Mmmm… debatable. The 9 years war was fought in the late 15 early 16 hundreds across much or Europe, parts of Africa, North America, South America, Asia etc. and involved many world powers. We have other wars that Amos predate the wars in this list and could be said to be world wars. Of course many world wars are debated- starts and ends, and the “7 years wars” or even WW2 contained several wars that could be said to be separate wars and not part of a larger war but part of a period of conflict. Sort of like how you can have 5 people in a train station all playing instruments for change but they aren’t in a band or playing together- each is independent. So it is debatable and nuanced. Some even argue that WW2 is the first true world war. Of course it all is a bit moot. The concept of world war” didn’t exist before “world war one.” So it isn’t so much that there never was a world war before that and WW1 is the first one. It’s more like how there were Hames Bond Films before Daniel Craig
But casino Royal is #1 in that continuity. We don’t count the ones before casino Royal because they were too long ago and too different and so forth. World war is more of a branding term than an exact and technical term anyway. In much of history the known world to a given group might not extend far past their borders. If there were two people on earth and they walked to find each other and fight that could be called a world war.
The term world war came about largely to describe not just total war that covered much of the globe or involved most world powers or such, but for a new kind of industrialized warfare. War has always generally been not super great fun. Comparing who has it worse, a soldier in Afghanistan in 2010 or a Roman soldier fighting in antiquity…
I bet both would say or sucked overall. If each saw the worst of their wars neither would probably care to trade with the other.
But the scope and level of awe and shock brought by mechanized combat was insane.
How quickly and completely people and even the earth itself could be wiped away or made unrecognizable. The sheer scale these things could be done at and how few men could Mame or kill so many so quickly and brutally with technology. Unlike older wars there was no defense. There was a meat grinder. Superior numbers across an open field didn’t necessarily mean anything. The advantages and usage of Calvary and infantry and all these things were flipped and inverted and turned all sideways. In clouds of dust and choking has and fumes and plumes of earth and Bursts of flame and deluges of blood and effluence the world watch itself change in a blink.
There had never been such a credible danger that a single military could in theory walk across a continent and leave nothing. Not a single living creature or a single mountain or recognizable feature or man made object. And if perhaps the largest army in history could and decided to lay such total waste to even the earth itself- they might do in weeks or months or years or decades what could be done in hours or days in this new age of war.
When “WW2” came- the scope and destructive power and haste it could be unleashed was even greater. And in these world wars we maybe didn’t truly fight in every place and every person but we didn’t just fight at land or on sea- we fought in the air and under the water even. On the land and beneath it. A truly 4 dimensional warfare. Such war was unprecedented in all of history. WW1 can be said to have been more destructive than any war- even all recorded war- before it, and ww2 even more so.
So when discussing “world war” we must be mindful the concept didn’t exist prior to WW1 in the sense we know it, we must be mindful that WW1 came at the chronological start of a new era and amidst a new world order of relatively fresh nations and ideas and social change and technology. It came at a new age of media, and while WW2 really gets the gold medal in early “media warfare,” WW1 was the first major conflict of anywhere near that scale to have such deep ties to media and exist as the first true modern “total war.”
We must remember that the other wars on the list… so WW1 was often called some version of “the Great War” in It’s time- though the phrase “world war” was in common usage coined to describe the war in the press. But the name “world war 1” was really applied retroactively. When the Second World War occurred, the similarities between the wars and their chronological proximity made it somewhat natural for historians and press to distinguish them but compare them- hence
The more recent conflict at the time was given a moniker of “2nd world war” and retroactively the Great War fought a generation before was “world war one.” Given the stage for ww2 was primarily set directly from the results of the previous conflict the case is even stronger to link them as related events. Most argument or objection to classifying the Great War as a world war is semantically lost when the second war occurs. While again- there were few corners of the world untouched or inactive in the war more or less- it was effectively a true world war more so than any in history save perhaps epochs ago when the world might have consisted of a small handful of people at conflict. Given the discussed and fairly inescapable link between the previous total war and ww2- ot makes sense to link them in name even more. Otherwise what- we have “the Great War” and “the world war”? That’s not confusing or odd or awkward at all.
Those earlier wars- asides not being if the same caliber and not occupying close chronological proximity and not being fully industrialized and mechanized “modern” (of the time) wars- were simply too old to go back and rename. Ot would be like renaming the American civil war “insurrection one” because of the January 6th guys and calling January 6th “insurrection 2.”
The events are too different, they may share some link in ultimate causality of time- but they aren’t directly linked enough, and there is no reason to override over a century of momentum in education and popular usage to retroactively apply a name to the america civil war.
Were we to have a second full out civil war on similar terms we MIGHT retroactively call the “civil war” the “first civil war” but it is also the case we may just use a date or some sort of label
referencing belligerents or precipitating factors or outcomes- and don’t forget that while a “civil war” does have some subjectivity in deciding when to apply the term, it is a far more precise or definable term than “world war.” If a world war is simply one covering the globe or much of it, or involving the majority of global powers or some majority of nations- the “Cold War” would be ww3 assuming we kept the current widely held definitions of WW1 and 2. The “Cold War” spanned the globe and involved most or all world powers. It saw fighting across continents- Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, artic and polar regions, and more. Countries in the Middle East and Asia and Eastern Europe and South America etc. were engulfed in total war. A distinction to the Cold War was that while many world powers did get involved in combat and were involved in total war- none openly entered official and large scale combat or total war against each other. It was much like WW2 if the allied and axis
power has basically tried to avoid each other and instead just the various local governments and resistance and revolutionaries or terror groups they supported fought one another. Proxy war wasn’t entirely new or novel but this type of proxy war was as was the introduction of mutually assured destruction and weapons of such might that opposing powers were essentially barred from occupation and invasion of each other even if the other sides armies were in total defeat. Even when the Soviet Union fell the United States didn’t “graciously hand over the country to the new federation.” Even with no government and no official unified military command, of western powers attempted to annex or occupy Russian lands even as a a peace keeping force for a transitional power they risked nuclear retaliations.
You can decide for yourself if America and other world powers facilitated and allowed the formation of a new Russian government out of some greater principles of nobility and self determination or if the threat of nuclear fire from remaining hardliners if pushed too hard guided American and other policies lost soviet fall. Maybe the west was super righteous and figured they’d allow lands once absorbed in the USSR to form local independent governments- or maybe they figured they could puppeteer many smaller and presumably Russian hostile neighbor states more safely and readily than a massive state.
Maybe they reasoned that western occupation or annexation of those lands risked ongoing conflict and possibly nuclear exchange with former Societs, current Russians, AND people of former soviet territories seeking to self govern. Maybe they figured that Russia Wu isn’t be so likely to use nuclear weapons against their own former and possibly future family states and in their own backyard. So maybe it was all largely a prudent and shrewd chess game to surround the new Russian federation with potentially hostile former states and provide an easy way to establish western fronts in the region to act in western interests- or maybe they were just being nice and didn’t think of any of that stuff when playing let’s make a deal with the former Soviets.
Regardless we have what could easily qualify as the third world war but isn’t Considered such. So the First World War? We can split hairs and negotiate with history but officially ww1 is the First World War.
The term world war came about largely to describe not just total war that covered much of the globe or involved most world powers or such, but for a new kind of industrialized warfare. War has always generally been not super great fun. Comparing who has it worse, a soldier in Afghanistan in 2010 or a Roman soldier fighting in antiquity…
I bet both would say or sucked overall. If each saw the worst of their wars neither would probably care to trade with the other.
But the scope and level of awe and shock brought by mechanized combat was insane.
When “WW2” came- the scope and destructive power and haste it could be unleashed was even greater. And in these world wars we maybe didn’t truly fight in every place and every person but we didn’t just fight at land or on sea- we fought in the air and under the water even. On the land and beneath it. A truly 4 dimensional warfare. Such war was unprecedented in all of history. WW1 can be said to have been more destructive than any war- even all recorded war- before it, and ww2 even more so.
We must remember that the other wars on the list… so WW1 was often called some version of “the Great War” in It’s time- though the phrase “world war” was in common usage coined to describe the war in the press. But the name “world war 1” was really applied retroactively. When the Second World War occurred, the similarities between the wars and their chronological proximity made it somewhat natural for historians and press to distinguish them but compare them- hence
The events are too different, they may share some link in ultimate causality of time- but they aren’t directly linked enough, and there is no reason to override over a century of momentum in education and popular usage to retroactively apply a name to the america civil war.
Were we to have a second full out civil war on similar terms we MIGHT retroactively call the “civil war” the “first civil war” but it is also the case we may just use a date or some sort of label