The World Crisis Breeds New Publishing Relationships for Churchill

This is a behind-the-scenes article. It focuses not on the content of The World Crisis (which former Prime Minister A. J. Balfour described as “Winston’s brilliant Autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe”) but rather on how that multi-volume history of the Great War—Churchill’s twelfth work—came to be published in both the UK and the USA.

As an established author, Winston Churchill had had a number of publishing relationships on both sides of the Atlantic, some of which were more enduring than others. His first was with Longmans Green, which had published his first five books (from the The Story of the Malakand Field Force to Ian Hamilton’s March) in both London and New York between 1898 and 1900. Then, after a brief fling with Macmillan (which had overpaid for the rights to Lord Randolph Churchill), Churchill moved to Hodder & Stoughton in London between 1908 and 1910 for the publication of My African Journey and the speech volumes Liberalism and the Social Problem and the now exceedingly rare The People’s Rights.

There followed a publication famine from Churchill’s appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911 through the end of the decade. Consequently, when Churchill determined to write a history of the First World War, he had no obvious publishing firm to approach. He was very much