Let me begin with a gripe. This is a beautifully researched and written book. It is the first account of the making of the cemeteries of the first world war based extensively on the archives of the Imperial, now Commonwealth, War Graves Commission (IWGC) that until recently have been largely closed to historians. It is also the first account that argues that the commission's founding director, the visionary imperialist Sir Fabian Ware, was the driving force behind this vast memorial undertaking and not just the servant of history. It would be just as readable if it had proper citations instead of the few, abbreviated, and needlessly refractive references coded to sentence fragments that are crammed begrudgingly on a few pages at the back of the book. I do not know whose fault this is but scholarship as good as David Crane's deserves better.

The rows of uniformly marked gravestones that follow the contours of battle for hundreds of kilometres, the unbearably long lists of the names of the missing dead inscribed near where their bearers were thought to have fallen, the austere, classical Stone of Remembrance, the "open mouth of death", as the critic Vincent Scully described Sir Edwin Lutyens's great monument at Thiepval, all are now so "imaginatively compelling" that it is hard not to see them as somehow inevitable. Like all successful works of art, they are necessarily what they are.

This was not always the case. The political and aesthetic claims on the names and bodies of the dead that Ware fought for were at the time wildly controversial, even radical. In 1920 the House of Commons debated the IWGC policy that all war graves would be treated equally and uniformly, and consequently that relatives would not have the right to erect individual memorials. "By all means have [collective] memorials," objected Viscount Wolmer, "but you have no right to employ, in making these memorials, the bodies of other people's relatives."

The Countess of Selborne in an article entitled "National Socialism of War Cemeteries" for the National Review came closer to grasping the full import of Ware's project. The rights of the next of kin had been abrogated by "a secret treaty with a foreign power", she fumed. Not quite. But, as Crane argues, the agreement that Ware negotiated in 1915 for "perpetuity of sepulture" on land paid for by France and maintained by a "properly constituted" British authority provided the framework for a collective and national memorial project on a scale the world had never seen.

The stakes were high. Ware's policies on how to treat the dead in the new cemeteries he had obtained in France were, the countess continued, "pure socialism of the most advanced school" that would inevitably lead to mediocrity and the end of individual liberty, to the "final tyrannical decree" that "no one is to have the right to move his relation's body from the national cemeteries". Her target here was not the treaties but "the conscription of bodies", "worthy of Lenin" in its "contempt of liberty … exaltation of the state … and the aspiration for similarity and equality." She understood Ware's vision and hated it.

In 1914 and 1915 there had been a number of private exhumations to retrieve the bodies of soldiers – almost exclusively officers – who had been hastily buried in France. They were sent home at private expense for private burial. Ware had opposed the practice, and so had both General Sir Nevil Macready, the adjutant general whose brief included army regulations on the care of the dead, and the French commander General Foch, who had helped negotiate the cemetery treaties. But the practice was hard to stop; the dead body had always belonged to the next of kin; burying one's dead seemed the most fundamental of individual rights.

The death and exhumation of Lieutenant William Glynne Charles Gladstone, MP, grandson of the prime minister, presented Ware with the chance to reframe the question not as a matter of individual liberty but of democracy and equality. Gladstone arrived in France on 15 March 1915, uninterested in military service and not very good at it, but proud of being with his regiment and of doing his duty. He wrote home frequently; his heart was in Flintshire. "I must break off now for a purpose, which I will tell you about tomorrow," read the last lines of an unfinished letter sent to his mother by comrades after his death on 15 April. A German sniper shot the very tall Gladstone as his head peeked out from the parapet of a collapsed trench.

Despite the rules and regulations, and because of the intervention of the prime minister and the king, the body of this Eton and Oxford-educated young lieutenant was returned to his family and buried with his ancestors in the churchyard at Hawarden. Ware made of this sad story a public relations triumph. It might have seemed only right and just that the body of a reluctant soldier who had been at the front for less than a month should lie with his fathers. But in Ware's account it was a craven case of class privilege. If men of all classes were being asked to give up their lives in Kitchener's New Army, then men of all classes should lie together in death. The Countess of Selborne had it right: Ware did aspire to "equality and similarity", and, less than a year after the war began, he had established it as the principle by which the IWGC operated. The only body granted officially sanctioned special treatment was that of the war's most sacred relic: the Unknown Warrior.

Ware succeeded not only in keeping all bodies for his new cemeteries but also in establishing the equality of commemoration: all tombstones were identical, all the epitaphs were the same except for short and carefully monitored lines that relatives could add at their own expense, all the names on the memorials to the missing dead were the same size, all subjects of the empire were included. (Crane does not mention it, but Ware fought hard to have the tombstones of some 1500 Chinese labourers who died serving on the western front inscribed in Chinese characters at considerable extra cost.) He also managed to get a team of distinguished but fractious architects to all pull in the same direction to create the classical and quietly austere monuments that transcended the religious divisions of metropolis and empire.

Crane traces the roots of Ware's idealism and zealotry to his upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren, a sectarian offshoot of Anglicanism characterised by reliance on the sole authority of scripture and on the importance of intense Christian fellowship. He left the religion of his fathers as a young man but took with him the "passion for battle, the conviction of righteousness, the love of authority" and "the spirit of independence" he had learned at home. After Oxford he found a secular outlet for his earlier religious commitments as an acolyte of Viscount Milner in his project of creating in South Africa an ideal version of imperial Britain, its destiny for greatness, its civilising mission. Under Milner, too, he discovered his talent as an administrator.

And most importantly, he came to articulate the political vision that Crane sees as being made concrete in the works of the IWGC. The life of man, he came to feel is a constant struggle between the individualist and the collective but at its highest stage "the individual is submerged in the family … the family in the nation … and so the Nation … in the highest attainment of human collectivity the world has yet seen … the empire". And so a conservative imperialist led the IWGC to create a memorial culture in which aristocratic heroism took second place to democratic service, and the death of Everyman, instead of the great of the realm, became the subject of memory. "None else of Name" would never again suffice.

There can be no question that, for Ware, the bodies of the first world war constituted an empire of the dead, and that he, more than anyone else, fought successfully to create and defend the twin foundations of the new collectivist memorial culture: national cemeteries and equal treatment of the fallen. But Crane himself suggests that it is very difficult to separate the power of the "zeitgeist" from the ardour of one of its servants, and it would be worth thinking about the alternative accounts that find support from Crane's evidence.

The conflicting claims of the nation and individual over the dead of war go back at least to Sophocles's Antigone, but not all of Ware's major policies grew out of an imperial resolution to an old tension. His rejection of tombstones where there were no bodies – "dud graves", Rudyard Kipling, one of his major collaborators, called them – is one example. More important was his insistence that the names of the missing dead be inscribed on memorials as near as possible to where they were thought to have fallen, rather than the cheaper alternative of listing them by regiment without any regard to necro‑geography. This decision speaks not of collectivism but of localism and of the intimate relationship between the names and the bodies of the dead. Parish, school and work monuments back home likewise gathered names bound to specific places in all sorts of ways.

Ordinary people supported Ware's policy. The kind of familial intimacy so evident in the letters of Lieutenant William Gladstone and his mother can be multiplied many times. Thousands of postmen carried billions of pieces of mail from the battle to the home front and back; packages of cigarettes and gloves and sweets were returned with the stamp "KILLED". Novelistic small details of life in these two radically different worlds flowed between soldiers and their kin.

The army of the first world war could no longer be treated as the "scum of the earth", which is how Wellington characterised his soldiers, but the reason was not so much a change in attitude as a change in the emotional infrastructure of a society that went far beyond how someone might have viewed the military. Every life now demanded a denouement in a way not true in earlier ages. The poor in the 19th century had come to hate the pauper funeral and to demand recognition in death; the proportion of the population who had names on their churchyard tombstones increased tenfold. And literature taught that the last scenes of an ordinary life were worth noting: there are no scenes of natural death in Shakespeare; they abound in the novels of the 19th century. This is the change that the Duchess of Selborne rued and that Ware mobilised for his own purposes.

But it had an independent life. In a sense, the empire of the dead and the dead of nations more generally were loaned to the collectivity. The million or so individual names and bodies that the IWGC put on the landscape are less an imperial aufhebung – an assimilation into a large entity – than a gathering of the dead that can be interpreted in many ways. Then, and certainly now, Thiepval in the Somme, facing east toward the former German lines, set amid tombstones, with its 16 weight-bearing columns engraved with the names of 73,367 missing soldiers, speaks of death, sadness and mourning, far more than of imperial unity.

And if one visits its architectural progeny – the Vietnam Veterans Memorial – one can not help but be struck by the way in which a collective monument enables individual mourning. Just as poppies and notes are left by descendants on the tombstones and lists of names of the first world war, friends and relatives leave gifts for the dead of Vietnam in front of the memorial in Washington. People speak to the dead; they offer beer and cigarettes and photographs and letters.

In this book Sir Fabian Ware finally gets his due. His persistence and administrative skill wrought a revolution in how the dead were remembered. We need not decide whether it was his vision or deeper currents in the inner lives of ordinary men and women that led to the creation of the first world war's graves. Crane offers ample evidence for his own views and for alternatives. This is one of the signs of an intellectually honest work of history.

• Thomas Laqueur is finishing a book to be called The Work of the Dead.