Practices of War — Technology, Mobilization, and the Home Front

Once a war begins, how it is fought becomes decisive. IB History treats the "practices" of war as a distinct area of study, covering the technology deployed, the way populations and economies are mobilized, the experience of the home front, and forms of resistance. These practices connect causes to effects: the methods used in war largely determine the human and material damage it leaves behind. This lesson surveys the main practices and shows how they evolved across the century.

Technology and the changing battlefield

The twentieth century saw an unprecedented acceleration in the technology of destruction. The First World War introduced industrialized killing on a mass scale: machine guns, barbed wire, and rapid-fire artillery produced the deadlock of trench warfare on the Western Front,