No, I am not discounting oral history, I am saying that historians have to assess this evidence and its reliability alongside other records. It certainly helps to establish the provenance if the evidence was written down at the time (e.g. Parish records).

Your earlier arguments were with Keith, who most certainly has an agenda, but Keith is an amateur, every bit a folk historian. And Keith in that argument was trying to say that all historians agreed on stuff which in the journal articles would be subject of debate. Consider what the historians say, not what Keith says they say.

But I think you are confusing history, which is the record of what actually happened, with political philosophy. People who write historical books tend to mix these, if not confuse them. They are not so mixed in journal articles, even by the same people.

So WWI was "a battle between empires" - quite evidently true. "To divide the world", there we diverge from historical fact and touch on questions of motivation, which are much harder to be definite about. And motivations for different individuals would have been different.