The Inter-War Crisis

This book presents the history of a civilization scrambling to save itself from looming disaster. By 1918 an entire generation felt themselves poised at a crossroads: a choice between chaos and decline or a new world political and economic order and despite the yearning for peace, war appeared unavoidable. Chapters cover the intellectual, scientific and cultural responses fo an age of anxiety and fear, the Russian Revolution and the Great Crash of 1929, how dictatorship came to replace democracy and the irresistable slide toward a second world war. Fully updated, this new edition features expanded sections on gender, culture and social policy as well as empire and globalisation.

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has authored and edited more than 30 books on the European dictators, the Second World War and the history of air power, includingOrigins of the Second World War (2016, fourth edition), The Air War 1939-1945 (2006, second edition),Why the Allies Won (2006, second edition), The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004),which won both the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for History in 2005, and1939: Countdown to War (2009). His book The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (2013) won a Cundill Award for historical literature.