Product Description

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead, the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong? How did we do this to ourselves? The War of the World comes up with compelling, fascinating answers. It is Niall Ferguson’s masterpiece.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18659 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 816 pages

Prospect
'...raw, revealing, carefully argued and surprising'

The Times
'Sobering, enthralling and illuminating'

About the Author
Niall Ferguson is Professor of International History at Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Customer Reviews

Refreshing, much needed review of some very well known history
The Times review quoted above is right. Whilst this book is plainly not for everybody, judging by the intemperate comments in some of the other reviews, I would hope that many more will welcome it as a challenging, fascinating new take on the 20th century. Everyone knows the usual story (not least because it's about the only bit of history that's still taught in any depth in schools). It seems to me that Prof Ferguson has made a genuine attempt to grapple with some of the aspects of that story that sit uneasily in the overall picture. The wars between China and Japan, and Japan and Russia; the great similarities between Nazism and Communism (which are generally ignored in modern teaching); the horrific logic that lay behind German and Russian genocide; the reasons why ordinary, intelligent people came to behave like savages - these are difficult topics, and I think they benefit from an intelligent revisionist's approach.

I found the book utterly engrossing, and I warmly commend it to anybody who is interested in twentieth century history.

Generic History
I've been very impressed by Ferguson's other works, in particular The Cash Nexus, Empire, and Colossus. War of the World, however, does not rise to the same standards as these earlier books. I found the argument to be laboured and unconvincing. Ferguson presents a lengthy tour through the history of the 20th century, throwing in remarks along the way suggesting that these events back up his central thesis; namely that the 20th century was so violent because of the rise of racial conflict. I was, I admit, instantly suspicious of the work because of its TV tie-in and catchy title that sounded more like the suggestion of a publicist than an academic. Indeed, i found the tenuous analogy between HG Wells' genocidal Martians and real 20th century atrocities particularly grating in its trivialising banality. Upon finishing the book, I was left feeling that this was history for its own sake. You get a good romp through the 20th century, but no compelling analysis. Ferguson never really tests or develops his apparent conviction that race issues were the key driver of 20th century conflict. Mediocre and lengthy.

The thesis doesn't always work, but a great piece of narrative
Niall Fergusson's War of the World is a chronicle of the martial horrors of the 20th Century. The detail is stunning and the style as accessible as, say, Simon Schama or James McPherson in the same historical narrative genre. Professor Fergusson's central thesis seems to be that the root of all of the last century's major conflicts, and particularly WWII, lay not in economic privation or political ambition but racial hatred. The book's title is derived from HG Wells's science fiction novel War of the Worlds: the perpetrators of 20th Century warfare are analogous to Wells's alien hordes, bent on destruction of another race, in pursuit of their own "lebensraum".

Fergusson marshals his evidence impressively into a blitzkrieg of evidence, detailing the development of the Nazi ideology, for example, from the minor sexual dalliances with Jewish women of those who were to become Nazism's principal leaders, through to the gas chambers and the Final Solution.

At times, it must be said, the litany of "evidence" of racial inferiority presented by the proponents of Nazism and related creeds comes so thick and fast that you have to remind yourself whose side the professor is on. Indeed, there are some commentators who believe he crosses the line. And though such accusations rather overstate the case it is understandable that a superficial reading of the text could easily lead one to that kind of impression.

One important thing that the author does is readjust some preconceptions. He points out, for example, that the conventional view of WWII beginning in 1939 is pegged to a UK audience. For the inhabitants of Manchuria, the Sudetenland and Abyssinia the war was well under way by then. He also gently, but firmly, "corrects" some past accounts of the same events, such as AJP Taylor's analysis of the origins of that war, whilst simultaneously acknowledging that historiography, like physics and astronomy, has moved forward since Taylor's day. He thus sidesteps any charges of damning with faint praise. (He is less generous, though, when dealing with historian EH Carr.)

As excellent as this book is, however, I'm not overwhelmingly convinced by the central thesis. Hanging the blame for World War II mostly on the back of anti-Semitism or Japanese contempt for their fellow Asians trivialises the big political-economic picture. Sure, the Axis powers in WWII were able successfully to exploit the prejudices they had amplified through their propaganda, and the atrocities inflicted on millions of Jews, Chinese and other specifically targeted groups had an undeniably premeditated racial driver, but without the hyperinflation of the twenties it has to be doubtful that there would have been a successful mobilisation in Germany.

The comparison is with all those semi-informed cleverdicks (not a term I would use on Fergusson, I hasten to add) who blame every war on religion. Sure there may be a case to be made in some instances (the Crusades, maybe?). But Ulster Protestants killing Catholics are like Southern trash lynching blacks: fighting for the right to be slightly less oppressed than the neighbours; for a slightly larger slice of a pitifully small pie. The solution is not found in the total extermination of either side, but in economic prosperity. Once they have a nice house, a big fridge and HDTV the majority are less concerned with bludgeoning other folks to death because of the colour of their skin or their mode of superstition. It is more difficult to, in Nietzsche's expression, "collect zeroes" in order to achieve your ambition if the supply of zeroes - a broad mass of dispossessed and disenchanted numbskulls - is limited. For although there were plenty of intellectuals at German universities who knew and accepted the principles of eugenics, it is doubtful that the average German thought beyond privation and finding scapegoats for it.

It is, of course, more complicated than that, and I doubt I would last five academic rounds with Niall Fergusson on the subject. And the fact that I don't agree with his thesis doesn't detract from an appreciation that War of the Worlds at least has a case to make and does so in masterly fashion.

The other point I would take issue with is his contention that the West did not win the War of the World. It's not that I disagree with what is said about the power accrued to the Soviet Union and then Russia since 1945, nor can I possibly deny the inexorable rise of China nor that Japan, for all its recent problems, remains an economic powerhouse to be reckoned with. It is more the framing of the war as a zero-sum game in which there have to be winners and losers. Yes there was untold suffering by millions at the end of the war, on both sides; yes, they were most definitely losers. But ultimately the transformation of Eastern Europe symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall opened up fantastic opportunities for East and West, even though it cannot be denied that Russia has some way to go before it clears up its act. Similarly, so does the rise of the tiger economies, and none more so than the rise of China. Like President Bush, I too would like to see far more political freedom bestowed on the peoples of Asia than is currently the case. But for the time being I, like billions of Chinese, possibly, think that economic progress is better than nothing, where Bush apparently would prefer they have "freedom". What's the value of having the freedom to starve? One thing the left had right during the seventies was that truly progressive movements grow best in conditions of prosperity.

Other parts of the thesis, though, do work, as in the case Fergusson makes for a preemptive strike at Germany in 1938, when the country was in a relatively weaker condition militarily and economically. There was already, at that time, sufficient evidence that the developing Nazi state was a malign presence. However, one only has to look at the furore caused by the Iraq war to see why Chamberlain and company hesitated in the face of Hitler's procrastinations - just as the anti-war mob now would have liked Blair to have done in the face of Saddam's ploys. Those who do not learn from history are obliged to repeat it, and just because Saddam had no WMD at the point of invasion, who is to say that would have remained the case? Hitler in Mein Kampf recognised that he literally got away with murder for a while because nobody was willing to crush his movement.

Fergusson also makes a good case in favour of "Bomber" Harris's campaigns on German cities, whilst not denying that they were by nature no less savage than say the bombing of Guernica.

Although an account of war in the 20th Century, it is WWII that dominates, and quite rightly. WWII saw conflict on a monumental scale: the battlefield at the Kursk salient, in July 1943, Fergusson tells us, was the size of Wales. It also yields accounts of savagery and degradation of industrial proportions, such as the escalating tendency by both sides to take no prisoners, which in turn fuelled a reluctance by soldiers of both sides to surrender, leading to some ferocious battles to the death. (Historian Antony Beevor, in a Financial Times interview, talks of the role of Fear, as opposed to Hatred, as the key driver in these circumstances. I would contend that Fear is similarly at the root of the "War of the World", and that this was exploited and whipped up into Hatred by the likes of Hitler.)

Plenty to ponder, then. Professor Fergusson fuels the fires of discourse. I doubt the book would have been half so valuable had the result been everybody nodding in unison at platitudes. Full marks.