Books like The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present

I read this book years ago and have now reread the first part, the one related to WW1. The “Present” alluded to in the title is the 1970s.Felix Gilbert (1905-1991) was a half German half British historian who became American in the 1930s. His mother was the granddaughter of the musician Felix Mendelssohn (so we should not be surprised at Gilbert's given name). His expertise was really the Renaissance and his book Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence is also in my TBR.I have limited myself to the years until the end of the First War, as part of my reading around the debacle that we are commemorating this year.This book is almost like a textbook. It is so very clear and so broad in its range. It is clear in the writing, in the development of ideas and arguments, and it touches on the Financial, Demographic, Political, Social, Cultural, and Military aspects of this complex period.After a few chapters on some general aspects, which were either shared or in which the European countries differed, he then groups these powers according to two big buckets. Some had a Parliamentary Government (UK, France, Spain and Italy) and some functioned under an Authoritarian Government (Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary). Once the players are presented he traces the Dance of Alliances in which dancers kept changing partners as each new diplomatic crises arose: the First Moroccan crisis, the Bosnian one, the Second Moroccan crisis, the First Balkan wars, etc, and onto the Final Outbreak.The war itself is developed with a similar clarity, discussing the geographic theatres as conceived by the various powers, and bringing in very plainly the determinant role the Russian revolution and the later entry of the US had on the conflict.Gilbert’s choice of introducing the players along the two axes of Parliamentary-Authoritarian proves very appropriate as he then later expounds on the domestic political changes undergone by the various countries. In all of them there was either an abrupt change of Cabinet or an even more abrupt transformation materialized in full-fledged revolutions.The book is also nicely illustrated, and most important, comes with a series of maps tracking the shifting of frontiers during the succeeding years of warfare.Gilbert's volume then for me acts as the neutral scaffolding on which I can place other readings with various interpretations of this war.