In his memoirs, Erich Ludendorff spoke of World War I as “the total war.” Few people at the time and indeed not many historians since have quarreled with that description. But what made it a “total war” and was Ludendorff the first to coin the term, or even, to describe the phenomenon? What about the characterization of the Franco-Prussian War as a guerre á outrance, or Clausewitz’s older expression: “absolute war”? And what about those who apply the same label to Sherman’s March to the Sea? Isabel Hull’s study of “total destruction” described German military culture from 1870 through 1918; is that the same thing? Perhaps the very proliferation of such applications questions the advisability of applying the term at all. Is it a term empty of historical meaning and one we would be wise to avoid? And what about chronology or the distinction between intent and consequences? Over the last twenty years, several historians have moved the origins of total war from the twentieth or even the nineteenth century to a much earlier time. Most persuasive have been David Bell’s study of the Napoleonic Wars and Emmanuel Kreike’s Scorched Earth that begins in fifteenth-century Europe.

But the origin of “total war” is only one problem. We often see total war described as a matter of mobilization—of soldiers, resources, and the home front in the service of conflict; is that a compelling or universal set of requirements? Newer approaches explore the environmental damage war, and especially total wars, cause, and have found a wider reflection in works such as the Online Encyclopedia of the First World War and recent studies of the American Civil War. And what is the relationship of “total war” to global conflicts such as the War of the Spanish Succession or the Seven Years (French and Indian) War? This leads us to consider the impact of colonial and imperial wars in creating the conditions that so often accompany total war: widespread, indiscriminate destruction and genocide.

The four panel participants on this roundtable take up the challenge of discussing the extent to which the concept of “total war” remains a historically valuable one, both for their own fields of expertise and as a broader theoretical concept. David Bell expands his purview from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe to examine in more general terms the reality of total war in preceding centuries. Laura Matthew examines and analyzes the “conquest” in Mesoamerica. Julia Roos looks at World War I in Africa against the background of the 1904-1907 Herero and Namaqua massacres. Wendy Goldman analyzes the Soviet Union’s participation in World War II. Two questions drive each scholar: (1) What does the term “total war” mean in the context of their research? and (2) Is total war itself a useful analytic or even heuristic category for historians?