Generally speaking, books of history are a high-risk, high-reward reading proposition. If executed well, a work of history can illuminate an aspect of the past you knew nothing about and make you realise your friends often have no idea what they’re talking about when they quote Abraham Lincoln at keg parties. But if executed poorly, history books can be a mess of contradictions, confusion, and frustration.
Certain history books are more susceptible to the latter category than the former. One repeat offender is the class of books discussing specific military battles. For these tomes, the trouble is often the author’s scope: what should they focus on? Perhaps they should focus on the individual soldiers marching forward. Or maybe they should discuss the decisions from battlefield commanders? Or better yet, why not both? Most authors choose to focus on everything about the battle great and small. Unfortunately, focusing on both gives the reader an experience similar to watching a movie where the television can’t decide if it wants to display the movie in full-screen or wide-screen format and flicks back and forth. It’s jarring and unpleasant.
This is why today’s book by today’s author is so special: not only does he avoid getting bogged down in the weeds, he synthesises more information than I believed possible on subjects so wide in scope that it’s frankly impressive it all fit into one book.
Not only that, the subject is easily the hardest for any historian: the outbreak of World War 1.
This is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War in 1914 by Sir Christopher Clark.
What It’s About
The Sleepwalkers is among the newest and, in my view, most definitive works on the outbreak of World War 1 aimed at a general readership. This is not to say it is a light read as it clocks in at a healthy 600+ pages. The Sleepwalkers takes the reader through the events, some remembered but most forgotten, that weighed on the minds of the ensemble cast of monarchs and government ministers in the decades and years leading up to the July Crisis of 1914. By the end of the book, you will realise that few if any of the players in this drama had any idea of what they were doing. Indeed, they sleepwalked into the painful birth of modernity.
The Sleepwalkers is a panoramic book of the highest caliber. Every participant country is granted the appropriate amount of attention. France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Serbia and Germany are all thoroughly examined together rather than examined in isolation. Clark had access to every archive, one of the privileges of being the Regis Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, so he couldn’t go into the project with any preconceived notions of what he would find.
The result is a thoroughly original and essential read for historically-minded readers.
Why It’s An Essential Read
Where to start with this monster? The Sleepwalkers is an essential read because it eloquently explains the most complicated event in history, a feat that I frankly thought wasn’t possible. This is no understatement. To illustrate the point for non-historians, consider the difference between asking someone how World War I happened vs how World War II happened. Even the most historically illiterate person can say World War II happened because Hitler was running the show in Germany and the other states didn’t like that.
But ask someone how World War I happened and the best you’ll get is “someone shot the Archduke and everyone got mad at each other for some reason.” The complexity of the event should be intimidating even for the most talented historian.
Adding to Clark’s woes was the 100 years of books, articles, and historical material written about the war. Famous historians like Barbara Tuchman and Fritz Fischer had all produced famous works which ought to have rendered any new volume irrelevant. Clark admitted this in the book, noting that one book written twenty years before he started writing The Sleepwalkers estimated there to be 25,000 books (!) on World War I already in existence…just in English. The amount of information should have crushed him and doomed this project.
And yet, in spite of that, Clark produced a fresh, original book about a subject everyone had already written about. The key is in the subtitle: How Europe Went To War In 1914. The operative word is ‘how’. Notice that Clark didn't ask “why did that happen” because that’s what the 25,000 other books did.
Asking ‘how’ also solved a different problem: increasing reader accessibility. The issue with a book on a complex historical topic, especially World War I, is trying to get somebody who knows nothing about it excited enough to give it a read. If Clark had chosen to ask “why” he would have implicitly assumed the reader knew something about World War I…which might not have been the case. Asking “how” forced him to put the causal reasons and relevant events in a coherent order, the order most likely to entice novices to this subject.
For that reason alone, the book is worth the time of any literate person, even those who might only be faintly interested. To be sure, The Sleepwalkers is still a book with a high degree of difficulty attached to it. There’s no escaping the complexity of the subject, so trying to read the book in a loud coffee shop is a bad idea.
Conclusion
The historian Sir Christopher Clark is an underrated writer who I believe deserves more attention. Being a Cambridge historian is useful in one sense as it lets him write these magnificent books, but on the other hand, I feel like it leaves him out of the relevant network of influencers that might get the book in front of more people.
That aside, The Sleepwalker’s success at achieving a nearly impossible task earns it a rare “essential read” label on this site.