Harper's Pictorial Library of the World War, Volume XII: The Great Results of the War

This volume captures the world's most prominent economist grappling with history's most devastating conflict in real time. Irving Fisher, writing in the immediate aftermath of the Armistice, turns his analytical powers toward the economic earthquake that has reshaped civilization. The book examines the Treaty of Versailles and its catastrophic financial implications, the desperate inflation devouring European savings, and the desperate, hopeful experiment of the League of Nations. Fisher's central argument remains startlingly relevant: nations cannot simply treat the symptoms of economic collapse but must diagnose its causes. The text documents how wartime finance, government control, and monetary policy had fundamentally altered the contract between states and their citizens, and it maps the uncertain terrain of reconstruction that lay ahead. Foreword by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. This is primary source history at its most immediate: a document written by someone who lived through the upheaval and sought to make sense of it before the lessons faded.