At the beginning of the twentieth century, the European powers engaged in a massive arms race that was part of industrial innovation. Even as sophisticated weaponry was one key to advancing global conquest, it also became part of national rivalries including economic, military, and imperial ones. Several comparisons offer themselves, not only in terms of the rates of increase but in terms of the military sectors that saw those increases. There is no doubt that the arms race stoked the fires of war, but historians often ask whether better diplomacy could have prevented the outbreak of the global conflict in 1914. The enormous military buildup, however, made some people living in the early twentieth century, as well as some later historians, see war as inevitable.

Questions to Consider