The transatlantic basis of war and peace, 1914–1917

ABSTRACT

The following paper is a review essay of Daniel Larsen’s Plotting for Peace. It begins with a brief overview of the book, which highlights its seminal insights on the financial quandaries of the Anglo-American international trade relationship during the First World War, and their galvanising effect on British strategy and American peace mediation symbolised by the House-Grey memorandum. It then traces the wide-ranging historiographical significance of Larsen’s placement of British strategy in the context of the balance of payments. Finally, the review offers some general criticisms of the book. In particular, the shortcomings of its American diplomatic and political history.

KEYWORDS:

• First world war
• international trade
• house-grey memorandum
• british strategy
• woodrow wilson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Daniel Larsen, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021).

² See for example Vincent Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1970), 193–223; Kathleen Burk, Britain, America, and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Allen & Unwin 1985), 54–76; Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), 815–992 and ‘The Battle of the Somme and British Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 21/1 (1998), 88; and Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London: Penguin Books 2014), 37–48.

³ Inaugurated by John Terraine, Sir Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (London: Cassel & Co 1963). See also Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: First World War Myths and Realities (London: Sharpe Books 2018) and William Philpott, War of Attrition: Fighting the First World War (New York: Overlook Press 2015).

⁴ Andrew Lambert, The British Way of Warfare: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy (New Haven: Yale University Press 2021), 307–338.

⁵ Wilson reiterated the principle only a month later in his ‘Bases of Peace’ memorandum, see Carl Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh 1969), 21; Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven: Yale University Press 2022), 82–87.

⁶ Harold and Margaret Sprout, Toward a New Order of Sea Power: American Naval Policy and the World Scene, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1940), 59–69.

⁷ John W. Coogan, End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Cornell: Cornell University Press 1981).

⁸ Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality 1914–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2007).

⁹ National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), Official Reports of the Second, Third and Fourth National Foreign Trade Conventions (1915–1917), passim.

¹⁰ Carasso, Investment Banking, 202–203; NFTC, Official Report (1916), 428–440.

¹¹ See McAdoo to Wilson August 21, 1915 in Arthur S. Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 34, July 21-September 30, 1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980), 275–279.

¹² Martin Horn, Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War (McGill-Queen University Press 2002), 103–4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Nicholson

John Nicholson is currently a PhD student in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. His dissertation concerns the influence of organised American businessmen on the foreign policy of the Woodrow Wilson administration. His wider research interests include economic warfare, German and British military history, and insurgency.