Road to Catastrophe is the first volume of this series about World War I. Before the first shot was fired on the Western Front, decades of nationalism, imperial rivalry, industrial armament, and diplomatic failure had already made catastrophe almost inevitable. This book traces that long road — from the humiliation of France in 1871 to the shots fired in Sarajevo in 1914 — through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the explosive instability of the Balkans, the web of alliances that turned a regional murder into a world war, and the thirty-seven days in which the fate of a civilization was decided by a handful of men who did not fully understand what they were unleashing.