In this book Mulligan "shows profound scholarship, sweeping vision, and synoptic elegance". (Professor Christopher Clark of the University of Cambridge). He shows how new conceptions of peace and global order were born in the fires of the First World War. Instead of seeing the war as an unmitigated catastrophe, he draws attention to the way in which recognition of its horrors helped, over the long term, to forge a different and less destructive world order.