Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/30/britain-first-world-war-biggest-error-niall-ferguson?CMP=share_btn_fb

What am I reading now:  I am currently rereading ( a textbook) "The History of Western Civilization - The Continuing Experiment" (14th Century to recent times) and, depending on my mood and location, concurrently rereading Barbara Tuchman's "The Distant Mirror", and have just just begun Niall Ferguson's fascinating "Civilization: The West and the Rest ", which I may now concentrate on because it is a library E Book and I only have two weeks to read it.

 After reading Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace - The Road To 1914", and my ongoing work-time listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcasts on WWI , even with my confessedly limited knowledge of history, I came to the same conclusion about Britain's "biggest error in modern history". Ditto for Turkey's entry (caused by fear of Russia's encroachment on Ottoman territory) , which led to the post-colonial mess in the Middle East. Just posting this as a partial, personal antidote to last year's communal chest pounding about how heroically the propaganda driven cannon fodder boys of the British Empire (and more specifically Duncan, BC) marched off to defend King and Country from the scourge of the evil baby killing Huns (such as my grandfather).

 Why study history? A quote from Ferguson's intro to "Civilization ...": :'There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive - but there is only one past. And although the past is over, for two reasons it is indispensable to our understanding of what we experience today and what lies ahead of us tomorrow and thereafter.First, the current world population makes up approximately 7 per cent of all the human beings who have ever lived. The dead outnumber the living, in other words, fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril. Second, the past is really our only reliable source of knowledge about the fleeting present ant to the multiple futures that lie before us, only one of which will actually happen. History is not just how we study the past; it is how we study time itself'.