This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. No one alive today recalls that titanic struggle, and very few Americans can tell you much about it.

Some 50 years ago, as an undergraduate, thanks to a dynamic professor, I came to understand and appreciate the monumental, global changes that came about as a result of World War I and the peace settlement that followed.

In brief, the war and resultant breakup of centuries-old empires marked the true beginning of the 20th century with its massive casualties of combatants and civilians, genocide, nationalistic hatreds, terrorism, psychic trauma and ultimate disillusionment. The origin of virtually every event of historic impact throughout the last century can be traced in one way or another back to what happened between 1914 and 1919.

So it was with great anticipation that I began reading British historian David Reynolds’ highly lauded new book, “The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century.”

As the title strongly implies, Reynolds’ study promised to be a balanced, detailed account of the war’s century-long global impact, i.e. its enduring legacy. In the book’s introduction, Reynolds correctly points out, “August 1914 has been depicted as ‘the great train crash’ that ushered in ‘History’s Age of Hatred,’ characterized by a ‘Fifty Years War’ in Europe that was followed by ‘the Third World’s War’ in the second half of the century.”

To my growing disappointment as I read the 429 pages that followed, I realized that this book is misleadingly mistitled. A much more descriptive subtitle would read, “Changing Perceptions of the Great War in Twentieth Century Britain.” Fully 90 percent of the book is about the war’s impact on and perceptions of the war in England and her dominions.

That said, Reynolds does deliver a smooth flowing analysis of the social, political, economic, diplomatic and artistic history of modern Britain as seen through the prism of that nation’s First World War experience.

Throughout the book Reynolds labors to point out how the war’s impact on England was radically different from the way the war changed the other belligerents. During the war, England lay safely uninvaded behind her English Channel “moat.”

As a result, even that nation’s reasons for entering the fray were unique. Reynolds observes: “The French lost 1.3 million … but this sacrifice could be justified as the cost of redeeming French territory, whereas the British and Irish death toll of 723,000 was not linked in the public mind to any concrete national goals-only to abstract ideals such as civilized values and even the eradication of war.”

The author adds that only America’s wartime motives and experience could, at least in a limited sense, compare to Britain’s. If anything, President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic reasons for going to war exceeded those of his British counterparts. As a result, the disillusionment with the war’s outcome and the isolationism that followed was even more pronounced in America than in England.

Britain’s postwar disenchantment was tempered by the fact that her global influence grew immensely as a result of the war. Reynolds calls the war “an imperial triumph” for England. She added new colonies and protectorates in Africa and the Middle East at the expense of her defeated foes. Here, albeit from a British perspective, Reynolds alludes to the long-term global impact of the postwar settlement. “Although the new map of the Middle East followed some Ottoman administrative boundaries, the successor states had largely been invented by the British and French.” Unfortunately, the author forgoes any detailed analysis of the evolution of these “artificial” Arab states leading up to the present ongoing turmoil in that region.

To his credit, Reynolds shows how the British leadership’s racist attitudes permeated treatment of the nation’s subjects throughout the Arab world and India. Arthur Balfour, whose famous “declaration” created the state of Palestine “considered the Arabs no more capable of administering themselves than the ‘red Indians.’ ” This attitude, according to Reynolds, even influenced the way Britain chose to honor her war dead.

The names of white leaders and ordinary soldiers were often listed on postwar monuments. The significant contributions of thousands of soldiers from India and other eastern colonies were seldom even acknowledged.

Reynolds presents an in-depth analysis of wartime and postwar art and poetry – often the work of soldiers and veterans. Here again, he focuses on British works while limiting his mention of French and German efforts to a few paragraphs. He does acknowledge the contributions of two American poets, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, both of whom resided in England during much of the postwar period.

In the book’s second section, appropriately entitled “Refractions,” Reynolds shifts gears. He turns much of his attention away from the war’s impact on the course of history, instead choosing to analyze how events such as World War II, the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet empire changed the way people, especially Britishers, came to perceive the First World War.

The staggering losses that England suffered during the Great War, particularly the 1916 Somme offensive, led the nation’s leaders first to attempt to appease Adolph Hitler. After the war came anyway, Winston Churchill’s reluctance to initiate a cross-channel invasion of German-held France also stemmed from the British army’s unfortunate experiences on the continent some thirty years earlier.

Once the war began and Germany quickly overran most of Europe, England, now standing alone, quickly altered its view of recent history. “So 1940 became central to a new national myth … a story of ’rediscovery’ when a country that had lost its way after the lost peace regained its identity and purpose in the furnace of the people’s war.”

In America too, according to Reynolds, the interwar period of isolation was now derided as a mistake. Wilson’s internationalism gained new converts who grew in number and zealotry once the Cold War and Soviet “threat” came to dominate America’s foreign policy. Reynolds makes a convincing argument that George W. Bush and his “neocon” supporters were simply the most recent embodiment of Woodrow Wilson’s idealism as they sought to plant the seeds of American freedom and self-determination throughout the oil rich Arab Middle East.

The book’s second section also contains a well written analysis of the rich body of World War I histories, literature, film and television productions that has appeared over the past fifty years.

Interestingly, Reynolds points out that one of the leading revisionist interpretations of the Great War has come from German historian Fritz Fischer. Departing from “shared blame” theories of the war’s outbreak, Fischer placed responsibility directly on the shoulders of German militarists, who he claimed dominated his nation’s foreign policy beginning in the Nineteenth Century with Otto Von Bismarck.

In the end, David Reynolds has produced a solidly researched, readable, but largely one-dimensional and far from definitive account of the legacy of the First World War. It baffles me how any book claiming to cover the long-range impact of that war can fail to mention the Maginot Line – that supposedly impregnable wall of concrete bunkers, and gun emplacements that France erected on that portion of her German border where the Germans had invaded at the outset of the Great War.

It was based on the mistaken post-war assumption among French leaders that any future war would likely be fought much like the last one, in the trenches. In 1940, Hitler’s blitzing tanks and airplanes simply swept around the Maginot Line and quickly overran most of France. For France, four long years of Nazi rule was the most tragic legacy of the First World War. One hopes that during the next four years of centennial commemoration, a book will appear that will more fully illuminate the true global impact of the Great War.