Roger L. Ransom is Distinguished Professor of History and Economics, Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He is best known for his work with Richard Sutch on the American Civil War and his many publications include the books One Kind of Freedom (co-authored with Richard Sutch Cambridge, 2001), Conflict and Compromise (Cambridge, 1990) and The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been (2005). He was the president of the Economic History Association in 2005, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the distinguished teaching award from the University of California, Riverside. He also won the Arthur H. Cole Prize from the Economic History Association and the Clio Can Award from the Cliometric Society.
Advance praise: 'World War I became a tragedy when victory became an end in itself rather than a means of achieving some prewar objective. In his lucid and insightful Gambling on War, Roger L. Ransom draws on history and economics to explain why that happened, why World War I upended the world's institutions, and why its tragic effects persist even today.' Philip T. Hoffman, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Advance praise: 'The First World War remains with us. Ransom, an economic historian, places it within an age of extremes that ran from Bismarck to Clemenceau. The war resolved no rivalries. It led to no new normalcy. The book jars the reader into that reality. It shocks. It angers. It is a must-read.' Holger H. Herwig, author of The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 Advance praise: 'Economists think of people as rational but this is belied by experience. From that perspective, economic historian Roger L. Ransom shows persuasively how over-confidence, fear and reckless gambles make sense of a sequence of bad decisions that led to the First World War, and to catastrophic outcomes that nobody planned for.' Avner Offer, author of The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation