Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War

Product Description

*Winner of the 2013 Norman B. Tomlinson Prize

Before the First World War, the British Admiralty conceived a plan to win rapid victory in the event of war with Germany–economic warfare on an unprecedented scale. This strategy called for the state to exploit Britain’s effective monopolies in banking, communications, and shipping–the essential infrastructure underpinning global trade–to create a controlled implosion of the world economic system.

Review

Lambert offers a radical reinterpretation of British strategy in the early part of World War I, particularly in regard to the relationship between economic and sea power… This book is more than a work of conventional naval history. [Lambert] is a master of bureaucratic politics, and I am not aware of a better account of how the Whitehall system worked in relation to strategic planning between 1904 and 1915…Lambert has made a major contribution to our understanding of Britain’s role in World War I.
–G.C. Peden (
American Historical Review Dec 2012)

Lambert argues that to understand Britain’s strategy in the First World War, historical engagement needs to develop beyond continental land operations and the movements of navies and expeditionary forces, to encompass a broader economic dimension which he posits underpinned Britain’s real strategy for a world war. [He} has achieved an impressive feat of scholarship. His close reading of a vast array of private and official papers brilliantly illuminates the working of Cabinet government in wartime.
— W. Philpott (
Twentieth Century British History, June 2013)

Nicholas Lambert has written a powerful book. If you can read it, do so. At least read the introduction. It
may change your idea about what happened to the British from August 1914 through 1915, and it
should get you thinking about the similarities and differences between 1912 and 2012.  [Full review available at – usnwc.edu/Publications/Naval-War-College-Review/2013—Spring.aspx]
— Tom Hone. (
Naval War College Review, Spring 2013)

This is a very important book… In essence, and it is hard to do justice to a work of such scope in the remit of a review, Lambert argues that before 1914 British policymakers had developed, refined, and adopted a system of economic warfare far more total, rigorous, and wide-ranging than any mere ‘blockade’…. Anyone writing about the development of British grand strategy, diplomacy, politics, civil-military relations and inter-service rivalries of this period will need to study this book. 
— Andrew Lambert (
War in History, Apr 2013)

The importance of Planning Armageddon lies in the book’s wider applicability to imperial and international history—especially as an essential study on the naval and strategic side of globalization…. sets a benchmark in its integrated approach to global economic history and strategic affairs: Lambert’s book is the one for the seminar room, in addition to comprehensive reading lists and essential reference. It is scholarship to be widely read, pondered, and debated—well beyond its ostensible niche. What stronger endorsement can there be? (John Brobst, H-Diplo, Jan 2014)

Lambert’s challenging, exhaustively researched and sophisticated analysis examines British planning for offensive economic warfare against Germany and its implementation in 1914 and 1915.  [His] argument centres on two further claims of immense significance for our understanding of pre-war international history. Firstly, he argues that the Committee of Imperial Defence adopted economic warfare as the national strategy in 1912…. Secondly, Lambert claims that economic warfare was the naval version of the short war [strategy].
–William Mulligan (English Historical Review, June 2014)

Readers of British naval strategy in the Fisher era will be seduced and provoked by this admirably engaging, significant, and persuasive book. It is a work of meticulous scholarship, based on exhaustive exploration of sources, and chall