Historian Maartje Abbenhuis, current fellow at NIAS, convenes a workshop on rethinking the concept of ‘total war’ as it applied to the First World War.
Aim of the workshop
Bringing together experts from around the Netherlands on colonial history and the history of war, the workshop will focus on rethinking the concept of ‘total war’ as it applied to the First World War. The main purpose of the workshop is to engage with the book project NIAS Fellow Maartje Abbenhuis is working on entitled Global War, Global Catastrophe: Neutrals, Belligerents and the Transformation of the First World War (with Prof. Ismee Tames, NIOD: due at Bloomsbury Publishing in December 2020), which has as its main focus reinserting global experiences of war (neutral, belligerent, colonial and metropole) into the mainstream history of the war. Participants will read draft chapters in advance and spend the morning considering the historical and historiographical implications of key interpretative concepts like ‘total war’, ‘modern war’, ‘global war’, ‘colonial war’.
The expected outcome of the workshop is to give targeted and early feedback on the ideas that Prof. Tames and I are presenting in the book, with an eye to improving its focus and critical application.