The World War and What Was Behind It; Or, the Story of the Map of Europe

Written in 1918 while the wounds of the Great War still bled, this book represents one of the earliest American attempts to make sense of the senseless. Bénézet had been giving talks to ordinary Americans in 1914, trying to explain why Europe had exploded into war, and discovered something troubling: most listeners could not name the countries of Europe, could not distinguish between Germans and Austrians, understood nothing of the ethnic tensions simmering across the continent. This book was his answer. He argues that the war's roots lay not in the assassination of an archduke, but in centuries of map-making by empires that drew borders without regard for the peoples who lived within them. The partition of Poland serves as his damning case study: Frederick the Great simply proposed to his rivals that they each take a slice, and poor Poland vanished from the map. This is a book about the violence of arbitrary lines, and why understanding those lines matters for anyone hoping to prevent the next catastrophe.