What The World Would Look Like If World War I Never Happened

World War I was the product of Europe's principal powers forging webs of alliances amongst themselves, pledging to defend one another in the event any were invaded. These competing networks, combined with long-standing ethnic and border rivalries, exploded with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The war claimed the lives of 20 million people and lead to national, social, and technological changes that fundamentally defined the 20th and 21st centuries. What then, would the world be like if this massive conflict had never happened? Assuming a comparable war does not occur in its place, a world where World War I never happened would come with many positives and negatives (via Seeker.com).

In 1914, a series of interconnected events set off a military conflagration so huge it eventually became known as the First World War, aka the Great War. World War I changed everything about warfare, from the equipment to the tactics, and permanently altered the map, as the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires all collapsed by its end. Over the course of its four years, World War I claimed roughly 14 million military and civilian lives, cost the combatants more than $300 billion, and introduced us to the concepts of shell-shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chemical warfare.

They say that dogs are man's best friend, and this truth became particularly evident during World War I. In what would later become one of the deadliest conflicts in history, warring governments used every tool at their disposal to support their cause. According to the WWI Centennial Commission, this included the use of canines in various capacities. From providing medical help to wounded soldiers to carrying messages across enemy lines, dogs played a crucial role in the outcome of the Great War.

In 2014, the BBC asked, "Why are so few WWI heroines remembered?" The answer — which came, in part, from University of Leeds professor Alison Fell — was a heartbreaking one. At the time, it was almost a global idea that it was men who were supposed to head out and fight while the women stayed home, kept the fires burning, and probably made some sandwiches. The upheaval of WWI that saw countless women picking up arms, heading deep into enemy territory as spies, and heading out into the workplace — and the laboratory — wasn't just an instance of women doing their part, it was the complete opposite of what society had expected form them for a long time. And society wasn't a fan.

Trenches were essentially an exercise in misery during WWI. History explains that infantrymen could spend weeks on end in them. Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front captures the ceaseless bleakness of it all: "Shells, gas clouds, flotillas of tanks — shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus — scalding, choking, death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave — there are no other options." That overwhelming hopelessness wasn't unique to his experience. The BBC quotes British soldier Charles Bartram, who fought in the trench-heavy Battle of the Somme: "From that moment all my religion died, after that journey all my teaching and belief in God had left me — never to return."