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Ring of Fire

A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War

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Ring of Fire

By: Alexandra Churchill, Nicolai Eberholst
Narrated by: Alexandra Churchill
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Bloomsbury presents Ring of Fire by Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst, read by Alexandra Churchill.

'Churchill and Eberholst put the world back into First World War.' Dan Snow

A remarkable, eyewitness-based view of the outbreak of the First World War.

As war broke out in the summer of 1914, not a nation on Earth understood the magnitude of what they were about to face. To win it, whole populations must be mobilised, and neutrality was impossible to practice.
Our understanding of this complex conflict has been coloured by a blinkered approach to popular history. It has ignored the fact that Denmark actively participated in laying minefields as soon as war began; that the first British shots were fired in West Africa, by a black man; and the first Australian casualties occurred not at Gallipoli, but in the Pacific.
The authors have scoured the globe in search of an enormous quantity of fresh material. This is not history as told by 'great men', this is a people's view of the war, translated from more than a dozen languages to fashion a new inclusive, touching and surprising tale of events that we thought we knew...©2025 Nicolai Eberholst (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 20th Century Military Modern War Imperialism Africa
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Critic reviews

Challenged everything I thought I knew about this war.
Churchill and Eberholst put the world back into the First World War. They portray the astonishing scale and reach of a war that might have started in Europe but was a genuinely global catastrophe.
By focussing on the immense impact the conflict had on common people – from colonial subjects to women and even children – Ring of Fire prompts a dramatic reassessment of how we should view and tell the history of this terrible war.
An eye-opening alternative to the well worn stories of brave tommies marching off to bash the Boche.
Wears its evident scholarship lightly on its sleeves, probes deeply, casts its net wide, and amounts to the new gold standard. (Peter Caddick-Adams, author of)
Panoramic and revelatory ... More than half a centuryafter Barbara Tuchman's seminal The Guns of August, this intricately researched and highly readable perspective on the great war makes for a worthy successor. (Alex Larman)
This lively account of the epic events of the opening months of the conflict highlights the chaos, uncertainty and, dare it be said, excitement of that time. Because it introduces so much new and largely unfamiliar source material, the book has a freshness to it that even readers familiar with the topic will appreciate. (Nick Lloyd)
All stars
Most relevant
This is a very different view of the outbreak of ww1, with a large focus on the bloody frontier battles at the start of the war. It canters rapidly from Maoris and Tongans in the Pacific to Austro-Hungarians and Russians without a breath in between! It took a while to get started but some of the accounts are breathtaking and the authors do a great job of telling you why ww1 was so much more than trenches, tommies, poilu and Fritz. I can’t really do the book justice in this short review but the short summary is: it’s brilliant, go listen now!

Different view of the outbreak of ww1

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There are so few decent histories of the out breaknof the First World War, at least in English, that turly put it in the context of non-British actions. Too often it is the retreat from Mons, the perfidious French and some jump cut to 1916. This superb work remedies that in magnificent fashion

Outstanding

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This book has done for me what the great Prof Richard Holmes did , And that it has made me want to know more about this World war that affected so many, The level of detail and research that has gone into Ring of fire is on a vast scale just like the Beginning of the war in 1914 and doesn't shy away from telling you how brutal and deadly the conflict was , Any Scholar of the first world war should have this book in their Collection.

what you thought you knew about 1914 but definitely didn't.

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An important work on the opening months of the war from a variety of perspectives, many of them of which are not particularly well served by the existing historiography. Walks the very fine line between academic and popular history and does it superbly - a rare skill for which the authors deserve great credit. Reviews have mentioned it in the same breath as Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” and it deserves to be considered in the same way; a vital addition to helping our collective understanding of the opening phase of the conflict. Highly recommended.

Scholarly but very listenable

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Don't go looking for the BEF on page 1, this book covers the War from its outbreak all over the world.
Churchill and Eberholst bring theatre's of War rarely covered and voices of Men, Women and Children to drive the narrative. A fantastic and unique book.

A new take on WW1

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