Introduction: the First World War and the making of modern world politics / Alexander Anievas -- Part I. Kladderdatsch! Capitalism, empire, and imperialism in the making and aftermath of World War I -- Germany, the Fischer controversy, and the context of war: rethinking German imperialism, 1880-1914 / Geoff Eley -- War, defeat, and the urgency of Lebensraum: German imperialism from the Second Empire to the Third Reich / Shelley Baranowski -- Capitalist peace or capitalist war? The July Crisis revisited / Adam Tooze -- Marxist theory and the origins of the First World War / Alexander Anievas -- The expansion of the Japanese empire and the rise of the global agrarian question after the First World War / Wendy Matsumura -- War and social revolution: World War I and the 'great transformation' / Sandra Halperin -- Part II. Reconfigurations: revolution and culture after 1914 -- European intellectuals and the First World War: trauma and new cleavages / Enzo Traverso -- Art after war: experience, poverty and the crystal utopia / Esther Leslie -- 'America's Belgium': W.E.B. Du Bois on race, class, and the origins of World War I / Alberto Toscano -- World War I, the October Revolution and Marxism's reception in the west and east / Domenico Losurdo -- Uneven developments, combined: the First World War and Marxist theories of revolution / Peter Thomas -- The First World War, classical Marxism and the end of the Bourgeois Revolution in Europe / Neil Davidson -- 'The new era of war and revolution': Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the outbreak of World War I / Lars T. Lih.