Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
World War 1 is more interesting to me because it is a war that could easily have never happened, and because it destroyed the imperial system, and eventually every European empire that existed within that system - a system that at the time was unchallenged, and might have endured still had not it destroyed itself from within. Practically every political development of note in the last hundred years had its roots in this war, from obvious ones like the rise of totalitarian states (Lenin's Russia of 1917 was the first), to less obvious ones like the establishment of Israel from the British mandate of Palestine, which would never have happened had the Ottoman Empire not been dismembered by the Allies following the war.
It's difficult for us to comprehend the power that Europe had over the rest of the world just this short time ago. The British, French, and Russian empires controlled over half the world's land mass and population between the three of them. The USA was an isolationist backwater that was pretty well impotent and unimportant outside the Americas. China was divided into spheres of influence by a consortium of Western powers and had essentially no central government to prevent those powers from doing whatever they wanted within those spheres. And all of it changed or ended because of the war.
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Don't forget the Austria-Hungry Empire was an incredibly powerful empire in its time, and though it was declining it was still a force to be dealt with.