What are some good books on the domestic policy/politics of the Central Powers of WWI?

by TheSouthernBelle

I've already read A Mad Catastrophe by Geoffrey Wawro, are there other books that can enlighten me on the domestic policy of the central powers? Specifically Austria-Hungary?

kieslowskifan

There are two good specialized monographs that showcase the civilian aspects of the war for both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Maureen Healy's Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire Total War and Everyday Life in World War I covers the effects of total war mobilization on a domestic economy ill-suited o such an endeavor. One of the more interesting points in Healy's monograph is her focus upon food, an aspect that is also covered in Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin by Belinda Davis, which like Healy does also delve into the gendered aspects of sacrifice and shortages.

Although it is as dry as Death Valley, Gerald Feldman's Army, Industry and Labour in Germany, 1914-1918 is one of the foundational texts on the management of the German wartime economy and the attempt by the military to reshape both industry and labor. A lot of the domestic policies of the wartime powers revolved around issues of war finance, and Hew Strachan's Financing the First World War is an excellent comparative analysis that helps to contextualize the collapse of the Central Powers' economies by the late war.

Historiography of the Ottoman homefront often overlaps with other topics such as Armenian genocide, emerging nationalisms (Turkish, Arabic, etc.) or the failures of the Young Turk's reform efforts to withstand the pressure of war. The relevant chapters of Erik J. Zürcher's The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Ataturk's Turkey do an admirable job of covering the issues in Anatolia. For the nebulous borders of empire, From Empire to Empire Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule by Abigail Jacobson and Arabs and Young Turks Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 by Hasan Kayali cover some of the thorny issues of nationalism, Ottomanism, and the tensions of empire. For the more violent aspects of Ottoman domestic policies, the relevant chapters of Shatterzones of Empires is pretty illuminating (it is also quite useful for coverage of Galicia during the war).

And of course there's Bulgaria, but that is an extremely understudied aspect of the Great War in English.