1 | Page 1914 in World Historical Perspective: The Uneven and Combined Origins of the First World War Alexander Anievas a.anievas@gmail.com St. Anne's College University of Oxford (forthcoming, European Journal of International Relations) Please do not quote without permission. Introduction 1 Nearly a century after the ‗lights went out‘ in Europe the causes of World War I (WWI) remain a topic of immense intellectual attention and lively debate. Existing scholarly literature on the subject is ‗probably the largest for any war in human history‘ representing the ‗the most analyzed and contested case‘ within the study of International Relations (IR) (Hamilton and Herwig, 2004: 1; Copeland, 2001: 56). 1 Despite the immensity of literature, the ‗long debate‘ remains mired within unhelpful methodological dichotomies. Whether a Primat der Aussenpolitik versus Primat der Innenpolitik approach best explains the war continue to dominate debates. Here, the historiographical literature intersects with and informs IR and social theory, which remain ensnared within these binary frameworks. Traditional historiographical and realist studies generally explain the war from the perspective of a European-centered changing distribution of power. They focus on developments within the international system and their effects on foreign policymaking and military strategizing. For all their differences, classical Marxist theories of imperialism also view the war‘s origins as a structural crisis, one nonetheless rooted in a very different system: world capitalism. A problem common to these systemic approaches is that they elide the question of agent differentiation in explaining variations in state action. Consequently, there is a tendency among Marxist and realist schools of thought (particularly defensive realism) to conceive WWI as exemplary of an ‗inadvertent war‘. 2 1 Acknowledgements: I‘d like to thank Jamie Allinson, Tarak Barkawi, Colin Barker, Duncan Bell, Stacey Gutkowski, Nivi Manchanda, Kamran Matin, William Mulligan, Gonzalo Pozo-Martin, Rick Saull, and Brendan Simms for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as to two anonymous referees. Special thanks must go to Justin Rosenberg for reading multiple drafts and for his infinite patience in answering my seemingly endless stream of questions. I am also grateful to the participants at the ‗Uneven and Combined Development and Contemporary World Politics‘ symposium held at Queen Mary University (February 2011) and the PhD Colloquium at the University of Cambridge (November 2010).