“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” said British statesman Edward Grey at the outset of war in 1914, “we shall not see them again in our lifetime.”  This course will study the causes for this unprecedented, and at the time, to many Europeans living in cultural rapport and economic interdependence, unthinkably engulfing conflict.  This course is not a history of its combat, but a patient consideration of its causes.  The course will ultimately concern the crises of the summer of 1914, but the bulk of our study will consider imperial, economic, nationalist, and arms race tensions in the decades prior to the war.  Our scope is large, but the history nearly guarantees no tedium; we’ll be helped by excellent writers, carefully selected in manageable readings: among them, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, E.J. Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, and John Keegan’s The First World War.