What were the causes of WW1, please especially focus on the armsrace (LONG EXPLANATION PLEASE)?
Perhaps the two best books I have read on this are Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” and Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism.” Tuchman masterfully details how a series of inter-locking and often secret treaties set the stage for conflict. Kennedy cites the many causes for a developing rivalry between Germany and England, mostly in the form of a naval race and colonial disputes, that led the latter, irrespective of her lack of treaty commitments to France, to enter the war on France’s sie once hostilities broke out. Taken in concert, the story line goes something like this: The unification of Germany, largely the consequence of the very able machinations of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, served to fill a power vacuum that had long existed in the middle of Western Europe when Germany was fragmented into 70 or so lesser states whose weakness was often exploited by their neighbors, particularly France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, coincident with the eli
