Product Description

Astonishing in its scope and erudition, this is the magnum opus that Niall Ferguson’s numerous acclaimed works have been leading up to. In it, he grapples with perhaps the most challenging questions of modern history: Why was the twentieth century history’s bloodiest by far? Why did unprecedented material progress go hand in hand with total war and genocide? His quest for new answers takes him from the walls of Nanjing to the bloody beaches of Normandy, from the economics of ethnic cleansing to the politics of imperial decline and fall. The result, as brilliantly written as it is vital, is a great historian’s masterwork.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42751 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Why, if life was improving so rapidly for so many people at the dawn of the 20th century, were the next hundred years full of brutal conflict? Ferguson (Colossus) has a relatively simple answer: ethnic unrest is prone to break out during periods of economic volatility—booms as well as busts. When they take place in or near areas of imperial decline or transition, the unrest is more likely to escalate into full-scale conflict. This compelling theory is applicable to the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated against Bosnians, but the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's analysis is devoted to the two world wars and the fate of the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe. His richly informed analysis overturns many basic assumptions. For example, he argues that England's appeasement of Hitler in 1938 didn't lead to WWII, but was a misinformed response to a war that had started as early as 1935. But with Ferguson's claims about "the descent of the West" and the smaller wars in the latter half of the century tucked away into a comparatively brief epilogue, his thoughtful study falls short of its epic promise. (Sept. 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Ferguson's eight-hundred-page reevaluation of the Second World War presents itself as a grand theory about ethnic conflict, the end of empire, and the postwar triumph of the East. The exact contours of the theory, however, remain unclear. Ferguson argues that the central story of the twentieth century is "the descent of the West," but he never really clarifies what "the West" means - Russia sometimes qualifies, sometimes not, depending upon what point Ferguson is trying to make. Ferguson is a skilled storyteller, and he offers many striking reflections on the bloodiest years of the past century, including a compelling analysis of appeasement. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is marred by sweeping judgments and jarring contradictions. A number of odd moves - such as the grouping of Hoovervilles with Soviet labor and German concentration camps - point up another conspicuous shortcoming: Ferguson's failure to make sense of America's power.
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From The Washington Post
The 20th century was the bloodiest in history. By now, the destruction is generally acknowledged, but the causes of the century's murderous conflicts are still matters of debate. So is the haunting question of whether a similar fate can be avoided in the 21st century.

In The War of the World, British historian Niall Ferguson offers a novel analysis of the causes of 20th-century violence. With more than 650 pages of main text and a vast scope, this is obviously a big book. It is also a fascinating read, thanks to Ferguson's gifts as a writer of clear, energetic narrative history.

As the title suggests, Ferguson sees common causes fueling and linking the disruptions of the 20th century. Thus for him, the "war of the world" begins with the Japanese defeat of the Russian navy in 1905 and doesn't end until the conclusion of the Korean War in 1953. Seen this way, World War I and II become peaks in a series of eruptions around the globe, all fueled by the incendiary confluence of three developments.

The first factor was economic. The 20th century was marked by rapid changes in prices and growth rates, and such volatility -- whether in the direction of boom or bust -- triggered social and political instability. The second development was social: Ethnic tensions, already growing, were heightened by the century's economic ups and downs. And the third factor was the decline of traditional empires. With their powers waning, Russia, China, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire lost control over their ethnically mixed borderlands -- the very areas where so much of the century's violence started, including World War I. The weakness of the old empires also tempted rising states such as Japan, Italy and Germany.

These aggressive new powers also embraced race theories that trumpeted the natural superiority of some ethnic groups. Earlier imperial powers had accepted miscegenation and the resulting racial melting pots as a natural characteristic of empire, but the supposedly scientific racism demanded an end to such mixing. Brutal conquest, ethnic cleansing and even genocide were more easily inflicted on so-called subhumans. Such racist thinking was prevalent in the first three decades of the 20th century, and as a result attacks against minorities occurred throughout the unstable, racially mixed communities of Eastern and Central Europe. In short, the stage was set for the Nazis' eradication of Jews, other minorities and the mentally impaired. The evil novelty of the German campaign was the industrialization of genocide in killing factories.

In Germany, assimilation's protective covering was torn away by the Nazi belief that the mixing of blood degraded the master race. "Hitler's determination to exclude Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft [the Nazi term for a racially pure community] meant identifying and persecuting a tiny minority that was inextricably interwoven into the fabric of German society," Ferguson writes. "And that may be the crucial point. Perhaps the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is best understood as a reaction to the very success of German-Jewish assimilation."

Ferguson's three crucial factors help explain why the century's conflicts were so cataclysmic. Even though there were many indicators of impending conflict, World War I took most people by surprise. To Ferguson, the outbreak of war was an "avoidable political error," and its massive destruction represented "nothing more than the most terrific train crash."

On the other hand, he concludes that a military confrontation with the Axis powers was unavoidable, given their determination to expand their living space, control vital strategic resources and found a new world order. "It was to be a world ruled by three empire-states, imperial in the extent of their power, but state-like in the centralized nature of that power," Ferguson writes. "It was to be a world shared between three master races: the Aryan, the Roman and the Yamato."

The Axis powers' aggressive intentions and actions in the 1930s should have convinced the Western allies to nip Hitler's aggrandizing moves in the bud, thus avoiding the all-out conflagration of World War II. Instead, Britain and France responded as if paralyzed and chose the worst option: They embraced appeasement, perhaps out of exhaustion from the century's previous great conflict. Or they may have been trying to buy time, which they squandered by failing to use it to rearm. Rather than forestalling war, appeasement led to it.

In both world wars, the failure of early, knockout military blows doomed Germany and its allies to ultimate defeat, forcing them to fight on multiple fronts. Given the preponderant economic capabilities of the British, French and United States, with the Soviet Union adding further industrial might in World War II, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan could not go the distance.

In terms of its war aims, the Soviet Union was the chief beneficiary of history's bloodiest war, Ferguson argues. "Central and Eastern Europe as far as the banks of the River Elbe was in Stalin's iron fist," he notes. Judged in terms of territories acquired or controlled, "the main beneficiary of victory in Asia, as in Europe, was once again the Soviet Union," which was repaid for entering the war against Japan with control of the Kuril Islands, Outer Mongolia, railways in Manchuria and other territorial gains -- and got a partitioned Korea as a Cold War bonus.

Beyond a redrawn world map, the century's wars left another grim legacy: the blurring of the line between civilians and combatants. Soviet labor camps, Nazi concentration camps, Allied bombings of German and Japanese cities, mass executions and purposefully induced famines disfigured the century. All told, far more civilians than combatants were killed -- a bleak phenomenon that marks the conflicts of our time as well.

As for the future, Ferguson wonders if the "war of the world" is really over. "The dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity," he warns, "are forces that stir within us still." He sees some hopeful signs, however, that the 21st century may not repeat the horrors of the 20th. First, the vulnerability of the world's major economies to cyclical slumps has declined markedly since 1945. Second, ethnic mixing on the borders of the old 19th-century empires is also less prevalent as a result of the mass killings, expulsions and resettlements of the 20th century. And finally, the anti-liberal empires -- notably the Soviet Union and Austria-Hungary -- have disintegrated and devolved into relatively stable and racially homogenized nation-states such as Poland and Germany.

Of one thing Ferguson is certain: "It is only when the extent of Western dominance in 1900 is appreciated that the true narrative arc of the twentieth century reveals itself. This was not 'the triumph of the West,' but rather the crisis of the European empires, the ultimate result of which was the inexorable revival of Asian power and the descent of the West." This may be the most long-lasting and consequential result of the 20th century's unparalleled violence. It is an undeveloped afterthought in this massive but readable book -- and an obvious theme for a follow-up volume.

Reviewed by James F. Hoge Jr.
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Are we at the edge of the end of Western domination of the world?
Niall Ferguson is a remarkably inventive and productive historian, who in the last decade has produced a number of major works including a largely favorable analysis of the British Empire, and one of the reluctant empire of the twentieth century, the American Colossus. Now in his latest book, an expanded version of a British Channel Four Television series, he surveys the history of the twentieth century, which he claims to be the bloodiest century in modern history. This century had `the greatest man- made catastrophe of all time' the Second World War. His thesis is that one major reason for the disasters of the century is the decline of the great multinational Empires which existed before the First World War- and the conflict brought about through `the emergence of new empire- states in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany.'

In explaining the violence of this most violent of centuries he also invokes two other major factors. The first is the ethnic conflict in which advanced processes of assimilation (as with the Jews in Germany) broke down. The second is the `economic volatility, the frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment" which bring with them intense social stresses and strain.

These theoretical elements outlined clearly in the first chapter of the book serve as basis for his panoramic survey of the century's great disasters. But as his masterly narrative of international diplomacy and military history unfolds the theoretical elements somehow fade before the careful massing of evidence, the detailed analysis of what happened in Central and Eastern Europe, in China, Manchuria, Korea and Japan, in the vast stretches of the Russian Empire, in Cambodia and East Asia, in conflicts where incredible cruelties are done again and again by empires in demise suffering from ethnic conflict and radical economic change. .

The evidence for the Jewish reader is especially agonizing when it comes to his chronicling events of the Shoah, and too of some of the particularly horrific crimes committed against the Jews which occurred before and after it. These were perpetrated by a variety of Central and Eastern European people, Ukranians, Lithuanians, Croatians, Rumanians, Poles, Hungarians.

A vast human gallery are also victims of most horrible cruelties .Whether it is the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks, or the Japanese wholesale rape of Chinese women,(The Rape of Nanking) , the slaughter of Tutsi by Hutus in Rwanda Ferguson provides a despairing picture of human cruelty and suffering..

In analyzing the perpetrators of the Holocaust he is especially instructive when examines not simply the ordinary `willing executioners' but the intellectual elite of the society then considered the most cultured in the world. Ferguson examines the Nazi appeal to `those with university degrees so vital to the smooth running of a modern state and civil society', and shows how Nazism provided a kind of political religion which came to replace declining traditional faiths. The new faith inspired by the magnetism of the Fuhrer captivated German intellectuals and deprived them of all sense of human decency.

Another theme of Ferguson is his belief that the wars of the twentieth century resulted in a shift in the world balance- of- power towards the East. As he understands it from 1500 to 1900 the West reigned supreme, but new centers of power have emerged which deprive it of its exclusivity.

Ferguson in some of his most recent journalism has addressed the question of which area of the world most likely to set off a new conflagration. He writes of the great Shiite and Sunnite divide. But alarmingly he also makes a parallel between the rise of a charismatic dictator in the thirties, and the rise of the Iranian Ahmadinejad today. He speculates about the rise of a nuclear Iran the West has tried to appease, and speculates about it compelling a nuclear exchange with Israel which brings about the twilight of the West...

Clearly Ferguson would like Western leaders to take responsibility now and by responsible action avert the new Disasters which may already be at our gate.

An ambitious work comes up a bit short
Niall Ferguson's The War of the World has received a fair amount of "buzz." And, indeed, as one reads it, the scholarship, the knowledge of historical nuances, and the command of the sweep of the 20th century are all readily apparent. However, in the end, the book is somewhat unsatisfying.

The book begins with an interesting notion, namely that life was rapidly improving as the twentieth century began. However, the puzzle addressed by Ferguson follows from that: why did the rest of the century become so bloody? The First and Second World Wars were ghastly events in terms of the butchery of human life. And, looking at the subtitle to the book, one result was "the descent of the West."

What factors shaped the currents of this time period? He suggests three major factors: ethnic conflict, economic turbulence, and the decline of empires. The first two are easily understood. However, he also notes the disintegration/decline of the old empires, such as the British Empire.

What next? He suggests that the West is slowly being challenged by rising powers such as China. He also notes that the West, because of slow population growth, is coming increasingly to depend upon foreign labor, including those from the world of Islam (the Near East, as he terms it). Thus, his sense is that the West is facing challenges as we have entered the 21st century.

Obviously, this is an ambitious volume. It is worth reading to get a global, overarching perspective on the 20th century. However, in the end, it is not fully satisfying. The thesis is never crisply stated, the book tends to meander, and the final chapter does not really pull things together as well as it could. In short, the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

A Century of Unprecedented Bloodshed
In both relative and absolute terms, the bodycount of the last century was the highest in recorded history. There were 16 conflicts that left more than a million dead, another 6 that claimed from a half million to a million lives, and 14 more that claimed from a quarter to a half million lives; all told, about 167 to 188 million people lost their lives as a result of armed conflict. Harvard historian Niall Fergusson has written a monumental tour-de-force attempting to answer the question: why?

Being Niall Ferguson, author of "Empire" and "Colossus," the reasons are not the conventional ones. Large-scale killing has taken place in previous centuries, and the 20th century, blessed with material progress, should have been a peaceful one, yet the bloodshed was unprecedented.

Ferguson disagrees with the traditional explanation that the scale of killing was a result of more sophisticated military hardware. The killing fields of Rwanda and Cambodia showed that large-scale massacres could be carried out by primitive weapons.

Stalinism, Fascism, and Anti-Semitism have been cited as the sources of the centuries largests mass murders. Ferguson argues that although the nation-states that formed after the disintegration of empires embraced extreme ideologies, these nation-states were not inherently evil; in fact they carried out many positive and peaceful goals.

Ferguson, instead, identifies three elements - the three E's - that were responsible for much of the 20th century's armed conflicts: "ethnic disintegration, economic volitility, and empires in decline." One of the primary examples he uses to illustrate his thesis is the case of Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to World War I, four empires were on the brink of dissolution - the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the Hapsburgs of Austro-Hungary, the Romanovs of Russia, and the Ottomans in Turkey. The co-existence of these multi-ethnic populations was always tenuous at best, the transformation from empire to nation-state was anything but smooth. The nation-states that emerged after the war - Turkey, Germany, and Russia had their own agendas to cope with the worldwide economic depression that followed the war. The other countries that were located in between from the Baltic to the Balkans experienced some of the bloodiest ethnic cleanings in history. And this was only a foreboding of what was to come.

What makes this "fatal formula" so pertinent today is that all of these elements exist in the Middle East today. According the Ferguson, as he elegantly argued in "Colossus," America is an empire, a liberal empire, but it is also an empire in denial. With economic instablity, which already existed before the invasion of Iraq; ethnic strife between Sunni and Shia; and America's wavering support for the young nation: everything seems to be heading toward full-scale civil war. Making matters worse, the conflict will inevitably spill over into Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom have ethnic and religious interests in the outcome.

Ferguson's analysis seems to be convincing. The brutality that we are witnessing today in Iraq where Sunni and Shia treat each other as "inferior or malignant species" is remarkably reminiscent of some of the 20th century's worst nightmares. We can only hope that the bloodletting can be stopped and that a political solution can be found. Unfortunately, the ranks of the optimists are dwindling.