Virginia Woolf famously observed that sometime in the first decade of the 20th century—she arbitrarily chose December 1910—human life was fundamentally transformed. That date is near the culmination of what Barbara Tuchman called a “century of the most accelerated rate of change in man’s record.” Tuchman was describing the somatic effects of the Industrial Revolution, Woolf the psychological changes in society that those effects drove.
What Woolf sensed and Tuchman saw, however, was something the political leaders of the time largely missed. Heads of state, foreign ministers, and chiefs of army staffs failed to appreciate the revolutionary technological advances of the late 19th century and the dramatic acceleration of life that followed. The mismatch between their outdated mental models and the new reality led them to practically sleepwalk into the lethality of World War I, unheeding of the warnings of the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars that preceded it.
