WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall

Steel, Coal, Rail: When Industry Changes War (why the scale becomes unstoppable) Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And if you’ve been listening to the first steps of this season, you can already feel what’s happening: the map is changing, the alliances are beginning to stiffen, the great powers are recalibrating around a new Germany, and everyone is quietly...

Germany Rises, France Remembers (humiliation, revanche, and the psychology of a wounded nation) Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Last time we began in 1870 because the catastrophe doesn’t begin with a match. It begins with a room filling with powder. And in 1871, that powder doesn’t just sit there. It settles into the lungs of Europe. It becomes memory. It...

1870: The Spark Before the Fire (Franco-Prussian War and the birth of a new Germany) Hello and welcome. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And today we begin where the modern catastrophe starts to take shape—not with a gunshot in Sarajevo, not with a trench, not with a dictator on a balcony, but with a war that looks, on the surface, almost old-fashioned. Two armies, two states, a c...

About WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall This is a story about why war happens when nobody truly wants it—until suddenly, everyone does. If you grew up with the usual explanation, you were told the First World War begins with a gunshot in Sarajevo. A young man steps forward, fires two rounds, and the world falls apart. It’s neat. It’s cinematic. It has a villain, a victim, a turning point, a...