Tans Lecture | How Europe Went to War in 1914 | Christopher Clark | 2014

The European continent was at peace on the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek arrived at Sarajevo railway station. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. In its complexity and swiftness of evolution, the “July Crisis” of 1914 is without parallel in world history. How was this rapid escalation possible? Why did an international system that had maintained continental peace for generations fail to prevent war in 1914? When did war become inevitable?

In this lecture, Christopher Clark revisits the century-old debate on the outbreak of the First World War, highlighting the complexity of a crisis that involved sudden changes in the international system, the entanglement of regional and continental tensions and rapid interactions between a plurality of great powers. Drawing on his own research and on recent trends in the historical literature, he proposes fresh perspectives on an old question.

Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. Catharine’s College. His best-selling history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600 – 1947, won several prestigious prizes and its critical reception gave him a public profile that reached well beyond the academic world. His latest book is a study of the outbreak of the First World War: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.