Events

CWSS Annual Lecture: John Horne, 'War as Revolution, 1904-23'

The Centre is privileged to have Professor John Horne deliver its annual lecture on the theme 'War as Revolution, 1904-23'.

Event details

Abstract

At the end of the 18th century, Revolution (both in political thought and also in practice - in America and France) became a new, dominant category. It redefined much else, including War. Revolution has remained important. But in the early 20th century, the political, industrial and technological capacities of western societies combined in a capacity for conducting war on a hitherto inconceivable scale of violence. At its core, World War One was the revelation of this new reality, which explains why it unleashed the forces that helped shape the rest of the century. War became the new dominant category, and it redefined much else, including Revolution. Between the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and 1923, when the cycle of violence surrounding World War One finally ended, War had become the Revolution of the 20th century.

John Horne is currently Leverhulme Visting Professor of History at Oxford University. He is emeritus Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he was Professor of Modern European History until 2015, and the founder of the Centre for War Studies in 2007, which he continues to direct.
A Member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is also on the Executive Board of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Of British-Australian parentage and upbringing, he did his undergraduate studies at the University of Adelaide and then at Balliol College, Oxford, before taking his D.Phil. at the University of Sussex. He went to work in Trinity College Dublin at the end of the 1970s. He has held visiting posts at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study, Germany, and Balliol College, Oxford.

He has written extensively on modern France and the transnational history of the Great War. Among his books are: (with Alan Kramer), German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven, Yale, 2001), translated into German (2003) and French (2005); (ed.) A Companion to World War One (Oxford, Blackwell-Wiley, 2010); (ed.) Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914-1915 (Paris, Tallandier, 2010); and with Robert Gerwarth, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is working on a history of the French experiences of the Great War.

Location:

Building:One Bateman Lecture Theatre