This is something that’s been with me for close to 20 years, but I remember posting on a history site similar to here where there was quite a few history professors who were there to answer questions. So basically in 1998/99 I asked a question regarding when the name World War 1 first came into being. Besides the normal responses two historians gave me a weirder answer claiming that there was talk in the historian community of renaming World War 1 since World War 1 wasn’t actual the true first world war, but something like the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812 better fit (one of the massive European colonial wars anyway) and that we might actual see that change happen “soon”.
In addition, I remember reading another historical book about World War 1 from that same period that claimed “future historians” might also rename World War 1 and combine it with World War 2 and the Cold War to something like “The Century War” because of how connected all three wars were.
So has there been anything actually like that in historical communities or was I just talking/reading quacks?
The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) was over 116 years and included two extended periods of peace (when the main combatants turned to civil strife and anarchy). The second was 1389–1415 or over 25 years which isn’t far off the interwar period.
“World war”, as a term for a war involving many countries across the world, goes back to at least the mid-19th century, but not as the name for any particular war. So a historian might say that the Seven Years War, for example, was a world war, but they wouldn’t call it the World War. And I suppose someone might, hypothetically, have said of a particular war that it was the first world war, but that would be a description, not a name.
The war of 1914-18 was mostly called “the Great War” while it was current and in the years afterwards, but sometimes “the World War”, and occasionally “the First World War” by people who were making the point that it was likely to be followed by other global conflicts. The OED has a cite for “the First World War” used in this sense in 1918, and several more such cites in following years until the first cite for “World War I”, which is in a Times article in September 1939, by which time of course a new world war had just broken out. (The same article contains the first cite for “World War II”, referring to that war.)
The upshot of all this is that, arguably, the first world war happened well before the First World War. But I think historians are generally comfortable with this; the nomenclature is too well-established to change now.
I’m a history enthusiast and not a scholar, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that the people were just talking out of their asses. The astronomy world has the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which can dictate what a planet is defined as and the various institutions fell in line after Pluto got the boot, but there is nothing equivalent among historians. There isn’t a group where people can come together and vote.
The names are fixed far too firmly in the public’ eyes. The fact that it didn’t happen as predicted can show you it was just someone making up stories.
When I worked in a reputable university, there was a course (and I shouldn’t be surprised, a book, or more than one) that taught 20th century European History under the title the European Civil War (right up to 1990)
The Seven Years War was fought in Western and Central Europe, The St. Lawrence and Ohio River Valleys, and the Indian subcontinent. It did not immediately and recognizably effect the lives of every human on the planet. The Napoleonic Wars added Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but China was still unaffected and India’s hash was quickly settled when the future Duke of Wellington defeated Tipu Sultan. Vast battle wastage, economic impact, unleashed pandemic, etc. all had to wait until 1914.
I don’t believe future historians will relabel WW1 to WW2, but it is difficult to predict how people will view things historically hundreds of years later. I think it isn’t entirely unlikely future historians slowly deemphasize the strict “1” and “2” delineation and instead think of the period 1871-1945 as a period of rising nationalism and Great Power conflict more akin to our modern conception of the Hundred Years War.
To the people living contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous to these times, there’s a lot of delineation between these events, but that is similar to the Hundred Years War, which was fought over several generations’ lifetimes and was not seen as part of a singular conflict by the participants of the time. From a zoomed out historical perspective, the Prussian victory in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, the formation of the German Empire in humiliating fashion with the Kaiser being proclaimed as German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors of occupied Versailles, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine (seen by most as a serious strategic overreach by Bismarck)–these events started a chain of incidents that lead directly to the end of World War 2 in 1945. A somewhat careful great power balance was permanently upset, alliances shifted to a point that World War I became inevitable. A long period of the great powers jockeying for power in colonials areas, the formation of the Franco-Russian alliance, the emergence of Imperial Japan, the United States beginning to fully recognize its potential might, these can all be seen as somewhat a part of a singular larger conflict.
While not as popularized today the period after 1871 up through 1814 is actually filled with wars involving the Great Powers. Other than Russia and Japan going to war these wars were typically not directly between the Great Powers, but they often related to Great Power politics. Many were colonial wars and were being fought specifically because of a view by all of the rulers of the Great Powers that they needed overseas Empires to build strength and power to make themselves better able to fight another Great Power if the time came.
Somewhat reminiscent of the Great Patriotic War fought by the Soviets in 1941-1945, which also had some other irrelevant and inconsequential stuff happening on the sidelines.
Future historians may well blend the 20th century into a series of conflicts “The 20th-century war”? but I doubt it.
Earlier conflicts are blurred by distance partly because of the lack of the visual evidence that seems essential for modern students. Many people in the UK today have no idea what happened at Waterloo in 1815, or off the coast of Spain five years earlier. If there was a full-colour film like “The Longest Day” or even “Saving Private Ryan”, they might remember more.
I would say that if it is possible to adopt a revisionist position on some historical event, most especially if the position involves disputing a completely arbitrary but commonly used name, then there is a body of historians somewhere that is lobbying heavily for that position.
I’ve read the argument that the Seven Years War can be regarded as part of the Second Hundred Years War. These were a series of conflicts between France and Britain.
The Nine Years War (1688-1697)
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714)
The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748)
The Seven Years War (1756–1763)
The American Revolution (1775–1783)
The French Revolution (1792-1802)
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815)
(Like the original Hundred Years War, these wars lasted longer than a hundred years.)
We’re all glad that one seems to finally be over. I don’t really know much about the Seven Years War except that I heard it was fought across continents. Had to look up the wiki for any details. It seems to qualify for a ‘world war’ in some sense, but even WWI pales in comparison to WWII.
And that answers a question I had about a QI clip I ran across where David Mitchell keeps getting buzzed for saying that World War I was so named sometime after 1939 or so.
Well, WWII had no direct effect on South America and that hardly disqualifies it from the name. The Seven Years War saw action in Africa and the Caribbean, the latter a vital area of contention. I don’t think it’s all that useful to no-true-World-War the conflict.