The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

906 Pages·2006·17.23 MB·English

by  Niall Ferguson

N I A LL F E R G U S ON
W A R - W O R LD
THE
Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
v-
THE WAR OF THE WORLD
PRAISE FOR
"Fascinating ... supremely readable and thought-provoking.' -Financial Times
"Here is a work of originality and depth, history at its most challenging and
controversial.... No one ... can afford to overlook it." —The Times (of London)
"Big, bold and brilliantly belligerent. -The Sunday Telegraph
"Ferguson ... writes with tremendous narrative verve.... He loves controversy... the
grenade lobbed into the cozy tea party of received wisdom." —The Sunday Times
"His descriptions of atrocities will purge readers with pity and terror. He fixes
on compelling details. . . . His judgements are . . . incisive . . . [His] statistics are
copious and telling." —The Independent
"Blends together the economic, financial and political analysis in a manner that far
too few historians are equipped to do. He is a fine debunker." —The Economist
"A deftly paced, continent-crossing account of the last century's 'age of hatred.' . . .
[I]t is gripping stuff." —The Guardian
"There is no Nobel prize for history, but if there was, Niall Ferguson would doubtless
be a contender." —The Herald
"One... is swept along by the author's superb clarity of expression and the persuasive
verve of his style. The book is simply a great read. Ferguson meshes political and
economic interpretations of history with psychological and literary ones with an
unparalleled ability. ... And one of the things that you cannot help but like about
Ferguson is that he doesn't dodge the tough issues." —The Irish Times
ISBN 1-59420-100-5 z
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WORLD WAR II, we have been told all our lives, was
our greatest triumph, the moment when the forces of
light, the Western democracies, prevailed over the forces
of darkness, the Nazis and the other Axis powers, in a
conflict the latter started in 1939 and which ended with
their defeat six years later. In this extraordinarily bril
liant and vivid book, Niall Ferguson challenges our en
during assumptions about what was, without question,
the most titanic struggle the planet has ever seen. The
War of the World redefines the Second World War as
the central act of an epic fifty-year struggle between rival
empires. Far from culminating in the triumph of the West,
this struggle was part of an inexorable shift in the global
balance of power toward the East. The central question
Ferguson poses and answers is why that shift had to be
so appallingly violent.
What made the twentieth century—an age of un
precedented material and scientific advance—also the most
violent in all history? What went wrong with modernity?
The stock explanations, Niall Ferguson demonstrates,
are inadequate, whether they blame military technology,
extreme ideology or dictatorial demagogy. For none of
these can tell us why violence was so heavily concentrated
in certain places—Central and Eastern Europe, Manchu
ria and Korea—and at certain times, above all the 1940s.
The key, he argues, was the lethal coincidence of three
forces: economic volatility, ethnic disintegration, and the
end of empires.
The world of 1900 was in many ways as globalized
as our own. Markets for goods, labor and capital were inte
grated as never before. Men and women had never mingled
so freely as they did in cities like London, Berlin and Shang
hai. Yet it was precisely such cities that were devastated in
what Niall Ferguson calls the War of the World—a war
waged against innocent civilians not by some ruthless
alien invader, as H. G. Wells had imagined, but by their
fellow human beings.
An epic historical narrative that takes the reader
from the fields of Flanders to the plains of Poland, from
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(continued from Irani Hap)
the walls of Nanjing to the beaches of Normandy,
The War of the World is Niall Ferguson's masterpiece.
Ik brings to life an age in which the irregularities of
boom and bust tore apart multicultural communities;
an age poisoned by the hateful idea of irreconcilable
racial differences; above all, an age of imperial endgames
in which the agonizing death throes of old empires co
incided with the rapid rise and fall of new and ruthless
empire-states.
Only by adopting the indiscriminately violent meth
ods of total war could the Western powers defeat these
enemies. Yet military victory could not arrest that descent
of the West which, Ferguson argues, was the true arc of the
twentieth century.
Drawing on a pioneering combination of history,
economics and the cutting-edge interdisciplinary study of
human violence, The War of the World is a revolutionary
reinterpretation of the modern era.
NIALL FERGUSON is
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of
History at Harvard University, a
Senior Research Fellow of Jesus
College, Oxford University, and
a Senior Fellow of the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. The bestselling author of
Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War,
The Cash Nexus, Empire and Colossus, he also writes regu
larly for newspapers and magazines all over the world.
Since 2003 he has written and presented three highly suc
cessful television documentary series for British television:
Empire, American Colossus and, most recently, The War of
the World. He, his wife and their three children divide their
time between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Jacket design Dean Nicastro Jacket photograph ferry Moore. May, 1945. by W Eugene Smith
© The Heirs of W Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star Inc , New York Collection Center tor Creative
Photography. The University of Arizona, Tucson Author photograph © Oewald Aukema
7he A member of Penguin Group (USA) Int.
Penguin 375 Hudson Street, New York. NY. 11)014
Press www.pcnguin.eom
The War of the World
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the
Modern World, 1700-2000
The Pity of War
The House of Rothschild
NIALL FERGUSON
The War of the World
Twentieth-Century Conflict and
the Descent of the West
THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2006
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First American edition
Published in 2006 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2006
All rights reserved
Excerpt from "The Waste Land" from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot.
By permission of Faber and Faber and the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Illustration credits appear on page xiii.
ISBN 1-59420-100-5
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