The Origins of the War of 1870

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Robert Howard Lord had the opportunity of using and transcribing in full the seven volumes of documents in the archives of the German Foreign Office which contain the German official record of the diplomatic crisis leading up to the outbreak of the War of 1870. Save for rare exceptions these documents have never hitherto been printed, and have been seen by only a few investigators; it has therefore seemed worthwhile to publish them in extenso. The period covered is, indeed, a brief one—July 4–15, 1870, but a period as packed with events and pregnant with fateful consequences as the famous “ten days” of 1914. As an introduction to the documents Lord has retraced the history of the crisis in the light of the mass of new sources, with the aim both of bringing out the conclusions to be drawn from the new material and of summarizing the subject for the general reader.