The World in the Twentieth Century (7th Edition)

Question: World War 1 is said to have been the first 'total' war. What does that mean? And what does it mean for people and nations trying to pick up the pieces and resume normal life? Answer: There had been many wars between the First World War but they were regional in nature and only some nations or kingdoms were involved in such battles. However, in contradiction to the above, the First World War was a total war as it unprecedented in terms of geographical coverage and also the involvement of the nations. In the First World War, all the imperialist nations were involved and through their involvement their colonies were also involved in this gruesome wars which went on for years. Even though the war commenced in Europe and was fought for domination amongst the colonist forces, its spread was essentially global with Asia, Africa and Latin America all part of the war as they were forced to enforce the positions taken by their colonizers (Brower and Sanders, 2013). This meant great misery for the people as earlier the disturbances were essentially restricted to a particular region and hence therefore people could migrate to nearly areas or could get support from neighbouring areas. However, this was not the case here as the war had global implications and hence virtually no place left unaffected (Brower and Sanders, 2013). The misery was particularly worse for the colonies whose economic and human resources were drained in the war their colonizers were fighting to keep them under their control. There was massive shortage of essential goods which fuelled inflation. Also, there was incidence of various diseases and epidemics which resulted in massive causalities. Employment was also adversely impacted as the focus of the colonizers was on producing more guns and ammunitions at the cost of the basic goods (MacMillan, 2014). References Brower, D. R. and Sanders, T. (2013), The World in the Twentieth Century (7th edition), New York: Pearson MacMillan, M. (2014), World War I: The War That Changed Everything, Retrieved on September 1, 2016 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-war-i-the-war-that-changed-everything-1403300393