This volume originated in an international conference held in Trinity College, Dublin, in June 1993, with the title ‘Mobilizing for “total” war: society and state in Europe, 1914–1918’. It is, however, both less and more than the conference proceedings – less, in that it only includes half the papers delivered on that occasion, as a result both of the economics of publishing and of editorial decisions to concentrate on particular countries and themes; but more, in that nearly all the essays that follow have been revised (in some cases substantially so) to take account of the requirements of a book that seeks to examine comparatively a particular process – that of the cultural and political mobilization of European societies during the First World War. The book, in other words, represents a further stage of reflection and selection from the conference. It is a genuinely international effort, with contributions in almost equal numbers from historians working in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the USA. The hope is that it will take its place in a sequence of collaborative volumes published in the last ten years which have used a comparative approach in order to understand the common, or systemic, features of the Great War while measuring the particularities of national cases.

Two points need clarifying on the editorial thinking behind the book. Firstly, many fine papers delivered at the conference do not appear here simply because they did not fit the volume's tightened focus. Some have been published elsewhere. One entire session of the conference, devoted to the social and political implications of the provisioning of civilians in different countries, has appeared in French translation.