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What was the role of industrial development in creating a social and industrial motivation to go to World War One?

Industrialization during the 19th century created a number of radical changes in human society. Populations grew rapidly even as standard of living rose, something that had essentially never happened before 1700.

Yet with change always comes turmoil, and even countries that didn't undergo outright revolution (as Russia did partway through the war) still had to deal with enormous shifts in the structure of their society and new tensions, especially the tension between workers and capital owners. This could have created conditions more prone to war, as countries were unstable and prone to violence in general.

Improvements in technology were by no means limited to civilian applications, and in the early 20th century weapons technology became extremely advanced, and capable of vastly more destruction than ever before. We now think of tanks and machine guns whenever we think of war; but in that period tanks and machine guns were radical new technologies unlike anything the world had ever seen. (Watch a video of a laser cannon on an experimental destroyer vaporizing an autonomous drone, and you may have some sense of how it felt looking at a machine gun in the 1910s.)


This increased military technology made war mobilization much faster, which could have contributed to causing the war. If deployment takes weeks or months, you can wait for an enemy to start to deploy before you respond. But if deployment takes days or even hours, you can't afford to wait; you need to be ready to deploy immediately or even pre-emptively. This meant that there was less margin for error in diplomacy and more paranoia between leaders. You can think of it as the difference between everyone in a room having a sword at their hip versus everyone in a room having a gun pointed at someone else's head. The latter scenario is obviously a lot more volatile. (This is the reason I don't believe nuclear weapons are actually a useful deterrent, by the way.)


The industrialization of war was also the beginning of the military-industrial complex, where corporations that manufacture military equipment now have an economic incentive to pressure the world into war. Previously, war was mainly a question of "labor", i.e. having enough soldiers; but now it became mainly a question of capital---having the best guns. Corporations that profit from war could put pressure on governments to go to war unnecessarily (though how much this actually has an effect has never been clearly demonstrated).


Yet, it's unclear how much this new technology actually contributed to causing the war. It's important to note that war has been part of human life for all of recorded history, and organized homicide is part of the behavioral profile of all primates going back millions of years. What made WW1 unique was not the fact that war happened or even the proportional death toll; it was mainly the fact that world population was so large and so well-organized, making what would otherwise have been dozens of wars around the world killing hundreds of thousands of people out of hundreds of millions into a single global war that killed millions of people out of two billion. Total global rates of death due to violence have been declining for centuries, and WW1 and WW2 were spikes in the trend that don't change the overall pattern.

In this sense, industrialization did cause WW1, not because it made the war happen or even made it that much worse, but because it made more people in the world and united people into nations. Prior to the 18th century the modern nation-state really didn't exist, and even well into the 19th century it was not the leading mode of political organization; so wars inherently had to be over smaller regions---but there were so many small wars that the total rate of death was actually higher, not lower. The huge absolute figures for deaths in the World Wars are really due to the very high population growth during the 19th and 20th century, not a sudden unique surge in violence. (Which is more violent, a city with 1 million people and 100 murders, or a city with 100,000 people and 20 murders? Clearly the latter, right?)

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