A lot of people, including myself,
have found the study of World War
I to be a little bit confusing sometimes.
And I think the reason is is the world
was very different leading up to World War I than it is today.
And to some degree, the modern world we live in
was shaped to a large degree by Word War
I and then later World War II.
And just to get a sense of what our modern world looks like,
and especially what modern Europe looks like,
this is a map of modern Europe.
But the interesting thing about this map
is instead of being the traditional map that you
normally see where you just see the country boundaries,
the state boundaries, this has the state boundaries right
here.
And these little gray lines, these show
where France ends and, say, Switzerland or Germany or Italy
begins.
But overlain on top of that we see
where the languages are spoken.
So this is actually much more focused on,
where do people speak French.
Where do people speak German?
And the thing that you will notice is, for the most part,
throughout most of Europe, today's boundaries,
the modern boundaries closely, closely match
up to where languages are spoken.
There are a few areas where there
is more of a disconnect with Catalan and Spanish.
And actually, that is leading to some issues.
But for the most part, in modern Europe,
the country boundaries and the linguistic boundaries
or the national boundaries kind of match up.
If we rewind to the world of entering into World War I,
things were very different.
Some of the boundaries we recognize.
We recognize the United Kingdom.
Well, Ireland has since been carved out.
But we recognize it as not being that
different than it is today.
Spain is not that different.
France is not that different.
Italy is not that different.
Germany is a good bit different.
In fact, if you take Germany, the German Empire entering
into World War I, or the early 1900s,
around 1914, between them and the Russian Empire,
they essentially were swallowing up a bunch of linguistic groups
right over here that now have their own independent states.
The other thing that you might notice
is this huge state called Austria-Hungary, or often
called the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And people say, well, there's-- I'm familiar with some of these
nations that have the word Austria and Hungary in them,
but I'm not-- what is this Austro-Hungarian Empire?
And what's interesting about it is it really was an empire.
It was really trying to cobble together
all of these folks that spoke all different-- all
the different types of ethnicities.
This is kind of a zoom-in of the Austro-Hungarian Empire leading
into World War I.
And the Austro-Hungarian Empire is probably the most important
thing to understand if we're trying
to get a sense of how World War I started, because leading up
to World War I, in 1908, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.
And that's another confusing thing for many of us,
that that's actually one country.
It's called Bosnia and Herzegovina,
or I guess for the Austro-Hungarians that was now
one region that they annexed.
And what's interesting about that
is if you look at the linguistic map,
you see that this whole region right over here
speaks a very similar-- essentially, they're
dialects of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian.
They're all very linguistically and ethnically connected,
so this whole region right over here
is linguistically and ethnically connected.
And what we'll see is, is that this desire
to connect people with similar ethnic or linguistic roots--
linguistic backgrounds is what led to a lot of what happened
in World War-- or at least was the spark that
fueled, that people sometimes say,
the powder keg of World War I.
The other thing that was a very different
or the other country or nation or empire
that we are not used to today is the Ottoman Empire.
So if we go today, we see the country
of Turkey, which is on the Anatolian Peninsula.
So this is Turkey right over here.
This is modern-day Turkey.
But entering into World War I in 1914,
Turkey was essentially part of the remnants of the Ottoman
Empire.
So this right over here is what the Ottoman Empire looked like.
This right over here is roughly modern-day Turkey.
But the Ottoman Empire consisted of modern-day Turkey
and much of the modern Middle East.
So much of-- especially, much of the Arab-- especially
the Arab world around Syria, Iraq, Lebanon,
much of what where modern-day Israel is,
some of Saudi Arabia.
And this was really the dying state of the Ottoman Empire.
At its peak, it controlled much of the Muslim world.
It controlled Northern Africa as well as all the stuff
you see here and even a little bit of Persia
and actually a good bit of the Balkans, southeast Europe,
and even Greece at the peak of its Ottoman Empire.
And now I'm talking about going hundreds and hundreds of years
back into the past.
So when we enter into World War II,
we don't have a world where people are,
where states are defined by linguistic boundaries
or by ethnic boundaries.
To a large degree, we had these empires
that had existed as we exited out of the 1800s.
And these empires were not just in Europe,
like the Austro-Hungarian Empire or not just in the Middle East,
like the Ottoman Empire.
Right over here is an empire map at around that point in time.
And you see, probably the most dominant feature here
is the British Empire.
That's in this pink color.
So British, that's the United Kingdom.
Great Britain would just be this right over here.
You throw in Ireland.
You get the United Kingdom.
Great Britain was in control of the Indian,
the entire Indian subcontinent. It was essentially
although nominally Egypt was somewhat independent,
Great Britain had a huge amount of influence here.
Obviously places like Canada and Australia and New Zealand
were under control of or a part of the British Empire.
What a lot of people don't realize
is a significant amount of Africa as well.
A significant amount of Africa was also under British control.
And what we have running up into World War
I is kind of a race for empire, an arms
race between the major powers of Europe.
In particular, you have Great Britain, or the United Kingdom,
that obviously had a vast empire.
The sun never sets on the British Empire.
And it wasn't ever setting on this empire
that we just saw here.
And the German Empire was also starting to flex its muscle
and starting to militarize.
And the more that the German saw that the British were
militarizing, the more that the British--
the more that the Germans would want to militarize and vice
versa, and you just had this arms race.
And they were all trying to build their empires.
So the Germans, they were present in Africa.
You have the French who were present in much of Africa.
And you have to remember all of this in context.
Some of this empire building was, frankly, just about ego
and just about spreading someone's influence,
spreading their power.
A lot of it was based on ethnic beliefs about civilization.
I guess these were rationalization to take control
of other people's resources.
And a lot of it was we were in a world
where access to resources-- in particular, access
to raw materials and especially oil-- could, to some degree,
define whether a power was a power at all.
And so with that, I think we have a pretty good basis
for the state of affairs as we enter into World War I.