World War I

World War I is one of the deadliest conflicts in history: around 9 million people died in battles and over 5 million civilians died as a result of military occupation, bombings, hunger, and diseases. Millions of people perished due to the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire and the 1918 flu pandemic. Despite a vast amount of research (by the end of 2012, around 60,000 works on World War I had been published worldwide), the question of the preconditions and causes of this war remains one of the most debated. Historians continue to argue about the reasons for the war, the level of preparedness of the participating countries, and the responsibility for triggering the conflict. Each side blames the other. Why did this terrible event happen at the beginning of the 20th century? What were the deep-rooted causes of the conflict? What consequences did it bring about? Read about this and much more in the new book of the 'Complete History of Eras' series.