little
Brown, 1961); and E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961.)
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1960) sold perhaps ten million copies and was translated into eight lan-
guages. It reinforced the current orthodoxyits success showed that the revival
of revisionism was confined to the historical profession. Geoffrey Baraclough said
that people like Shirer and himself were the club bores of the sixties: No one
wants to listen to us, and people whisper that we are obsessed, hysterical and
neurotically anti-German. See Gavriel Rosenfeld, The Reception of William L.
Shirers The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Ger-
many, Journal of Contemporary History (January 1994), 121. R.J.B. Bosworth,
Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), on pp. 1956, considering the effu-
sion of influential books from this time, cites E.P. Thompsons The Making of the
British Working Class of 1961 as a pivotal force linked to the rise of a new social
history.
5. C.E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), 191.
6. John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940). See also
Cato, (Michael Foot, Frank Owen) Guilty Men (New York: Frederick Stokes,
1940).
7. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Dell, 1962); The Proud Tower
(London: Macmillan, 1966), xvi.
8. Arno Mayer, Domestic Causes of the First World War, in Leonard Krieger and
Fritz Stern (eds.) The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo
Holborn (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967), ch.15; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The
German Empire, 18711918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, Dover, NH:
Berg, 1985); Fritz Fisher, World Power or Decline: The Controversy Over German
War Aims in the First World War, trans. Lancelot Farrar, Robert and Rita Kimber
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); D.C.B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of War
in 1914 (New York: St. Martins, 1983); Volker Rolf Berghahn, German and the
Approach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martins, 1973).
9. The older generation of historians had already been turning toward the idea.
William L. Langers Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1940, The Conflagration of
Ideas in Pre-War Europe, focused on the growth of a new revolutionary spirit,
integral nationalism, anti-Semitism, and cultural despair, developments arising ul-
timately from the conflict between science and religion. William L. Langer, In
and Out of the Ivory Tower (New York: Neale Watson, 1977), 1789. Raymond
Sontag had ended his Germany and England: Background of Conflict, 18481894
(New York: Appleton Century, 1938), with the thought that Greater Britain, like
Weltpolitik, was in part an escape or, as men thought, an answer to domestic dis-
content. (3412). We must turn, wrote A.J.P. Taylor, from the foreign offices
to the more profound forces which shape the destinies of men. The Rise and
Fall of Diplomatic History, Englishmen and Others (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1956), 84.
10. Lewis Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, 19381939 (London: Macmillan, 1948); In the
Nazi Era (London: Macmillan, 1952); Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration,
19361940 (London: Macmillan, 1961); John Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue
281
Th e J ou r na l
to Tragedy (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pierce, 1948); Elizabeth Wiskemann,
The Rome-Berlin Axis: A History of Relations Between Hitler and Mussolini (New
York and London: Oxford, 1949); Maurice Baumont, La faillite de la paix, 1918
1939 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946).
11. A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 1701.
12. A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (New York: Capricorn, 1961, first
ed. 1946).
13. Taylor, Personal History, 172. Eckhart Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics
in Germany, 18941901, trans. Pauline and Eugene Anderson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975); Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic,
18711918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). George Hallgarten, Imperi-
alismus vor 1914, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1963); Hans Gatzke, Germanys Drive
to the West: A Study of Germanys Western War Aims During the First World War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1950). The same view pervades Barrington Moores
classic analysis of paths to democracy, Social Origins of Democracy and Dicta-
torship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon,
1993). Adam Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 31213.
14. Taylor, Personal History, 172.
15. Quoted in Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intel-
lectuals (New York: Columbia University Press), 1963, 171.
16. Trevor-Roper, Rowse, Wiskemann, Hudson, Craig in Roger Louis (ed.), The
Origins of the Second World War: A.J.P. Taylor and His Critics (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1972), 4, 41, 11416; T.W. Mason, Some Origins of the Sec-
ond World War, Past and Present 29 (1964), 6787. See also Esmonde Robert-
son, The Origins of the Second World War: Historical Interpretations (London:
Macmillan, 1971); Esmonde Robertson and Robert Boyce (eds.) Paths to War:
New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martins,
1989); Gordon Martel (ed.) The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered:
The A.J.P. Taylor Thesis After Twenty-five Years (Boston and London, 1986), and a
second edition with some different contributors, The Origins of the Second World
War Reconsidered: A.J.P. and the Historians (London and New York: Routledge,
1990).
17. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Atheneum, 1961),
184. Taylor also wrote, When I say that Munich was a triumph for all that was best
in British life I mean that . . . enlightened people, men of the leftwhom perhaps I
equate too easily with all that was bestthat they had said that the inclusion of the
Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia was, in the words of one of them, Brailsford,
was the worst crime of the peace settlement of 1919. . . I mean by that a triumph for
all who had preached enlightenment, international conciliation, revision of treaties,
the liberation of nationalities from foreign rule, and so on. Quoted in Mehta, Fly
and the Fly Bottle, 1212.
18. E.D. Morel, Truth and the War (London: National Labour Press, 1916), xxiii,
1635. George Bernard Shaw argued that This hideous war of 191418 was at
bottom a fight between the capitalists of England, France and Italy on the one side
and of Germany on the other for the command of African markets. Quoted in
Norman Angell, After All (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1951), 141. It
was a case, wrote Shaw, of English Monroe-ism. George Bernard Shaw, What I
Really Wrote About the War (New York: Brentanos, 1932), v.
19. Morel, Truth and the War, 165. Hillaire Belloc, who regarded Morel as a Prussian
agent, countered with this couplet: Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, but
Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
20. H.N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (London: G. Bell, 1918), 28.
21. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, 7. Friedrich Naumann, Central Europe,
trans. Christabel Meredith (London: King, 1916).
22. H.N. Brailsford, Across the Blockade (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe,
1919), 162, 165.
282
23. H.N. Brailsford, Property or Peace (New York: Covici-Friede, 1934), 299, 300.
24. H.N. Brailsford, From England to America (New York and London: Whittlesey
House, 1940), 61, 85.
25. H.N. Brailsford, Our Settlement With Germany (New York: Hammondsworth),
1944, 29.
26. Another way of saying that international Communism, not merely a spillover from
the Russian revolution, grew from the anti-war propaganda of anarchists, paci-
fists, and radical social democrats. The Comintern began at Zimmerwald. See
my Ambiguities of Trotskys Leninism, Survey (Winter 1979); and F.L. Carsten,
War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: U.C. Press, 1982).
27. Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World, in Alan
Adler (ed.) Theses, Resolutions, and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the
Communist International (London: Ink Links, 1980), 28.
28. At first the Hobson-Brailsford-Lenin interpretation of imperialism had heavily in-
fluenced Taylor. He was to return to it in the fifties, when he wrote a sympa-
thetic and yet sharply critical re-consideration of British foreign policy dissent, The
Troublemakers. See A.J.P. Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Pol-
icy, 17921939 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957). Despite shortcomings, Taylor
concluded, Hobson and Brailsford are our sortthey had caused him to appre-
ciate the German position and the moral illegitimacy of the peace of Versailles.
Taylor studied further with Alfred Pribram in Vienna. He read Friedjung, von
Srbik, and Oncken on Bismarcks diplomacy in war and peace. See Alfred Pribram,
Austrian Foreign Policy, 19081918, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923); England
and the International Policy of the Great Powers, 18711914 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1931); Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Metternich (Munich: Bruckmann, 1925);
H. Friedjung, The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 18591866, trans. A.J.P.
Taylor and W.L. McElwee (London: Macmillan, 1934); Hermann Oncken, Das
deutsche Reich und die Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Barth,
1933); See John Boyer, A.J.P. Taylor and the Art of Modern History, Journal of
Modern History 49 (March 1977), 4072.
29. Frank Eyck, G.P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1982) 339; G.P. Gooch, Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy
(London: British Institute of International Affairs, 1923); A History of Modern
Europe, 18781919 (London and New York: Cassel, 1923); Franco-German Rela-
tions (London and New York: Longmans, 1923); Germany (London: Benn, 1925).
His memoirs are Under Six Reigns (London and New York: Longmans, 1959).
30. G.P. Gooch, British Diplomacy Before 1914 in the Light of the Archives, in
Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft (New York: Russell and Russell, 1942),
103.
31. John Fair, Harold Temperley (London and Toronto, Associated Universities Press),
192.
32. Gooch, British Diplomacy, 90. Goochs friend Hermann Lutz had used this
phrase in a pamphlet. See also T.G. Otte, Eyre Crowe and British Foreign Policy: A
Cognitive Map, in T.G. Otte and A. Pagedas, Personalities, War, and Diplomacy
(London: Frank Cass, 1997), 1437.
33. For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Taylor-Made History, National Interest
(Summer 1994); and Robert Cole, A.J.P. Taylor: The Enemy Within the Gates
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
34. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor, 117.
35. E.L. Woodward, Short Journey (New York: Oxford, 1942), passim, for criticism of
various shortcomings of the Grosse Politik; Great Britain and the German Navy
(London: Oxford, 1935), 40, 287 for accord with Crowe as against Sanderson.
36. William L. Langer, The Franco-Russian Alliance (Cambridge, MA, Harvard, 1929);
European Alliances and Alignments, 18711890 (New York: Knopf, 1931); The
Diplomacy of Imperialism, 18901902 (New York: Knopf, 1935).
283
Th e J ou r na l
37. A.J.P. Taylor, review of Langers Diplomacy of Imperialism, International Affairs,

November-December 1936, 9267.
38. That was the point of Taylors short review of Bismarckian diplomacy in Germanys
First Bid For Colonies, 18841885(London: Macmillan, 1938).
39. Taylor, Germanys First Bid For Colonies, 25.
42. A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 18091918 (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1948), 259; similar conclusions in E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London:
Macmillan, 1945).
43. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 18481918 (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1954), 4789, 484, 493. On the Straits Taylor parallels the account
of Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 2 vols. (New York and London:
Scribners, 1930); and even Schmitts earlier account, England and Germany, 1740
1914 (New York: Fertig, 1967, first ed. 1916), 400, 417. Revisionist arguments on
Poincare are discussed below. On the Balkan League, see also Raymond Sontags
review of the British documents on the Balkan wars, Journal of Modern History,
(June 1934), 215. Taylor leaves out of account neo-Slavism in Russia. See D.C.B.
Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1983), 153.
44. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 4967, 500, 519, 528.
45. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 573.
46. Quoted in Mehta, Fly and Fly Bottle, 178.
47. Barness notes on the Origins, Barnes papers, box 4; Barnes to William Neumann,
9 May 1961, Neumann Papers, box 1.
48. Barnes to Neumann, 25 April 1961, Neumann Papers, box 1. David Hoggan,
The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed (Costa Mesa, CA: Institute for
Historical Review, 1989, first ed. 1961). On Taylors links to the older revisionism
and to Hoggan, see P. A. Zhilin, A. S. Lakhushevskii, and E. N. Kulkov, Kritika
osnovnykh konseptsii burzhuaznoi istoriografii vtoroi mirovoi voiny (A Critique
of the Fundamental Conceptions of the Bourgeois Historiography of the Second
World War) (Moscow: Akademii Nauka, 1983), 401.
49. Sidney B. Fay, New Light on the Origins of the World War, American Historical
Review (July and October 1920), reference is to the July number, 619. Karl Kautsky
et al. Die deutschen Dokuments zum Kriegsausbruch (Charlottenburg, 1919); Karl
Kautsky, Wie der Weltkrieg enstand (Berlin: Cassirer, 1919); Kautsky was assistant
secretary of state in the German Republican government and the leading theorist of
German Social Democracy, a critic of the Russian revolution, and much hated by the
Russian Bolsheviks. He stood for the Eisenacher tradition of Bebel and Liebknecht
in German Marxism, which held that Germany must be built to include Austria,
or suffer terrible Prussian distortions. Kautsky sought to use the documents to
improve on the apologetic German White Book, which he called a white-wash
book, but he also wanted to defend against the Versailles treaty by blaming the
war on the Kaiser and Prussianism while claiming that Anschluss with Austria
would end Prussian predominance in the German state. Karl Kautsky, Germany
Since the War, Foreign Affairs (15 December 1922), 101, 105; Richard Gooss,
Diplomatische Aktenstucke zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges, 1914, 3 vols. (Vienna,
1919).
50. Fay, New Light, American Historical Review (July 1920), 618.
51. Fay, New Light, 628.
52. Charles Downer Hazen, Fifty Years of Europe, 18701919 (New York: Henry
Holt, 1919), 3212, 3668.
53. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War (New York and London: 1926),
xiii.
54. Barnes counted himself a soldier in a growing international phalanx: Morel,
Loreborn, Dickinson, Beazley in England; Fabre-Luce, Demartial in France; von
284
Wegerer, Brandenburg, Montelgas, Stieve, and Lutz in Germany; Fay and Langer
in the United States. See E. D. Morel, Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy: Fresh
Revelations (London: ILP, 1919); Lord Robert Loreborn, How the War Came
(London: Methuen, 1919); G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904
1914 (New York and London: Century, 1926); R. Beazley, Lord Greys Account of
Things, Foreign Affairs (December 1925); Alfred Fabre-Luce, La Victoire (Paris:
Nouvelle Revue Francais, 1924); Georges Demartial, La guerre de 1914: la mobi-
lization des consciences (Paris: Rieder, 1922); Alfred von Wegerer, Der Beginn des
Krieges (Berlin, 1924). Erich Brandenburg, Von Bismarck zum Weltkriege (Berlin:
Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft fur Politik und Geschichte, 1925); Max Montelgas,
British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (New York: Knopf, 1928); Friedrich
Stieve, Isvolsky and the World War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926); Hermann
Lutz, Lord Grey and the World War (New York: Knopf, 1928). A subsection of
the Weimar Foreign Ministry, the Kriegsschuldreferat, directed and financed an
array of publication efforts, including the periodical Kriegsschuldfrage and its suc-
cessor, Berliner Monatschefte (both edited by Von Wegerer), and Grosse Politik.
Von Wegerer and Lutz were on the Foreign Ministry payroll, and much of the
work on German innocence was left to them and to foreigners such as Barnes
and Fay. Imanuel Geiss, The Outbreak of the First World War and German War
Aims, Journal of Contemporary History (July 1966), 7578; Holger Herwig,
Of Men and Myths: The Use and Abuse of History and the Great War, in Jay
Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary Habeck (eds.) The Great War and the Twentieth
Century (New Haven and London: Yale, 2000), 3013.
55. William L. Langer, Izvolski and Poincare, The New Republic (15 April 1925);
Barnes, Genesis, 99100.
56. Langers letter to The New Republic (30 April 1924), 260. Langer praised Barnes as
one who has long taken his place among the leading writers on (diplomacy before
1914) and waged a courageous fight against staggering odds in this country. He has
reduced many of his opponents ad absurdem and the process is highly illuminating
and instructive. The Nation (5 December 1928), 264.
57. Barness book was called an intolerant plea for tolerance and Menckenized
history. The Barnes Papers contain a lengthy and warm correspondence between
H. L. Mencken and Barnes over 25 years. Menckens encouragement of Barness Re-
visionist efforts, particularly against that idiot Hazen, are coupled with his praise
of Genesis and his pro-German and occasionally anti-Semitic remarks. Barnes col-
lected all the commentary on his book, with full citations, in In Quest of Truth
and Justice: Debunking the War Guilt Myth (Chicago: National Historical Society,
1928). See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (New York and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 207215.
58. Taylor, Rise and Fall of Diplomatic History, 81.
59. Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1929), vol. 1,
14, citing for support Kautsky, Montelgas, and Gooch.
60. Fay, The Origins of the World War, vol. 1, 25; vol. 2, 479.
61. Fays dissuasion has failed to stick; instead, its opposite has held sway. Some
milestones of the preventive war thesis are Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan
(London: 1958); A.J.P. Taylor, War By Timetable: How the First World War Began
(London: Macdonald, 1969); L.L. Farrar, The Short War Illusion (Santa Barbara
and Oxford, Clio, 1973); and a considerable political science literature. See the
essays by Steven Van Evera and Jack Snyder in Steven Miller, Military Strategy
and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1985); but see
also the critique by Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1991), ch. 2. David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War in
Europe, 19041914, 13, casts doubt on the thesis of the land arms race leading to
war.
62. Origins of the World War, vol. 2, 556. See the discussion of the Comintern line,
above.
285
Th e J ou r na l
63. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, 2 vols. (New York and London:
Scribners, 1930), vol. 1, 147.
64. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, vol 2, 409.
65. Quoted in Michael Cochran, Germany: Not Guilty in 1914, Boston, Stratford,
1931, 4.
66. Yet Fay noted the disadvantages of permanent foreign office secretaries determin-
ing policy. Some, like Sir Eyre Crowe, said Edward Mead Earle, had preju-
dices which distorted their judgements. Earles lesson was that bureaucracy in the
American Department of State was a danger. A Wise and Upright Story of War
and Responsibility, The New Republic (5 December 1928), 735.
67. Michael Cochran, Germany Not Guilty in 1914; Charles Seymour, The Diplomatic
Background of the War, 18701914 (New Haven: Yale, 1916); Preston Slosson,
review of Barnes, Genesis in American Historical Review (January 1927), 319
20. Seymours volume was considered to have popularized the allied case, going
through ten printings by October 1918.
68. Raymond Sontag, European Diplomatic History, 18711932 (New York: Appleton
Century Crofts, 1933).
69. Barnes to Sontag, 6 February 1933, Sontag Papers. Sontag must have wondered at
this and other expressions of praise for Diplomatic History. A. Whitney Griswold
sent his encomia, with the added thought: I wish every one who shudders at the
name of Hitler could read it. Griswold to Sontag, 9 April 1935, Sontag Papers.
70. Sontag to Temperley, 17 December 1936, Sontag Papers. Salisburys biographer
and daughter Lady Gwendolyn Cecil sent Sontag a copy of Salisburys famous
memorandum on relations with Germany, dated 29 May 1901, in which Salisbury
casts doubt on the perils of British isolation. This is the last document in Harold
Temperley (ed.) Foundations of British Foreign Policy, 17921902 (Cambridge,
1938), 518520.
71. England and Germany: Background of Conflict, 18481894 (New York: Appleton
Century Crofts, 1938), xii. Hans Kohn, scholar of European nationalisms, objected
that the statement gave too much credit to German nationalism. Kohn to Sontag,
17 January 1939, Sontag Papers.
72. Sontag review of Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, Journal of Modern History
(June 1936), 229.
73. Linglebach to Sontag, 28 October 1938, Sontag Papers.
74. Walter Millis, The Road to War: America, 19141917 (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1935); Viewed Without Alarm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937); Charles
Callen Tansill, America Goes to War (Boston: Little Brown, 1938); C. Hartley
Grattan, Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard, 1929).
75. Bundy to Sontag, 15 February 1955, Sontag Papers. Sontag called Milliss Road
to War a too well disguised pacifist tract. American Historical Review (January
1936), 363. I am grateful to Marc Trachtenberg for calling my attention to this
review.
76. William L. Langer, In and Out of the Ivory Tower (New York: Neale Watson,
1977), 1689.
77. Langer review of Germany and England, New York Herald Tribune, 15 January
1939; Schmitts review, in American Historical Review (July 1939), compared the
talent for dissimulation of Bismarck and Hitler.
78. Sontag review of H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, a book he judged to be a
product of the school of Grattan, Millis, and Tansill, Saturday Review (3 June
1939), 1617.
79. O.J. Hale, Publicity and Diplomacy (New York and London: A.C. Crofts, 1940).
80. Barnes ms, August 1933, box 20, Barnes Papers.
81. William Robinson to Barnes, 20 September 1933, Barnes Papers.
82. Barnes to Alfred Baker Lewis, 26 February 1941, Barnes Papers.
83. Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.) Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace (Cantwell, ID:
Caxton, 1953).
286
84. Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism and Brainwashing: A Survey of the War-Guilt
Question in Germany After Two World Wars, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets
(New York: Arno, 1972), 12. On Bardeche and Rassinier, see Deborah Lipstadt,
Denying the Holocaust (New York: Plume, 1994), 5065. Barnes also expressed
admiration for the work of William Appleman Williams on the non-interventionist
tradition.
85. Taylor usually referred to the work of the American revisionists as interesting in its
way, but not much as scholarship, and in his bibliography for War By Timetable
he called Fay the most adroit defender of Germany and Barnes the most pre-
posterous. Nevertheless, Taylor, after publishing Origins in 1961, occasionally
acknowledged something of a debt to the revisionists, as when he referred to col-
lective security in the thirties as perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace.
A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 286.
86. Porter Sargent, Getting US Into War (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1941).
87. David Hoggan, The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, CA,
Institute for Historical Review, 1989 (first ed. 1961). Alfred von Wegerer, The
Origins of World War Two (New York: R.R. Smith, 1941). See the review of Der
erzwungene Krieg by Gerhard Weinberg in American Historical Review (October
1962), 1045.
88. Among many possible examples, the superb text for sixth form students preparing
A levels, Andrew Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War (Oxford and
Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1997).
89. David Carlton, Anthony Eden (London: A. Lane, 1981), 4802.
90. John Charmley, Churchills Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relation-
ship, 19401957 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1601). See the review
by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Visions and Revisions, New Leader (18 December
1995).
91. Donald Cameron Watt, Appeasement: The Rise of a Revisionist School, Political
Quarterly (April-June, 1965), 207.
92. H. W. Koch, introduction to The Origins of the Great War: Great Power Rivalry
and German War Aims (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1984), 6.
287

D'Agostino-2004-Journal of The Historical Society

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

D'Agostino-2004-Journal of The Historical Society

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

A n t h o n y D ' A g o s t i no

The Revisionist Tradition in

Historical revisionism may be an advance on previous

The Journal of The Historical Society IV:2 Spring 2004 255

generations, however much it has been disparaged, in G.M. Youngs

revisionist history. Do these recurrences amount to a pattern or even

Orthodoxies Old and New

politicians called him a Duce of Arab nationalism. Eden told Eisen-

The interpretation had an understandable appeal during the 1960s,

Taylor and Fischer

history, which became The Course of German History, his first

Taylor greeted the Fischer controversy as a vindication of his

Taylor and Brailsford, Namier and Woodward

Greys policy in 1914 could have prevented war either by constrain-

dispute remained private, and it did nothing to dampen Goochs

German policy, which he said had been formed by Thimme.39

only alternative to the restoration of German hegemony, at first

Teuton. Only in Germany was policy based upon the cauchemar

Taylor and Barnes, Fay and Schmitt

Barnes called the Fay articles a blinding flash on the road to

of documentary material that historians now had to digest, he had

the same evidence; and second, a mark of professional presentation

as Fay or Langer. Barnes wrote to him that Having been shabbily

of today is far closer to the ideals of the German nationalists of

dropped their attitude toward Appeasement. Langer had felt that

so prejudice opinion against him that the commendable elements

post-war administration of Germany. He opposed the Nuremburg

The interpretation of World War I as an accident, in keeping with

37. A.J.P. Taylor, review of Langers Diplomacy of Imperialism, International Affairs,

Potrebbero piacerti anche