Planning Armageddon

Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War Hardcover – November 21, Lambert offers a radical reinterpretation of British strategy in the early part of World War I, particularly in regard to the relationship between economic and sea power.
Table of contents

• Planning Armageddon — Nicholas A. Lambert | Harvard University Press
• British Economic Warfare and the First World War
• Planning Armageddon

William Philpott; Planning Armageddon: Most users should sign in with their email address. If you originally registered with a username please use that to sign in. To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account?

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Without being bogged down in the morass of World War I politics and battlefield bound military history, which until today has not led to an understanding of why and how the war broke out, the author describes for the first time a much more significant dimension to the war: In the beginning of the 20th century for the first time in history, the world was connected in three critical ways, international finance, communication, and logistics.

Lambert's framework finally allows to understand clearly why Germany and Great Britain were battling for supremacy in the United States and Latin America. Literally on the day of the Declaration of War on August 4, , England cut the transatlantic cables between Germany and the U. This precipitated the submarine war, the fight against neutral commerce, and the desperate German sabotage campaign in the U. Planning Armageddon is one of the best works ever produced about the Great War.

An excellent story of a little-known situation. This is not your grandfather's naval history book, and for good reason. Lambert scoured through the archives to recreate the bureaucratic environment that occupied the minds of British officials of the day. This book significantly rewrites the history of British grand strategy prior to the outbreak of World War I. Lambert uses a perplexity of original, mutually-supportive primary sources to describe a strategy which was buried in history.

British war planners sought to leverage their virtual monopoly of global shipping, finance, and communications to initiate a collapse of the global economic system in order to swiftly destroy their German rivals. Unintended consequences linked to the complexity of the legal, financial and diplomatic factors promptly forced the government to abandon the strategy. Planning Armageddon debunks conventional understanding of British history. While there are many sharp criticisms of the book, none have address Lambert using primary sources.

Simply put, Lambert's arguments are thoroughly supported by unmatched archival research.

This is a really frustrating book. Lambert promises a "radical" new interpretation that will overturn everything that has gone before it. On virtually every page we are told how clever the author is -- it seems that only he is capable of penetrating the veil of secrecy that has been imposed on the subject. This gets tiresome in a hurry. He might be forgiven if he delivered the goods, but the book repeatedly falls short.

British Economic Warfare and the First World War

Like so many sensationalist books, this one fails to back up its claims. In fact, most of the story outlined here has been told before. To a large extent, Lambert is simply providing more detail. This might have made the book a useful one, but Lambert is not content to build on earlier scholarship, his goal is to bury it! Unfortunately, the "radical" argument that the British Admiralty developed secret plans to win a rapid victory through economic warfare is not really supported by the evidence Lambert provides.

There is no shortage of footnotes to give the work the appearance of authority and scholarly rigor, but this is mostly misdirection.

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It requires a real leap of faith to accept Lambert's overall interpretation. Shawn Grimes' book on British naval planning provides a well documented look at what the British Admiralty was really doing during this period, and it's not what Lambert says it is. Planning Armageddon is not completely worthless, however. It offers an interesting narrative and some insight on certain issues.

The problem is knowing which parts are reliable, and which have been mangled to support the author's "Radical" agenda. See all 4 reviews. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: Naval Policy and History. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime.

Nicholas Lambert's subject is not naval history at all in the classic sense but British grand strategy; how the British planned to fight before , and why in the event they found themselves making war in ways they had previously decided were undesirable, unthinkable or fatal Contrary to what almost all other historians have written, Lambert shows that the Cabinet had drawn sharply back from what in had briefly looked like committing the bulk of the British army to a Continental campaign. From , Britain's war strategy was a form of economic blockade, based less on the physical interception of merchant ships at sea than on the exploitation of Britain's dominance of shipping and finance.

Not the least important and original part of this book is its reconstruction of this strategy from the fragmentary and ambiguous evidence which has led so many other scholars in different directions Time alone will tell whether Nicholas Lambert, who has demolished the ideas of so many other scholars, is himself vulnerable to revision. Few will match the massive scope and depth of his research. Rodger Journal of Maritime History Factfulness Hans Rosling Inbunden. Skickas inom vardagar.