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La guerra del mundo
Pese a las expectativas de estabilidad y progreso que auguraba la llegada del siglo XX, este acabó siendo el más violento y desestabilizador de la historia; abocó al mundo a dos guerras mundiales, al fanatismo y al genocidio, y lo dividió en dos grandes bloques antagónicos. En la presente obra, el gran historiador británcio Nial Ferguson ofrece una serie de reveladoras y penetrantes respuestas a las causas de tantos desastres concentrados en una sola centuria.
896 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2006
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5468 people want to read
About the author
Niall Ferguson
103 books3,325 followersNiall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC.
The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which--Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist--was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg.
Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).
(Source: Amazon)
The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which--Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist--was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg.
Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).
(Source: Amazon)
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April 27, 2016
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's...that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied...With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter."
-- H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Niall Ferguson, the young Oxford fellow who gratingly insists upon himself, takes Wells as his cue in The War of the World (singular, not plural). Like Wells, Ferguson starts his book at the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Specifically, he starts with September 11, 1901, in an obvious allusion to the more famous September 11, 2001. The connection is never explained; but then again, there are a lot of connections that are not made in this book.
Ferguson begins The War of the World by showing how a modestly educated white man born on this date would actually have a pretty good life. Technology was changing the world, making it easier for those of lesser-means to live easier lives. What had once been a far-flung globe was being stitched together by safer, faster travel, and by the web of finance. Soon there would be flying contraptions, electric gizmos, and a big ocean liner named Titanic. Things were off to a smashing start!
Within thirteen years, much of the world would be entangled in a disastrous war that started with an assassination in the Balkans, of all places. This touched off what Ferguson calls "the bloodiest century in history" (in both relative and absolute figures).
The big promise of The War of the World is that Ferguson is going to stand conventional wisdom on its head; make up down and down up; and irreparably alter the way we think of the twentieth century. To which I reply, in my best arcane contract law parlance: Ferguson's claim tis "mere puffery."
Ferguson's non-ground-breaking thesis is that the bloodshed of the twentieth century resulted from the trifecta of economic boom-and-bust, decaying empires, and race. That's like me saying that a baseball game is won by good pitching, good defense, and scoring more runs than the other team.
Furthermore, Ferguson doesn't cover the whole of the twentieth century; instead, he focuses on the years 1914-1945. That's right. In other words, this is a book about World War One and World War Two (except that it's written by the brash, dashing, insufferable, Indiana Jones-wannabe Nial Ferguson, so it's in your face!).
After an agonizingly prolonged introduction, chock-full of needless charts and graphs, you get to the book's first section, which deals with World War One. Here, the focus is on decaying empires. In Ferguson's telling, World War One came about as Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans struggled to hold onto their fast-fracturing empires. Well, duh. This isn't really novel or unique. It seems pretty obvious that the entangling alliances that set off the war like a series of dominoes were entered into in the hopes of protecting imperial assets. (The Germans were allied with Austria Hungary; Austria Hungary was allied with Serbia; then the Germans and the Austrians allied with Italy against Russia; in response Russia allied with France and France allied with Great Britain and Great Britain promised to uphold Belgium's neutrality. See? Simple.)
This is not to say that I totally disliked this section. I did not. It just promised too much. Ferguson is easy to read, inserts telling anecdotes, and doesn't neglect sources such as plays, poems, and novels, that tell a great deal about a time period but are often ignored. Moreover, as he did with The Pity of War, Ferguson places a lot of the blame of the war on England. This is actually provocative, and frankly, has a lot of truth to it. Much of the history of World War One is told through the prism of World War Two. Thus, the Germans are always the baby-eating villains, and the British are always the stalwart heroes (and the Americans are always the ones to come in and save England's ass, which then gives us the right to be rude to Europeans while claiming - despite being born in the 70s or 80s - that "we saved your ass in World War Two!) I call this view of World War One Retroactive Hitler Syndrome. The subtler reality is that Germany was doing what every other European power was doing: protecting itself. To a large extent, it was England's decision to enter the war that took it from a continental conflict (of which Europe has had hundreds) to a global war.
In the mid-war years (1919-1937), Ferguson discusses economic volatility and race. Again, his economic arguments feel rehashed. I mean, is there anyone anywhere who doesn't understand that the crushing debt of Versailles and the Great Depression created a fertile environment for Adolf Hitler?
The race discussion is a little more interesting. In Ferguson's view, the war didn't cause racial genocide; rather, race caused the war. There is a fascinating bit about how the victorious Allies planted the seeds for war by dismembering the German Empire, thereby removing ethnic Germans from their homeland.
The focal point of the race discussion, though, is on the Jews. A lot of time is spent on pogroms, anti-Semitic tracts, race laws, marriage rights, property rights, and finally, the Holocaust. This is in contrast to a much shorter, though more enlightening discussion of race in Asia, where the Japanese were subjugating the Chinese and Koreans. Simply put, I've read about the Holocaust before. From where I'm sitting at my desktop computer, I can look to one of my bookcases and see any number of titles covering this topic: Nazi Germany and the Jews by Saul Friedlander; Auschwitz: A New History, by Laurence Rees; The Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer; Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Goldhagen; and Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes (I call this my "frowny face" shelf).
The point I'm trying to make, not succinctly, I might add, is that this "groundbreaking" work is actually taking up space in a well-furrowed field (to uncomfortably use a farming metaphor).
To extend this thought a bit further, it's tough to know how much original digging Ferguson did, as opposed to slightly re-framing the work of others. It doesn't help that Ferguson doesn't use endnotes (he explains in a note at the end of the book that the 2,000 endnotes would not possibly fit in the book, and are available online. I tried to find them at his website, www.niallferguson.org, but after an admittedly half-assed attempt, gave up). Most of the sources in his bibliography are secondary, previously published works. And in certain parts of the book, I could tell. For instance, during the section on the "rape of Nanking," Ferguson uses a newspaper story about Japanese soldiers in a beheading contest. This same story was used by Iris Chang in Rape of Nanking.
The second half of the book is dominated by World War Two, which Ferguson rightly describes as starting in 1937, with the Japanese invasion of China. What can I say about this section? The words diffuse, scattered, and random come to mind. There is no narrative; there is no arc; there is no thesis. There's just a lot of dots, without any connecting. Ferguson seems to be jumping around willy-nilly, to use a phrase I would otherwise never utter. One moment he is excerpting a graphic description of Jews being executed; the next moment he is arguing that the Axis powers never had a chance to win.
Again, this is not to say I wasn't entertained. To an extent, I was. Ferguson is like a really smart guy who gets really, really drunk at one of my parties, and then starts talking about history. Like a drunk, he'll get going on a topic and continue down that road for awhile before suddenly veering to another topic. However, if Ferguson's point was to show that World War One and Two were actually one long war, I don't see how these random factoids fit in.
The diffuseness was at times exasperating, but it tilted into irritation at times due to Ferguson's blunt style. He is given - as a brash, young historian - to making bald pronouncements on controversial subjects, as though anyone who felt otherwise was a nitwit (that is, was not Niall Ferguson). For instance, Ferguson dismisses Lindbergh as a "crypto-fascist" and concludes that Japan never would have surrendered without being bombed to smithereens (ignoring, of course, Ultra decrypts to the contrary).
In the last fifty pages, Ferguson decides to extend his un-proven thesis forward, into the rest of the century (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) This epilogue was rushed, and like the rest of the book, ungainly.
There's definitely a lot of ideas here, and keen insight, but this is a book badly in need of some Ritalin.
-- H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Niall Ferguson, the young Oxford fellow who gratingly insists upon himself, takes Wells as his cue in The War of the World (singular, not plural). Like Wells, Ferguson starts his book at the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Specifically, he starts with September 11, 1901, in an obvious allusion to the more famous September 11, 2001. The connection is never explained; but then again, there are a lot of connections that are not made in this book.
Ferguson begins The War of the World by showing how a modestly educated white man born on this date would actually have a pretty good life. Technology was changing the world, making it easier for those of lesser-means to live easier lives. What had once been a far-flung globe was being stitched together by safer, faster travel, and by the web of finance. Soon there would be flying contraptions, electric gizmos, and a big ocean liner named Titanic. Things were off to a smashing start!
Within thirteen years, much of the world would be entangled in a disastrous war that started with an assassination in the Balkans, of all places. This touched off what Ferguson calls "the bloodiest century in history" (in both relative and absolute figures).
The big promise of The War of the World is that Ferguson is going to stand conventional wisdom on its head; make up down and down up; and irreparably alter the way we think of the twentieth century. To which I reply, in my best arcane contract law parlance: Ferguson's claim tis "mere puffery."
Ferguson's non-ground-breaking thesis is that the bloodshed of the twentieth century resulted from the trifecta of economic boom-and-bust, decaying empires, and race. That's like me saying that a baseball game is won by good pitching, good defense, and scoring more runs than the other team.
Furthermore, Ferguson doesn't cover the whole of the twentieth century; instead, he focuses on the years 1914-1945. That's right. In other words, this is a book about World War One and World War Two (except that it's written by the brash, dashing, insufferable, Indiana Jones-wannabe Nial Ferguson, so it's in your face!).
After an agonizingly prolonged introduction, chock-full of needless charts and graphs, you get to the book's first section, which deals with World War One. Here, the focus is on decaying empires. In Ferguson's telling, World War One came about as Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans struggled to hold onto their fast-fracturing empires. Well, duh. This isn't really novel or unique. It seems pretty obvious that the entangling alliances that set off the war like a series of dominoes were entered into in the hopes of protecting imperial assets. (The Germans were allied with Austria Hungary; Austria Hungary was allied with Serbia; then the Germans and the Austrians allied with Italy against Russia; in response Russia allied with France and France allied with Great Britain and Great Britain promised to uphold Belgium's neutrality. See? Simple.)
This is not to say that I totally disliked this section. I did not. It just promised too much. Ferguson is easy to read, inserts telling anecdotes, and doesn't neglect sources such as plays, poems, and novels, that tell a great deal about a time period but are often ignored. Moreover, as he did with The Pity of War, Ferguson places a lot of the blame of the war on England. This is actually provocative, and frankly, has a lot of truth to it. Much of the history of World War One is told through the prism of World War Two. Thus, the Germans are always the baby-eating villains, and the British are always the stalwart heroes (and the Americans are always the ones to come in and save England's ass, which then gives us the right to be rude to Europeans while claiming - despite being born in the 70s or 80s - that "we saved your ass in World War Two!) I call this view of World War One Retroactive Hitler Syndrome. The subtler reality is that Germany was doing what every other European power was doing: protecting itself. To a large extent, it was England's decision to enter the war that took it from a continental conflict (of which Europe has had hundreds) to a global war.
In the mid-war years (1919-1937), Ferguson discusses economic volatility and race. Again, his economic arguments feel rehashed. I mean, is there anyone anywhere who doesn't understand that the crushing debt of Versailles and the Great Depression created a fertile environment for Adolf Hitler?
The race discussion is a little more interesting. In Ferguson's view, the war didn't cause racial genocide; rather, race caused the war. There is a fascinating bit about how the victorious Allies planted the seeds for war by dismembering the German Empire, thereby removing ethnic Germans from their homeland.
The focal point of the race discussion, though, is on the Jews. A lot of time is spent on pogroms, anti-Semitic tracts, race laws, marriage rights, property rights, and finally, the Holocaust. This is in contrast to a much shorter, though more enlightening discussion of race in Asia, where the Japanese were subjugating the Chinese and Koreans. Simply put, I've read about the Holocaust before. From where I'm sitting at my desktop computer, I can look to one of my bookcases and see any number of titles covering this topic: Nazi Germany and the Jews by Saul Friedlander; Auschwitz: A New History, by Laurence Rees; The Holocaust, by Martin Gilbert; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer; Hitler's Willing Executioners, by Daniel Goldhagen; and Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes (I call this my "frowny face" shelf).
The point I'm trying to make, not succinctly, I might add, is that this "groundbreaking" work is actually taking up space in a well-furrowed field (to uncomfortably use a farming metaphor).
To extend this thought a bit further, it's tough to know how much original digging Ferguson did, as opposed to slightly re-framing the work of others. It doesn't help that Ferguson doesn't use endnotes (he explains in a note at the end of the book that the 2,000 endnotes would not possibly fit in the book, and are available online. I tried to find them at his website, www.niallferguson.org, but after an admittedly half-assed attempt, gave up). Most of the sources in his bibliography are secondary, previously published works. And in certain parts of the book, I could tell. For instance, during the section on the "rape of Nanking," Ferguson uses a newspaper story about Japanese soldiers in a beheading contest. This same story was used by Iris Chang in Rape of Nanking.
The second half of the book is dominated by World War Two, which Ferguson rightly describes as starting in 1937, with the Japanese invasion of China. What can I say about this section? The words diffuse, scattered, and random come to mind. There is no narrative; there is no arc; there is no thesis. There's just a lot of dots, without any connecting. Ferguson seems to be jumping around willy-nilly, to use a phrase I would otherwise never utter. One moment he is excerpting a graphic description of Jews being executed; the next moment he is arguing that the Axis powers never had a chance to win.
Again, this is not to say I wasn't entertained. To an extent, I was. Ferguson is like a really smart guy who gets really, really drunk at one of my parties, and then starts talking about history. Like a drunk, he'll get going on a topic and continue down that road for awhile before suddenly veering to another topic. However, if Ferguson's point was to show that World War One and Two were actually one long war, I don't see how these random factoids fit in.
The diffuseness was at times exasperating, but it tilted into irritation at times due to Ferguson's blunt style. He is given - as a brash, young historian - to making bald pronouncements on controversial subjects, as though anyone who felt otherwise was a nitwit (that is, was not Niall Ferguson). For instance, Ferguson dismisses Lindbergh as a "crypto-fascist" and concludes that Japan never would have surrendered without being bombed to smithereens (ignoring, of course, Ultra decrypts to the contrary).
In the last fifty pages, Ferguson decides to extend his un-proven thesis forward, into the rest of the century (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) This epilogue was rushed, and like the rest of the book, ungainly.
There's definitely a lot of ideas here, and keen insight, but this is a book badly in need of some Ritalin.
May 29, 2013
Typical Book written by and made for Establishment.
2 out of 5 Stars. Ferguson didn't add any thing new to the historical view of "World War" but only reinforced the same old song and dance.
As a Hedge Fund Investment Banker during the height of the Financial Crisis, I found "his" research a bit disingenuous that he didn't write a thing about how banks FUND most of the wars around the Globe especially when the title of this book is "The War of the World".
He admits in the credits that he had at least 11 students compile most of the detailed research but comes up with his own conclusions. He points at the same conflict zones beneficial for Western Propaganda, Pearl Harbour and the Nazis invasion of Europe.
If this research was truly a "The War of the WORLD" he should have included the rest of the WORLD:
1.US Military Coups and Occupation of South America and the Caribbean and the continued "Economic Occupation" of those countries. ie. Haiti
2. The French Occupation of Polynesia/Indochina/Vietnam and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People.
3. US Occupation of Hawaii and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People.
4. US Occupation of Philippines(1898 to 1946) and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People.
also includes:
-Guam
-Laos
-Micronesia
-Palau
5. The British Occupation of China/Middle East and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People. (Trade with a known Violator of Human Rights is Illegal Under 4th Geneva Conventions and Most Domestics Laws in 1st World Countries.
One last note, Ferguson does not attack the "Bad Guys" from the perspective of Extreme Nationalism, ie. the Nazis. He should include Nationalism as a factor to war. He arrives at it from the point of Race. Ferguson comes from a nationalistic Nation of "Great" Britain. He fails or refuses to acknowledge that States & Nationhood create physical and ethnic boundaries which in turn stress "Them" and "Us". That is the greatest flaw of Nationalism, it separates and segregates entire regions from each other. Nationalists think it's inclusive but Nationalism can also be used to Exclude.
Einstein stated it best,
"I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever."
* Albert Einstein, in a letter to Alfred Kneser (7 June 1918); Doc. 560 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8
2 out of 5 Stars. Ferguson didn't add any thing new to the historical view of "World War" but only reinforced the same old song and dance.
As a Hedge Fund Investment Banker during the height of the Financial Crisis, I found "his" research a bit disingenuous that he didn't write a thing about how banks FUND most of the wars around the Globe especially when the title of this book is "The War of the World".
He admits in the credits that he had at least 11 students compile most of the detailed research but comes up with his own conclusions. He points at the same conflict zones beneficial for Western Propaganda, Pearl Harbour and the Nazis invasion of Europe.
If this research was truly a "The War of the WORLD" he should have included the rest of the WORLD:
1.US Military Coups and Occupation of South America and the Caribbean and the continued "Economic Occupation" of those countries. ie. Haiti
2. The French Occupation of Polynesia/Indochina/Vietnam and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People.
3. US Occupation of Hawaii and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People.
4. US Occupation of Philippines(1898 to 1946) and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People.
also includes:
-Guam
-Laos
-Micronesia
-Palau
5. The British Occupation of China/Middle East and its continued "Economic Occupation" of its People. (Trade with a known Violator of Human Rights is Illegal Under 4th Geneva Conventions and Most Domestics Laws in 1st World Countries.
One last note, Ferguson does not attack the "Bad Guys" from the perspective of Extreme Nationalism, ie. the Nazis. He should include Nationalism as a factor to war. He arrives at it from the point of Race. Ferguson comes from a nationalistic Nation of "Great" Britain. He fails or refuses to acknowledge that States & Nationhood create physical and ethnic boundaries which in turn stress "Them" and "Us". That is the greatest flaw of Nationalism, it separates and segregates entire regions from each other. Nationalists think it's inclusive but Nationalism can also be used to Exclude.
Einstein stated it best,
"I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever."
* Albert Einstein, in a letter to Alfred Kneser (7 June 1918); Doc. 560 in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8
June 7, 2025
How the West was Lost.
I enjoy history books that have ideas or try to answer pertinent questions. Niall Ferguson’s ‘The War of the World’ does just that as he looks interpret why the first half of the 20th Century was one bloodiest in human history. The book explores why the period from roughly 1900 to 1950 witnessed such a staggering level of global violence, genocide, and upheaval. Ferguson’s central thesis is that the extreme violence of the era cannot be explained solely by ideology or economics, but by a combustible combination of ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires—a trio he dubs the ‘killer apps’ of catastrophes.
Ferguson has several key themes and arguments. For example, he argues that racial and ethnic tensions—not merely nationalism or class conflict—were central to the 20th century’s bloodshed, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. He draws direct lines between imperial competition, decolonisation, and the genocidal violence seen in places like the Balkans, the Holocaust, and Japanese-occupied China. Ferguson also agrees that the global economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s, especially the Great Depression, are positioned as key drivers of extremism and shows how market collapses exacerbated nationalist sentiments and destabilised fragile democracies, particularly in Germany. This ties into the fall of empires, especially after the First World War where the decline of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British, and Russian Empires left power vacuums and incited nationalist violence. It must also be noted that Ferguson is especially interested in the ways multi-ethnic empires, despite their flaws, managed to suppress violence that later exploded in more ‘democratic’ nation-states.
Ferguson writes in a vigorous, sometimes confrontational style that blends rigorous scholarship with vivid storytelling. He doesn’t shy away from controversial views, such as his critique of the West’s moral standing or his questioning of the inevitability of Allied victory in World War II. The book combines military history, political analysis, and demographic data, often using maps, charts, and comparative graphs to support his claims. The narrative is not strictly chronological; instead, Ferguson moves thematically and geographically, at times sacrificing linear clarity for analytical depth. This can be both a strength and a weakness depending on how you like to read your history.
The book offers a bold reinterpretation of what we might consider familiar history where he challenges the simplistic moral binaries of World War II historiography. However it must be noted that the sweeping scope can lead to overgeneralization, especially in areas like colonial Africa or Latin America, which receive less attention. Furthermore, it has been argued that Ferguson’s revisionism has downplayed the Allied culpabilities while magnifying the crimes of others.
To conclude, this is a daring and intellectually stimulating work that forces readers to rethink the causes of 20th Century conflict. While not without flaws, it succeeds as both a powerful synthesis and a challenge to conventional narratives. Ferguson doesn’t offer easy answers, but he does ask the right questions in my opinion. As such, this makes this a must-read for the study of this period, but also global history as a whole, political violence, and the dark undercurrents of modernity.
I enjoy history books that have ideas or try to answer pertinent questions. Niall Ferguson’s ‘The War of the World’ does just that as he looks interpret why the first half of the 20th Century was one bloodiest in human history. The book explores why the period from roughly 1900 to 1950 witnessed such a staggering level of global violence, genocide, and upheaval. Ferguson’s central thesis is that the extreme violence of the era cannot be explained solely by ideology or economics, but by a combustible combination of ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires—a trio he dubs the ‘killer apps’ of catastrophes.
Ferguson has several key themes and arguments. For example, he argues that racial and ethnic tensions—not merely nationalism or class conflict—were central to the 20th century’s bloodshed, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. He draws direct lines between imperial competition, decolonisation, and the genocidal violence seen in places like the Balkans, the Holocaust, and Japanese-occupied China. Ferguson also agrees that the global economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s, especially the Great Depression, are positioned as key drivers of extremism and shows how market collapses exacerbated nationalist sentiments and destabilised fragile democracies, particularly in Germany. This ties into the fall of empires, especially after the First World War where the decline of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British, and Russian Empires left power vacuums and incited nationalist violence. It must also be noted that Ferguson is especially interested in the ways multi-ethnic empires, despite their flaws, managed to suppress violence that later exploded in more ‘democratic’ nation-states.
Ferguson writes in a vigorous, sometimes confrontational style that blends rigorous scholarship with vivid storytelling. He doesn’t shy away from controversial views, such as his critique of the West’s moral standing or his questioning of the inevitability of Allied victory in World War II. The book combines military history, political analysis, and demographic data, often using maps, charts, and comparative graphs to support his claims. The narrative is not strictly chronological; instead, Ferguson moves thematically and geographically, at times sacrificing linear clarity for analytical depth. This can be both a strength and a weakness depending on how you like to read your history.
The book offers a bold reinterpretation of what we might consider familiar history where he challenges the simplistic moral binaries of World War II historiography. However it must be noted that the sweeping scope can lead to overgeneralization, especially in areas like colonial Africa or Latin America, which receive less attention. Furthermore, it has been argued that Ferguson’s revisionism has downplayed the Allied culpabilities while magnifying the crimes of others.
To conclude, this is a daring and intellectually stimulating work that forces readers to rethink the causes of 20th Century conflict. While not without flaws, it succeeds as both a powerful synthesis and a challenge to conventional narratives. Ferguson doesn’t offer easy answers, but he does ask the right questions in my opinion. As such, this makes this a must-read for the study of this period, but also global history as a whole, political violence, and the dark undercurrents of modernity.
November 10, 2008
The explanations that we learn in high school for history's most horrible events tend to remain with us unchanged, unless we really look deep. Ferguson challenges many of the assumptions about the causes of the 20th Century's dreadful violence and is convincing. Living in Jerusalem, I've often seen how conventional wisdom about the persistent violence of the Middle East seems to miss the mark. That only makes me more convinced that Ferguson is right in refusing to accept the reasons advanced by historians 50 years ago for, say, the Nazi's campaign against the Jews. Our ideas ought to be constantly developing and responding to new research, and Ferguson's book is the best way to get a very broad sweep of these new perspectives.
January 19, 2008
This is the first book by Ferguson that I've read. I was pleased with this effort--it was well-researched, and although it covers material amply familiar to any 20th century history buff, it was engaging not only because of Ferguson's fluid style but also because of his unconventional take on the causes and dynamics of human conflict and cruelty. You may or may not agree with some of his interpretations but he makes convincing arguments which make one want to research the topic in greater depth.
A couple of caveats: Ferguson assumes his readers have a basic familiarity with political economy and macroeconomic concepts, in addition to the traditional history-book versions of WW1/WW2. If you're new to these topics, it's still a good and informative read, but you may find yourself skipping over parts of Ferguson's analysis. Second--Ferguson does not spare the reader one jot the horrors of man's inhumanity to man--some of his descriptions of the pogroms, rapes, massacres, and genocides of the 20th century are stomach churning and filled me alternately with revulsion, incredulity, sorrow and despair--if any single lesson is to be drawn from this book it is that it is all too easy for historical, political, social, and economic forces quite beyond our control to transmogrify the supposedly civilized into murderous beasts and sadists.
One more minor point: the maps in my edition (a penguin softcover) were fairly useless--I wish an editor had taken the time to create maps which contain the majority of places or geography mentioned in the book! I had to use my own atlas to visualize a lot of what Ferguson was discussing.
A couple of caveats: Ferguson assumes his readers have a basic familiarity with political economy and macroeconomic concepts, in addition to the traditional history-book versions of WW1/WW2. If you're new to these topics, it's still a good and informative read, but you may find yourself skipping over parts of Ferguson's analysis. Second--Ferguson does not spare the reader one jot the horrors of man's inhumanity to man--some of his descriptions of the pogroms, rapes, massacres, and genocides of the 20th century are stomach churning and filled me alternately with revulsion, incredulity, sorrow and despair--if any single lesson is to be drawn from this book it is that it is all too easy for historical, political, social, and economic forces quite beyond our control to transmogrify the supposedly civilized into murderous beasts and sadists.
One more minor point: the maps in my edition (a penguin softcover) were fairly useless--I wish an editor had taken the time to create maps which contain the majority of places or geography mentioned in the book! I had to use my own atlas to visualize a lot of what Ferguson was discussing.
June 2, 2010
There is something about this guy’s work that is a little annoying. Like his The Ascent of Money, it was almost there, but not quite. I needed something on World War Two recently and saw this and bought it, but it has a much broader interest than just that conflict.
The idea behind this is fascinating – pretty much that we like to think most of the conflicts of the last century were ideological, when in fact they were mostly ethnic. There is some fascinating stuff on the formation of Turkey and the expulsion of the Greeks to facilitate that and some disturbing bit and pieces about Stalin and Soviet (or rather Russian) exceptionalism, but as always the most disturbing information here is on the Nazi. The information here about the invasion of Poland and the consequences of it due to both the Soviet Union and Germany is horrific. I used some of this when teaching WW2 recently – particularly his explaining that the Germans literally killed girl guides as part of their policy of removing all possibility of there being ‘leaders’ who might form a resistance.
But although there is a remarkable amount of fascinating material in this book it doesn’t really work. I’m not sure how much ethic divisions really define the last century or if they are enough to explain everything. Power is much more interesting than just skin colour or how many fingers you use to cross yourself with. Economic power would seem a much more interesting way to explain the world.
However, I’ve been selective in my reading of this book and will eventually need to go over the bits I skipped. Which was, truth be told, most of the book. There is a television series to this one too, but I still haven’t watched the money one, so getting around to watching this one might be a bit of a problem as well.
The idea behind this is fascinating – pretty much that we like to think most of the conflicts of the last century were ideological, when in fact they were mostly ethnic. There is some fascinating stuff on the formation of Turkey and the expulsion of the Greeks to facilitate that and some disturbing bit and pieces about Stalin and Soviet (or rather Russian) exceptionalism, but as always the most disturbing information here is on the Nazi. The information here about the invasion of Poland and the consequences of it due to both the Soviet Union and Germany is horrific. I used some of this when teaching WW2 recently – particularly his explaining that the Germans literally killed girl guides as part of their policy of removing all possibility of there being ‘leaders’ who might form a resistance.
But although there is a remarkable amount of fascinating material in this book it doesn’t really work. I’m not sure how much ethic divisions really define the last century or if they are enough to explain everything. Power is much more interesting than just skin colour or how many fingers you use to cross yourself with. Economic power would seem a much more interesting way to explain the world.
However, I’ve been selective in my reading of this book and will eventually need to go over the bits I skipped. Which was, truth be told, most of the book. There is a television series to this one too, but I still haven’t watched the money one, so getting around to watching this one might be a bit of a problem as well.
November 3, 2016
From Nanking to Visegrad, from Manchuria to Auschwitz, the hatred in this breeze-block of a tome is shocking; and we talk of the 'darkness' of serial killers instead of governments. The Second World War takes up the bulk - there is surprisingly little on 911 or the Arab Spring which renders his argument that global warfare is over a little specious at times. Ferguson posits that the 20th century saw the decline of the West and the beginning of the dominance of Asia; it's hard to argue with after reading this thought provoking, uncomfortable book.
March 28, 2020
The War of the World by Niall Ferguson just astounding, almost every page has some obscure detail of some event in some war that the west was ever involved with from 1900 to 1999, so huge an undertaking surely you would need a team of researchers buckets of coffee and mountains of cupcakes. No western nation is left out Americans British French Germans Russians are all well covered but far more indepth examinations of the Germans and Russians with whole sections outlined. Other smaller western nations are briefly mentioned. Clearly facts told then all these nations are all guilty of some horrendous war atrocity just curiously numbers killed escalates the further east you travel. The connections and relationships between these events and underlying inhumanity bound them all together in what all participants believe is right and justified killings when you put on fish bowl glasses this absolutely ridiculous and mental really. Humans can fall into hatred and murderous warfare so quickly we are a menace to ourselves without a doubt. Is there any hope in the 21st century with nuclear annihilation but greater seriousness is nations nuclear proliferation 24 nations and counting this hanging like a noose around our necks let's go with hope but hopelessness is a hair width behind. We really don't need mountains of wealth just mountains of purpose look after each other start in your house then spread out. Anyway after these statements I need to find sand so I can bury my head in it. Tidbits When did the War of the World end? Perhaps the best answer is July 27, 1953, when the armistice was signed that ended the Korean War. Why did that conflict peter out, rather than escalate into a global conflict between the superpowers? One tempting explanation is that the exponential increase in destructive power that began with the first atomic test raised the stakes too high to permit a full-scale conflict. Tidbits How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked. ‘If we can’t shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush. Tidbit No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.
Read
January 25, 2008OK today I have the time to follow up on this book. This is a bit off the cuff but for those undergraduates of you who didn't read it until the day before you were assigned to speak in front of the class it will give you some nuggets to work with.
Firstly the author Mr. Furguson has a penchant for writing what one might almost call big history that is looking beyond the titles we find convenient when analyzing say the 20s or the 30s or even World Wars One and Two. This author may delve into some of that and use some of the same vernacular but his historiography lies somewhere entirely.
Here he reexamines the history of the late nineteenth through about the mid 20th century and offers up some very insightful notions that are at once obvious and also terrible in their ramifications.
The title of the book is no coincidence and points directly to H.G. Wells invasion thriller and argues persuasively I think that it has already come to pass. No extraterrestrials mind you. Just one human lower others to sub-human status for war making and political purposes. The author examines the ethnic upheavals taking place particularly in eastern Europe in the first half of the century noting that the tendency towards ethnic cleansing was not unique to one group or another. The phenomena was much more widespread and the reason this was noted earlier is part being too close to the subject and part the enormity of the Holocaust.
Throughout time there have been attempts by one group to rub out another group. What changed in the last century was the rise of industrials and mass destruction. Communication became instant and means by which virulent thought could be disseminated to the masses. Add to this long standing European feuds and pograms and you see the rise of the settings needed for a new term to be invented. Genocide.
The author makes the case that the real underlying issues in the wars of the last century can more or less be traced to racial and tribal origins and goes about describing what was happening on the ground that causes him to reach this conclusion. This is s topic of much debate to this day particularly in places like Poland where no national reconciliation has ever taken place. The Germans were meticulous record keepers and the fact is they even comment that the Poles where more ferocious anti-semites than them. What we so often think of as a German thing was in fact widespread among other groups as well. The German may have been leader of the kabal, he may have even been it's worst perpetrator, but he was far from the only one killing Jews and other people in cold blood.
The author goes to note how the rules of war seemed to change radically somewhat in the First World War and then radically in The Second World War where by the end of the war all sides were essentially trying to destroy the other without reference to civilian bystander or military participant.
If one looks at Rwanda... Where did such an awful thing spring forth from? Surely every idea has it's nexus it's source? What about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? What he's getting at is the lines that traditionally have been used to define warfare have fundamentally changed and that Total War, genocide, and mass attrition have in an odd way become the de facto standard today. He argues the period starting around 1900 and running at least until the end of World War Two or Korea represent not a series of separate wars but rather a modern fifty year world war.
Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
How many times have we heard these words? We have had generations since the closure of the period author specifies and they have all seen it in the methodology handed down to use from ancient times. In a sense the author has proposed a new overarching schema to help better understand the underlying causes of war and what really causes it. He argues it's not economic in nature though economics can play a role. I think he says it's really boiled down to the not entirely tamed beast within the heart of man and it's expression through nationalism. Nationalism became the new tribalism armed now with the machine gun, tank, bomber, even nuclear bomb. It only needs a machete to show expression as in Rwanda.
I recommend the book. You can get your mind around it and then look at how the racial tensions express themselves within the United States in political and social warfare among other things. I was more critical of some earlier works of his but I think he's on to something here.
Firstly the author Mr. Furguson has a penchant for writing what one might almost call big history that is looking beyond the titles we find convenient when analyzing say the 20s or the 30s or even World Wars One and Two. This author may delve into some of that and use some of the same vernacular but his historiography lies somewhere entirely.
Here he reexamines the history of the late nineteenth through about the mid 20th century and offers up some very insightful notions that are at once obvious and also terrible in their ramifications.
The title of the book is no coincidence and points directly to H.G. Wells invasion thriller and argues persuasively I think that it has already come to pass. No extraterrestrials mind you. Just one human lower others to sub-human status for war making and political purposes. The author examines the ethnic upheavals taking place particularly in eastern Europe in the first half of the century noting that the tendency towards ethnic cleansing was not unique to one group or another. The phenomena was much more widespread and the reason this was noted earlier is part being too close to the subject and part the enormity of the Holocaust.
Throughout time there have been attempts by one group to rub out another group. What changed in the last century was the rise of industrials and mass destruction. Communication became instant and means by which virulent thought could be disseminated to the masses. Add to this long standing European feuds and pograms and you see the rise of the settings needed for a new term to be invented. Genocide.
The author makes the case that the real underlying issues in the wars of the last century can more or less be traced to racial and tribal origins and goes about describing what was happening on the ground that causes him to reach this conclusion. This is s topic of much debate to this day particularly in places like Poland where no national reconciliation has ever taken place. The Germans were meticulous record keepers and the fact is they even comment that the Poles where more ferocious anti-semites than them. What we so often think of as a German thing was in fact widespread among other groups as well. The German may have been leader of the kabal, he may have even been it's worst perpetrator, but he was far from the only one killing Jews and other people in cold blood.
The author goes to note how the rules of war seemed to change radically somewhat in the First World War and then radically in The Second World War where by the end of the war all sides were essentially trying to destroy the other without reference to civilian bystander or military participant.
If one looks at Rwanda... Where did such an awful thing spring forth from? Surely every idea has it's nexus it's source? What about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? What he's getting at is the lines that traditionally have been used to define warfare have fundamentally changed and that Total War, genocide, and mass attrition have in an odd way become the de facto standard today. He argues the period starting around 1900 and running at least until the end of World War Two or Korea represent not a series of separate wars but rather a modern fifty year world war.
Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
How many times have we heard these words? We have had generations since the closure of the period author specifies and they have all seen it in the methodology handed down to use from ancient times. In a sense the author has proposed a new overarching schema to help better understand the underlying causes of war and what really causes it. He argues it's not economic in nature though economics can play a role. I think he says it's really boiled down to the not entirely tamed beast within the heart of man and it's expression through nationalism. Nationalism became the new tribalism armed now with the machine gun, tank, bomber, even nuclear bomb. It only needs a machete to show expression as in Rwanda.
I recommend the book. You can get your mind around it and then look at how the racial tensions express themselves within the United States in political and social warfare among other things. I was more critical of some earlier works of his but I think he's on to something here.
January 14, 2011
Pretty poor. Tries to be "controversial" and "iconoclastic" etc, but is actually a pretty standard history of WW2 with few if any new insights. What's worse, it has little logic (he often contradicts himself: at one time WW1 is shown by analysis of the financial markets to be completely unexpected and a few pages later it's the outcome of a long period of rising tension), and shows little historical sense (quite reasonably slagging off Bernard Shaw for falling for Stalin's regime, he never asks *why* British leftists failed to see the truth, as though he doesn't expect Shaw and the Fabians to be subject to historical forces). His weirdest oversight is to claim to have a thesis that extends WW2 back in time into the 1930s, but never to consider what the Spanish Civil War meant to the European players and how it helped determine their actions in 1938-39. The final section, which you assume from the preface to be about showing the continuities from WW2 into the postwar period, is simply a rather sketchy essay of not very original thoughts mainly about the Cold War. Overall, the few good bits in this book are lost in a rather mean, rather dim, and rather incoherent whole.
June 15, 2014
Niall Ferguson's breath-taking overview of the violent 20th century is certainly worth the time taken to read it. Even with my familiarity with history, I feel that there was something to learn and contemplate on every page. While his conclusions are complex and difficult to sum up, the endless atrocities of the bloody previous century were a result of man's infinite ability to see other classes, ethnic groups, religions and tribes as enemies, and practice unconstrained mass brutality, whether during wars or not. As usual, Ferguson writes with craft and style, and has the enviable and rare knack for expressing economic realities in an entertaining narrative. I would recommend this fine book to all who take an interest in modern history, especially if you extrapolate the past to better understand where this poor old world is headed.
January 6, 2022
В най-известната си книга Стивън Пинкър твърди, че насилието в глобален мащаб намалява. Историкът Нийл Фъргюсън не би се съгласил. Според него столетието след 1900 г. е най-кървавото в човешката история. За да ни убеди, той проследява ключови събития от началото на Бел Епок до края на Втората световна война.
Заглавието на книгата е вдъхновено от романа на Хърбърт Уелс - "Войната на световете", в който марсианци нападат Земята, но накрая самите те биват унищожени от бактериите, към които не са се приспособили. Тезата на Нийл Фъргюсън е, че въобще не са нужни извънземни за допускането на масово насилие и смърт. Хората са напълно достатъчни. Основна идея в книгата е, че насилието е провокирано от етнически различия в рамките на национални държави. Неслучайно най-кървавите места на двадесети век са били региони със смесване на значителни малцинства - Полша, Украйна, Балканите, Манчурия. Интересно е, че историкът многократно отхвърля термина раса като биологичен феномен, какъвто е и научния консенсус. Много близки генетично групи от хора се избиват взаимно. Различията между отделните индивиди в самата група често са по-големи от междугруповите такива.
Във "Войната на света" се анализират ключови събития от двадесети век - двете световни войни, Холокоста, граждански войни, бомбардировки на цивилно население, показни убийства на исторически личности с огромни последици - Франц Фердинанд (Първа световна война), Ернст фон Рат ("кристална" нощ), но се споменават и малко познати герои, спасили хора под огромен натиск - Чиуне Сугихара (японски дипломат в Литва, издавал визи за емигриране на евреи), Джон (Йон) Рабе - "добрият нацист" от Нанкинг, защитил местното население в германското посолство от сигурна смърт в ръцете на японската армия.
На моменти книгата е прекалено англоцентрична, но това е донякъде разбираемо. Със сигурност има какво да научите с оглед на сериозния обем, посветен на дълъг исторически период. И не забравяйте, че хората са способни, както на невиждана жестокост, така и на неподозиран героизъм, особено в най-критичните ситуации.
Заглавието на книгата е вдъхновено от романа на Хърбърт Уелс - "Войната на световете", в който марсианци нападат Земята, но накрая самите те биват унищожени от бактериите, към които не са се приспособили. Тезата на Нийл Фъргюсън е, че въобще не са нужни извънземни за допускането на масово насилие и смърт. Хората са напълно достатъчни. Основна идея в книгата е, че насилието е провокирано от етнически различия в рамките на национални държави. Неслучайно най-кървавите места на двадесети век са били региони със смесване на значителни малцинства - Полша, Украйна, Балканите, Манчурия. Интересно е, че историкът многократно отхвърля термина раса като биологичен феномен, какъвто е и научния консенсус. Много близки генетично групи от хора се избиват взаимно. Различията между отделните индивиди в самата група често са по-големи от междугруповите такива.
Във "Войната на света" се анализират ключови събития от двадесети век - двете световни войни, Холокоста, граждански войни, бомбардировки на цивилно население, показни убийства на исторически личности с огромни последици - Франц Фердинанд (Първа световна война), Ернст фон Рат ("кристална" нощ), но се споменават и малко познати герои, спасили хора под огромен натиск - Чиуне Сугихара (японски дипломат в Литва, издавал визи за емигриране на евреи), Джон (Йон) Рабе - "добрият нацист" от Нанкинг, защитил местното население в германското посолство от сигурна смърт в ръцете на японската армия.
На моменти книгата е прекалено англоцентрична, но това е донякъде разбираемо. Със сигурност има какво да научите с оглед на сериозния обем, посветен на дълъг исторически период. И не забравяйте, че хората са способни, както на невиждана жестокост, така и на неподозиран героизъм, особено в най-критичните ситуации.
May 4, 2009
Ferguson attempts to address the question of what made the 20th C so bloody with a surprising hypothesis. He says that racism and ethnic hostilities were the culprit, triggered by economic volatility and declining empires. He then, beginning with WWI and ending in current times but focusing mostly on WWII, describes the ethnic and racist aspects of major wars, minor wars, wars within wars, internal wars of totalitarian regimes, etc.
He calls his premise a hypothesis, and he makes a good start at demonstrating it, but I feel he has a way to go to prove it. I think his triggers may be necessary but not sufficient to set off ethnic violence. He neglects to explore the very real role played by ideology, created myths, and propaganda in creating the ground for the violence. He settles for human nature as being sufficient. Again, necessary, but not sufficient.
He points out that an aspect of the lethality is the 20th C ability of people to dehumanize their enemies, seeing them as sub-human, vermin, insects, allowing killing with impunity, barbarity and atrocities without conscience. This is something, along with ideology and the cultural groundwork prior to his triggers, which if explored more thoroughly would have bolstered his thesis.
Not all his cited examples are convincing. It's difficult to see ethnic tensions as a primary aspect of Mao's murderous various revolutions, or even much of a contributor to the millions killed. One needs to look at each example given and analyze it in context to see if the violence was primarily ethnically or racially motivated. Giving evidence that ethnicity was one aspect, or suspected aspect, doesn't mean that it contributed that much. In some cases, of course, it's pretty clear. In others one needs to analyze further. At the same time, he almost contradicts himself when showing how "ethnic" violence occurs between people who are not really of different ethnicities. Again, it calls for looking at deeper reasons as I've suggested.
Ferguson is readable, interesting, usually a clear thinker. He documents his work well with charts and graphs, copious endnotes and an equally abundant bibliography. I gained insights into things I'd not found elsewhere, and appreciated some of the subtleties he presented. I think his thesis is well worth considering and exploring further. But in my mind he hasn't yet displaced ideology and advancing technology as the primary causes of the bloodiness of the 20th C. Still, a worthwhile book to read, and a hypothesis worth considering, even if it needs further work and analysis.
He calls his premise a hypothesis, and he makes a good start at demonstrating it, but I feel he has a way to go to prove it. I think his triggers may be necessary but not sufficient to set off ethnic violence. He neglects to explore the very real role played by ideology, created myths, and propaganda in creating the ground for the violence. He settles for human nature as being sufficient. Again, necessary, but not sufficient.
He points out that an aspect of the lethality is the 20th C ability of people to dehumanize their enemies, seeing them as sub-human, vermin, insects, allowing killing with impunity, barbarity and atrocities without conscience. This is something, along with ideology and the cultural groundwork prior to his triggers, which if explored more thoroughly would have bolstered his thesis.
Not all his cited examples are convincing. It's difficult to see ethnic tensions as a primary aspect of Mao's murderous various revolutions, or even much of a contributor to the millions killed. One needs to look at each example given and analyze it in context to see if the violence was primarily ethnically or racially motivated. Giving evidence that ethnicity was one aspect, or suspected aspect, doesn't mean that it contributed that much. In some cases, of course, it's pretty clear. In others one needs to analyze further. At the same time, he almost contradicts himself when showing how "ethnic" violence occurs between people who are not really of different ethnicities. Again, it calls for looking at deeper reasons as I've suggested.
Ferguson is readable, interesting, usually a clear thinker. He documents his work well with charts and graphs, copious endnotes and an equally abundant bibliography. I gained insights into things I'd not found elsewhere, and appreciated some of the subtleties he presented. I think his thesis is well worth considering and exploring further. But in my mind he hasn't yet displaced ideology and advancing technology as the primary causes of the bloodiness of the 20th C. Still, a worthwhile book to read, and a hypothesis worth considering, even if it needs further work and analysis.
September 23, 2018
One of Niall Ferguson's last worthwhile books, The War of the World reexamines the Twentieth Century's cataclysms through a revisionist lens. It's a combination of well-trod events and scholarship (most of Ferguson's citations are familiar secondary sources by Richard Evans, John Toland, etc.) with a provocative approach: Ferguson places great stress on the ethnic and racial fault lines, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, that drove some societies to violent expansion (Germany, Italy, Soviet Russia, Japan) and others to decay and dissolution (Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, even Britain). Thus he treats the two world wars, and indeed the Cold War, not as separate events but the same conflict on a longstanding continuum of race hatred, empire building and market expansion. Ferguson's arguments are solid and quite convincing in some respects; as an economic historian he unsurprisingly fairs best showing how globalization impacted the world in imperial twilight, allowing the economically liberal United States to triumph over fascist and communist dictatorships. While there's nothing particularly fresh in his analysis of World War II, it's nice to see Ferguson demolishing the revisionist case for Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler and Japan's supposed grievances against the West while also showing that the conflict was morally grey and, at best, a qualified Allied victory. On other occasions, he dips into more facile analyses (reviving the canard that Communism and fascism are identical), cartoonish provocations (detailingg the speech of a provocative demagogue in 1933 which he - shockingly! - reveals to be not Hitler but Franklin Roosevelt) and, in later chapters, dire warnings about the Death of the West, especially Ferguson's post-9/11 hobbyhorse of "Eurabia" and the Muslim Menace. Ferguson's idiosyncratic analyses are often dubious, even objectionable; unlike his reactionary later works, however, they're minor flaws in a muscular, engaging work of historical synthesis.
September 6, 2010
Bloody brilliant....this is what revisionist history should be....a second reading has left me less enthused but still a very good book...but the descent of the West? Only if you decided America cannot be included in this. The 20th was, after all, the American century and the East did not begin its true rise until near the end of the century...mostly EU propaganda...but a very good book for all that.
January 2, 2024
What is the global significance of the two World Wars? What should we learn from the 1900s?
Much more than a dry chronicle about what happened, all-star historian Niall Ferguson dives into the importance and context of it all. His thesis is that the world wars erupted because of unstable economies, decaying empires, and ethnic conflict. It is a sober reminder that these problems are consistent with history and human nature.
There is a lot to reflect upon, but here are some points I liked:
- The history of racism and anti-Semitism. It was much more widespread than just the Nazis, although of course they took it to extreme levels. Some of it was unexpected, like Germans accusing Czechs as being "Half-humans"...thank goodness science has disproven these awful theories.
- How self-determination was doomed to fail because of so much ethnic rivalry within countries (not just in the Balkans). Also, war actions led to appeasement before WWII, not the other way around.
- How fascism was alike and different across regimes. Fascism = nationalism + socialism + war.
- Japan's WWII regime: their Yamato Race was the “leading race” of Asia whose mission was to “liberate the billion people of Asia", and all the world's oceans were to be renamed the "Great Sea of Japan” = all oceans
- How bombing vastly changed war tactics and deaths in WWII.
- 31 million Europeans were uprooted from their homes in WWII, and 13 million ethnic Germans (across Europe). Wow! An estimated 2 million German women were raped by the Soviets.
- How the Holocaust was ethically worse than the nuclear bombs...interesting discussion.
I also liked the book’s set up as it goes from pre-WWI to the Cold War (briefly in the epilogue). An awesome book all around!
Much more than a dry chronicle about what happened, all-star historian Niall Ferguson dives into the importance and context of it all. His thesis is that the world wars erupted because of unstable economies, decaying empires, and ethnic conflict. It is a sober reminder that these problems are consistent with history and human nature.
There is a lot to reflect upon, but here are some points I liked:
- The history of racism and anti-Semitism. It was much more widespread than just the Nazis, although of course they took it to extreme levels. Some of it was unexpected, like Germans accusing Czechs as being "Half-humans"...thank goodness science has disproven these awful theories.
- How self-determination was doomed to fail because of so much ethnic rivalry within countries (not just in the Balkans). Also, war actions led to appeasement before WWII, not the other way around.
- How fascism was alike and different across regimes. Fascism = nationalism + socialism + war.
- Japan's WWII regime: their Yamato Race was the “leading race” of Asia whose mission was to “liberate the billion people of Asia", and all the world's oceans were to be renamed the "Great Sea of Japan” = all oceans
- How bombing vastly changed war tactics and deaths in WWII.
- 31 million Europeans were uprooted from their homes in WWII, and 13 million ethnic Germans (across Europe). Wow! An estimated 2 million German women were raped by the Soviets.
- How the Holocaust was ethically worse than the nuclear bombs...interesting discussion.
I also liked the book’s set up as it goes from pre-WWI to the Cold War (briefly in the epilogue). An awesome book all around!
November 23, 2020
The twentieth century was (among other things) an appalling exercise in mass murder, with two world wars and a fifty-year succession of proxy wars that was termed a cold war, resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths. In this fat volume (published in 2006) British historian Niall Ferguson tackles the question of what went wrong.
It covers much of the same ground as Paul Johnson's massive Modern Times, another excellent survey of the disastrous century, but with a particular focus on the role played by collapsing empires. Ferguson highlights the way in which the need for natural resources drove the industrialized nations to colonize less developed regions in the course of the nineteenth century; those powers that came up short in the scramble for empire (Germany, Japan) felt they had to play catch-up. The other crucial element in the catastrophe was racism, and Ferguson devotes a good deal of attention to the way in which ethnic differences were exploited, often with pseudo-scientific nonsense, to dehumanize targeted peoples. His accounts of atrocities are detailed and disturbing; the cruelty and the scale of the crimes are almost beyond belief. He does not excuse the ones committed by the victors (like the British and American bombing campaigns that deliberately targeted German and Japanese civilians). He gives this summation of his thesis: "To repeat: economic volatility very often provides the trigger for the politicization of ethnic difference. Proximity to a strategic borderland, usually an imperial border, determines the extent to which the violence will metastasize."
There you have it. The rest of the six-hundred-plus pages is detail and documentation. It's not a pretty picture. But it is excellent history, for the general reader who wants to understand why the last century was so ghastly.
It covers much of the same ground as Paul Johnson's massive Modern Times, another excellent survey of the disastrous century, but with a particular focus on the role played by collapsing empires. Ferguson highlights the way in which the need for natural resources drove the industrialized nations to colonize less developed regions in the course of the nineteenth century; those powers that came up short in the scramble for empire (Germany, Japan) felt they had to play catch-up. The other crucial element in the catastrophe was racism, and Ferguson devotes a good deal of attention to the way in which ethnic differences were exploited, often with pseudo-scientific nonsense, to dehumanize targeted peoples. His accounts of atrocities are detailed and disturbing; the cruelty and the scale of the crimes are almost beyond belief. He does not excuse the ones committed by the victors (like the British and American bombing campaigns that deliberately targeted German and Japanese civilians). He gives this summation of his thesis: "To repeat: economic volatility very often provides the trigger for the politicization of ethnic difference. Proximity to a strategic borderland, usually an imperial border, determines the extent to which the violence will metastasize."
There you have it. The rest of the six-hundred-plus pages is detail and documentation. It's not a pretty picture. But it is excellent history, for the general reader who wants to understand why the last century was so ghastly.
October 4, 2021
Гарна комплексна популярна праця по світовій історії 20 століття. З акцентом на війнах. Більшість концентрується лише на двох світових війнах, але Фергюссон дивиться ширше на все полотно, як безперервнмй рух протистояння народів. Мені сподобалось.
November 17, 2022
3.5/5 Phew !
Firstly, this is not a history of the entire "short century" 1914-1991. It is a history of the 2 World Wars only.
Secondly, unless you are a Niall Ferguson fan and a true-blue history buff, I would suggest reading Ken Follett's historical fiction series - Century Trilogy instead. Much more enjoyable and it might make you understand the times better.
Key takeaway - Dehumanisation - Any ideology that tells you that you are superior because of being born in a certain caste / religion / region / race is deplorable and leads to disaster for human-beings.
Firstly, this is not a history of the entire "short century" 1914-1991. It is a history of the 2 World Wars only.
Secondly, unless you are a Niall Ferguson fan and a true-blue history buff, I would suggest reading Ken Follett's historical fiction series - Century Trilogy instead. Much more enjoyable and it might make you understand the times better.
Key takeaway - Dehumanisation - Any ideology that tells you that you are superior because of being born in a certain caste / religion / region / race is deplorable and leads to disaster for human-beings.
April 12, 2015
The fall of Empires, says Ferguson in this impressively solid masterpiece, is generally more bloody than their rise. Even without his thorough account of a century of conflict and the extinction of the European Empires and recent rise of Asia, the conclusion would be hard to deny, as the industrial age culminated in a series of crimes so vast as to eclipse the public conscience of earlier wars. Not for nothing is the Godwin the ultimate signal that an internet thread has descended into anarchy.
Just what made the wars of the 20th Century both so murderous and so universal is a theme which occupies much of the book. The culmination of the trend in the suicidal spasm of violence from 1937 to 1945 is examined in painstaking detail in terms of the economic disparities between the antagonists, their populations and productivity, the distribution of atrocities by both sides and the grievances and greeds which led to these wars. Ferguson also indulges in a myth-shattering analysis of appeasement, today a term of abuse but at the time an understandable and rational attempt to save the situation. Britain went to war a year too late, Ferguson establishes based on hardware production trends, so the policy was mistaken but not irrational.
The account of the Shoah is harrowing, but there are some surprises for those not familiar with the detail. The sickening horror of soap production beggars many minds already, but the indifference of Italy and Japan to Nazi German anti-Semitism will be unknown to some, and the record of both countries is shockingly superior to that of some of the Allies and occupied. Japan and Italy even played some small part in extricating Jews from occupied Europe, and a small number of survivors resulted from their ambivalence. Staggeringly, in 1946 a spontaneous pogrom broke out in Poland against returning concentration camp inmates. Again, I am struck by the feeling that one cannot read this and remain sane.
Atrocities and hate existed on all sides, but only one side's murderers systematically faced justice. Is this wrong? Ferguson says no - the crimes of the aggressor are of a different order to the indiscipline of the defenders. I agree, to a point - one way to avert such crimes in the future might be to ensure that our criminals face a court regardless.
Stalin receives short shrift. The greatest irony of the century may be that this paranoid and psychopathic individual only ever trusted one man, and that negligence led to perhaps 20 or 40 million Soviet deaths over and above those that led from his own attempts to engineer a society. The Japanese come off better, and were it not for their vile behaviour towards the populations of occupied territories one suspects that Ferguson would come out in sympathy. The stated desire to expel the Europeans and provoke an Asian Renaissance was not dishonourable, and ironically has come to pass. Their confrontation with the USA was all but forced upon them, and also far from certain in outcome. Faced with the seizure of their assets and an oil embargo, the Japanese would have been forced to their knees in 18 months. On the face of it at least, their casus belli seems to stand.
It is most striking that once all these foes were defeated, a "cold" war ensued at perhaps an even higher level of violent intensity worldwide. The era of conflict that spanned the century did not merely fizzle out, and arguably yet another pretext has now been found in the War "on" Terror. It strikes me, though, that the determinants today are suddenly no longer tied to industrial productivity. Faced with the British Empire, and later the Soviets, Hitler could not have won after the first reversal of the Battle of Britain and the huge miscalculation of Barbarossa. Production is destiny.
Today, by contrast, irregular guerilla forces are facing down empires with some success. The War of the World has seen the eclipse of Europe as an imperial force in its own right. The War on Terror, I'll warrant, will see the eclipse by exhaustion of the US Empire and the historic renaissance of Asia, the culmination of the century-long spasm which Ferguson masterfully documents in this book.
Just what made the wars of the 20th Century both so murderous and so universal is a theme which occupies much of the book. The culmination of the trend in the suicidal spasm of violence from 1937 to 1945 is examined in painstaking detail in terms of the economic disparities between the antagonists, their populations and productivity, the distribution of atrocities by both sides and the grievances and greeds which led to these wars. Ferguson also indulges in a myth-shattering analysis of appeasement, today a term of abuse but at the time an understandable and rational attempt to save the situation. Britain went to war a year too late, Ferguson establishes based on hardware production trends, so the policy was mistaken but not irrational.
The account of the Shoah is harrowing, but there are some surprises for those not familiar with the detail. The sickening horror of soap production beggars many minds already, but the indifference of Italy and Japan to Nazi German anti-Semitism will be unknown to some, and the record of both countries is shockingly superior to that of some of the Allies and occupied. Japan and Italy even played some small part in extricating Jews from occupied Europe, and a small number of survivors resulted from their ambivalence. Staggeringly, in 1946 a spontaneous pogrom broke out in Poland against returning concentration camp inmates. Again, I am struck by the feeling that one cannot read this and remain sane.
Atrocities and hate existed on all sides, but only one side's murderers systematically faced justice. Is this wrong? Ferguson says no - the crimes of the aggressor are of a different order to the indiscipline of the defenders. I agree, to a point - one way to avert such crimes in the future might be to ensure that our criminals face a court regardless.
Stalin receives short shrift. The greatest irony of the century may be that this paranoid and psychopathic individual only ever trusted one man, and that negligence led to perhaps 20 or 40 million Soviet deaths over and above those that led from his own attempts to engineer a society. The Japanese come off better, and were it not for their vile behaviour towards the populations of occupied territories one suspects that Ferguson would come out in sympathy. The stated desire to expel the Europeans and provoke an Asian Renaissance was not dishonourable, and ironically has come to pass. Their confrontation with the USA was all but forced upon them, and also far from certain in outcome. Faced with the seizure of their assets and an oil embargo, the Japanese would have been forced to their knees in 18 months. On the face of it at least, their casus belli seems to stand.
It is most striking that once all these foes were defeated, a "cold" war ensued at perhaps an even higher level of violent intensity worldwide. The era of conflict that spanned the century did not merely fizzle out, and arguably yet another pretext has now been found in the War "on" Terror. It strikes me, though, that the determinants today are suddenly no longer tied to industrial productivity. Faced with the British Empire, and later the Soviets, Hitler could not have won after the first reversal of the Battle of Britain and the huge miscalculation of Barbarossa. Production is destiny.
Today, by contrast, irregular guerilla forces are facing down empires with some success. The War of the World has seen the eclipse of Europe as an imperial force in its own right. The War on Terror, I'll warrant, will see the eclipse by exhaustion of the US Empire and the historic renaissance of Asia, the culmination of the century-long spasm which Ferguson masterfully documents in this book.
February 5, 2010
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.
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.
August 12, 2015
This is not "a revolutionary look at humanity's most murderous century" so much as a scattershot economic and military history of Eurasia, 1940-1945. There's several places where Ferguson attacks other authors' claims, but targets rather dubious, second-rate literature--there's no great corrections to Shirer, or Trevor-Roper, or Beevor, or Tuchman, or any of the other accepted canon. These challenges furthermore regard "controversies" like to what depth Stalin had planed a preemptive invasion of Germany--great questions for a targeted history, but by no means a new synthesis of a war, let alone a century of war, let alone the socioeconomic, nationalist, racial and other drivers of those wars.
Whether Stalin and the NKO wargamed for a first strike westward seems anyway moot, unless their plan included the phrase "two thousand kilometers of fascist dogs non-stop whuppin' our asssssssssssssss along the unpaved road to Stalingrad" and was decorated in the margins with little Stukas strafing massed Soviet infantry. Even then, it's the Red Army under the Terror, so every corporal who studies the plan ends up shot within a week anyway.
It's war, and nazis, and strategic bombing, and bizarre ethnologists, and fairly well-written, so it's a pleasant enough read. It's not necessary, however, for even the most amateur historian of the Great Wars, and there's better introductions to the story.
I would have given it three stars, but there was a table somewhere in the 300s with a particularly egregious typo, which I now can't find. Apparently there wasn't room in 746 pages for an index of tables. THANKS NIALL FERGUSON PHD.
Whether Stalin and the NKO wargamed for a first strike westward seems anyway moot, unless their plan included the phrase "two thousand kilometers of fascist dogs non-stop whuppin' our asssssssssssssss along the unpaved road to Stalingrad" and was decorated in the margins with little Stukas strafing massed Soviet infantry. Even then, it's the Red Army under the Terror, so every corporal who studies the plan ends up shot within a week anyway.
It's war, and nazis, and strategic bombing, and bizarre ethnologists, and fairly well-written, so it's a pleasant enough read. It's not necessary, however, for even the most amateur historian of the Great Wars, and there's better introductions to the story.
I would have given it three stars, but there was a table somewhere in the 300s with a particularly egregious typo, which I now can't find. Apparently there wasn't room in 746 pages for an index of tables. THANKS NIALL FERGUSON PHD.
May 18, 2019
Una cosa extraordinaria para flipados por la historia del siglo XX como un servidor
May 10, 2015
I have now read four of Mr. Ferguson's works, the others being Empire, Colossus, and The Ascent of Money, and this one is by far his best work (although, Empire was great too). No other book on WWII has done what this one has done: explained WHY WWII happened and WHY it was so violent. All other books explain HOW WWII transpired, but this one cuts right to the meat of the matter. The results and conclusions are devastating to anyone with a firm belief in humanity's central goodness. Mr. Ferguson shows how every nation involved in the war was also involved in some sort of crime that goes against the idealistic rules of war. Not even America is spared from being tagged with war crimes, as the carpet and fire bombings of civilian culminating in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki show. This book gives further proof that war, even a necessary war like WWII, is still a blight upon mankind. Any person opposed to war purely on moral and idealistic grounds would do well to read this book and use its analysis and conclusions as a part of their argument. In short, this is a necessary book to be read by anyone interested not just in WWII, but in 20th century history and conflict and in discovering the true depths of human depravity, which are, to judge from Mr. Ferguson's work, staggering. Not only that, but certain parallels to today's world should make everyone concerned about the potentials of a "Second War of the World."
January 26, 2012
Brilliant! This is a very serious and dense book when Ferguson explores the deep themes of war. His main premise is that in the 50 years between the start of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904/5 and the end of the Korean War, that more humans died in conflicts that at any time in the history of mankind. He documents that opinion at length and explores major themes:
- economic volatility,
- ethnic conflict; and
- the descent of European power.
Details: Ferguson explores issues of racial tension in very sensitive terms and in a very honest manner. Ferguson's opinion is incredibly well researched and I am amazed at the breadth of this undertaking as he covers such a long period and so many countries. I was especially fascinated by his comparisons of the treatment of ethnic Germans and Jews in eastern Europe in the 1920's and 1930's.
I had always thought that poverty led to conflict but Ferguson focuses on economic volatility instead. Depressions hurt everyone but when the haves and have-nots change places, anger rises.
The Takeaway: A masterpiece for the modern historian. I have to read everything Ferguson has ever written.
- economic volatility,
- ethnic conflict; and
- the descent of European power.
Details: Ferguson explores issues of racial tension in very sensitive terms and in a very honest manner. Ferguson's opinion is incredibly well researched and I am amazed at the breadth of this undertaking as he covers such a long period and so many countries. I was especially fascinated by his comparisons of the treatment of ethnic Germans and Jews in eastern Europe in the 1920's and 1930's.
I had always thought that poverty led to conflict but Ferguson focuses on economic volatility instead. Depressions hurt everyone but when the haves and have-nots change places, anger rises.
The Takeaway: A masterpiece for the modern historian. I have to read everything Ferguson has ever written.
September 8, 2009
This is a book about killing. That's about it. Mostly it's about the mass extermination of humans. And the economics of killing lots and lots and lots of people. If you're interested in why people hate and kill millions of people, this might be a book for you. But there isn't even much "why" in the book. There are a lot of numbers. Pages and pages of numbers...of people...killed by the tens of thousands. There's not much else in its 646 pages.
Niall Ferguson is a well-respected historian. He looks great on TV and does some excellent documentaries. He seems like a pleasant, even brilliant man. But history, even the history of war, is not only about killing. It's about people and how they think and why they decide things. It's mostly about telling stories -- presenting dramatic narrative of events involving humans in difficult and challenging times. This book has none of those elements. You don't know anything about the people being killed. You don't learn anything about the handful of monsters doing the killing. You're just numb..and fairly bored.
Niall Ferguson is a well-respected historian. He looks great on TV and does some excellent documentaries. He seems like a pleasant, even brilliant man. But history, even the history of war, is not only about killing. It's about people and how they think and why they decide things. It's mostly about telling stories -- presenting dramatic narrative of events involving humans in difficult and challenging times. This book has none of those elements. You don't know anything about the people being killed. You don't learn anything about the handful of monsters doing the killing. You're just numb..and fairly bored.
December 29, 2020
The more I read authors from "revered" institutes (like Oxford) the more I lose respect for these institutes. What a waste of pages. Yes, the author has a few nuggets of uncomfortable truths that the West is unwilling to acknowledge (esp the fact that WWII was not a fight of good vs evil but evil vs evil) but the author is highly biased towards the Anglo-American view of the events
Quick to denounce Hitler for his Aryan (read White) supremacy, the author fails to see the same flaw in Churchill (or in the British people, for whom he has only praise; Someone needs to remove those rose-tinted glasses). He dismisses the death of Indians (3mn+ Bengalis) calling the equivalence of two oppressive colonial regimes facile. He even goes to a great extent to justify the deaths
1. Quit India angered the Brits; (there is a line which reads like "Sure we killed a few million. What about Gandhi eh? Quit India was also violent. Some 60,000 injured. So much for peaceful protests ha. No one tells Gandhi anything".) This stupid equivalence is used to justify the moral stance of the Brits
2. It was war and India was declared as a resource center (occupied hostile territory) by Brits (indicating that the methods were "unfortunate but understandable")
3. The famine was triggered by a natural disaster and Churchill wasn't really to blame;
According to the author, Churchill (or the British Raj) would be as evil as the Nazis IF they had killed leaders systematically. For me, that was the point where the author and the book lost all relevance. It is just another highly biased portrayal of global events. His coverage of the forces at play White-washes the crimes of the British Raj. Germans industrialized Killing of Jews. British gobbled up cultures and created systems of oppression that could have lasted for millennia. They were not different. They were the same ideologies, directed at different sets of people in different parts of the world on different timescales. Their cost to humanity has been the same and they deserve equal amount of scorn and denunciation.
Funnily enough, the only true representation of the British Raj in the book comes from a source that the author quotes (but doesn't comment on). Hitler rightly called out the moral hypocrisy of the Raj in subjugating the people in the name of democracy and modernization and author was kind enough in adding (or maybe not vigilant enough in removing) that quote
Also, the blurb is misleading. The book does not cover the whole of 20th century. It is just about the two world wars and there are much better books on each of the subjects.
Overall, it is a biased collation of various other works, paraded as a new take on events. Can skip the book for sure.
Quick to denounce Hitler for his Aryan (read White) supremacy, the author fails to see the same flaw in Churchill (or in the British people, for whom he has only praise; Someone needs to remove those rose-tinted glasses). He dismisses the death of Indians (3mn+ Bengalis) calling the equivalence of two oppressive colonial regimes facile. He even goes to a great extent to justify the deaths
1. Quit India angered the Brits; (there is a line which reads like "Sure we killed a few million. What about Gandhi eh? Quit India was also violent. Some 60,000 injured. So much for peaceful protests ha. No one tells Gandhi anything".) This stupid equivalence is used to justify the moral stance of the Brits
2. It was war and India was declared as a resource center (occupied hostile territory) by Brits (indicating that the methods were "unfortunate but understandable")
3. The famine was triggered by a natural disaster and Churchill wasn't really to blame;
According to the author, Churchill (or the British Raj) would be as evil as the Nazis IF they had killed leaders systematically. For me, that was the point where the author and the book lost all relevance. It is just another highly biased portrayal of global events. His coverage of the forces at play White-washes the crimes of the British Raj. Germans industrialized Killing of Jews. British gobbled up cultures and created systems of oppression that could have lasted for millennia. They were not different. They were the same ideologies, directed at different sets of people in different parts of the world on different timescales. Their cost to humanity has been the same and they deserve equal amount of scorn and denunciation.
Funnily enough, the only true representation of the British Raj in the book comes from a source that the author quotes (but doesn't comment on). Hitler rightly called out the moral hypocrisy of the Raj in subjugating the people in the name of democracy and modernization and author was kind enough in adding (or maybe not vigilant enough in removing) that quote
Also, the blurb is misleading. The book does not cover the whole of 20th century. It is just about the two world wars and there are much better books on each of the subjects.
Overall, it is a biased collation of various other works, paraded as a new take on events. Can skip the book for sure.
May 8, 2023
The following review might seem more like a pan, it’s not meant to be. I might have gone with 4*, felt like that would be false advertising, but would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys modern history.
The author’s thesis is that there was one single war raging, ebbing and flowing throughout the 20th C, with a few hiatuses and time outs between battles.
His thesis is interesting, instructive and gives this big, long, bouncy book a slightly different slant of mind than many standard histories. It is also quite heavily attention-weighted towards everyone’s favourite world war, WWII
I am sort of a fan of Ferguson, not a real fanatic, but have read enough of his work to come to grips with the sentiment that, although he is highly knowledgeable and has an extraordinarily high output of work, he inevitably falls short of his potential.
This book does nothing to disabuse me of this conclusion. It needed more cohesiveness and a sharper set of plot points to successfully pull off the author’s unusually ambitious intentions.
Ferguson proposes his thesis, states succinctly what that thesis is, supplies us with a huge, rambling and entertaining banquet filled with all manner of fascinating historical material (even though I consider myself relatively well read in modern military history, I hadn’t come across much of it before) and leaves it at that. In the end, his theses concludes as nothing more than a hypothesis. He doesn’t satisfy with his statements, just makes us hungry.
He final conclusion is that we may have seen the last of a War War. Any further conflicts are likely be localised, or regional, at worst.
As a gambler, that’s a bet I like, but wouldn’t take.
The author’s thesis is that there was one single war raging, ebbing and flowing throughout the 20th C, with a few hiatuses and time outs between battles.
His thesis is interesting, instructive and gives this big, long, bouncy book a slightly different slant of mind than many standard histories. It is also quite heavily attention-weighted towards everyone’s favourite world war, WWII
I am sort of a fan of Ferguson, not a real fanatic, but have read enough of his work to come to grips with the sentiment that, although he is highly knowledgeable and has an extraordinarily high output of work, he inevitably falls short of his potential.
This book does nothing to disabuse me of this conclusion. It needed more cohesiveness and a sharper set of plot points to successfully pull off the author’s unusually ambitious intentions.
Ferguson proposes his thesis, states succinctly what that thesis is, supplies us with a huge, rambling and entertaining banquet filled with all manner of fascinating historical material (even though I consider myself relatively well read in modern military history, I hadn’t come across much of it before) and leaves it at that. In the end, his theses concludes as nothing more than a hypothesis. He doesn’t satisfy with his statements, just makes us hungry.
He final conclusion is that we may have seen the last of a War War. Any further conflicts are likely be localised, or regional, at worst.
As a gambler, that’s a bet I like, but wouldn’t take.
August 27, 2020
This is undoubtedly a hard and difficult read, the book is extremely dense and packed with a mind boggling wealth of information on every page.
Nonetheless Niall has managed to write to my mind one of the best accounts of the time from roughly the late 1890s to 1945 with a coda of pages running from 1953 to the mid 2000s that I have ever read.
This book challenged my preconceived idea that the cold war was a struggle between competing economic ideas and reframed it as being a continuation between forces of ethnic conflict between minorities.
This is at first a bizarre way of framing this period but is convincing take the Soviet union where kulaks were given a racial element the son of a rich farmer being a class enemy based not on wealth he owned but through racial characteristics.
Indeed throughout the time period covered by this book Niall gives so many examples of this identifying certain zones in the world as hotspots for ethnic conflict. He also focuses on the factors that gave rise to the first and 2nd world war with one of the most interesting anaylises of the cause and outcome of the first world war I've read to date.
I would hardly call myself a novice in this field having a degree in modern history focusing on European history in general. But I found this book to be an interesting change of pace and more insightful than most of the books and essays I had to read during University.
Nonetheless Niall has managed to write to my mind one of the best accounts of the time from roughly the late 1890s to 1945 with a coda of pages running from 1953 to the mid 2000s that I have ever read.
This book challenged my preconceived idea that the cold war was a struggle between competing economic ideas and reframed it as being a continuation between forces of ethnic conflict between minorities.
This is at first a bizarre way of framing this period but is convincing take the Soviet union where kulaks were given a racial element the son of a rich farmer being a class enemy based not on wealth he owned but through racial characteristics.
Indeed throughout the time period covered by this book Niall gives so many examples of this identifying certain zones in the world as hotspots for ethnic conflict. He also focuses on the factors that gave rise to the first and 2nd world war with one of the most interesting anaylises of the cause and outcome of the first world war I've read to date.
I would hardly call myself a novice in this field having a degree in modern history focusing on European history in general. But I found this book to be an interesting change of pace and more insightful than most of the books and essays I had to read during University.
April 1, 2021
An absolute slogfest. Took longer to read than the Battle of Verdun.
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