Duncan Bell

Duncan Kelly, Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics is an extraordinary intellectual history, and the outstanding history book I read in 2026. This is a tour de force exploration of the effects of World War I on the evolution of economic, social and political thought. One recurring theme in the book builds on the thoughts of Élie Halévy and focuses on "étatisation"- way in which state power/control, required by the war, become steady state features of the postwar society. Another invaluable feature of the book is the way it articulate the richness of thought that emanated from the war and, by implication, the ways that this richness is lost in conventional narratives when it involved paths not taken. Not only did I learn the most from this book of any history I read this year, it was also (by far) the most difficult for me to understand. This due to the differences in ways that Kelly conceptualizes history and time. Nonlinearities, juxtapositions of differences in time scales across difference phenomena, etc. all represent a much more complex vision of the dynamics of historical developments as found in economics, and I would say economic history. And more concretely, the set of models I have in my head to interpret historical narratives (which are very much defined by the various stochastic processes I use) were inadequate to capture the depth of Kelly's vision.