When Peace Collapsed: The World Before the Trenches

This episode breaks down the long fuse that burned for decades before 1914. Revolutions, collapsing empires, new ideologies, and a ruthless arms race made war inevitable. We follow the political dominoes from the Revolutions of 1848 to the Balkan wars and trace how Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire kept escalating tensions. By 1914, one shot was all it took to ignite the explosion.