Dear Friends,
Hello. I just finished Prof. Hew Strachan's The First World. I intend to read more books on the said topic, written in an engaging way and especially shedding new light on the origins of the war, international relations, alliances, etc. Prefer recent publications.
Thanks a lot.
Adam Tooze's book The Deluge, David Stevenson's 1914-1918 and Avner Offer's The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation are good places to start! Tooze looks at WWI and the Interwar years from a macro-economic perspective, Offer looks at the role that food production, livestock, "horse power", etc. played in shaping the war and the preceding decades. Stevenson's book looks at the war from all angles, and is a great, all round read.
I'm reading it now but the recently released three volumes of the Cambridge History of the First World War cover quite a lot socio-political / economic history, often from an inter or transnational perspective, and so far I've found it to be quite good.