The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (UK) / Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (US), Niall Ferguson, 2006

I had been very rude about this book when it first came out. His Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997) had been very clever, so I was disappointed that War of the World seemed reductionist, populist, and intellectually sloppy. Had he gone to a University overseas, I wondered to myself? Yes, he had indeed and was thus no longer face-to-face with hyper-critical British academics jealous maybe of his new-found TV fame and so doubly keen to demolish his arguments before they came to print.
But then in 2008 he published The Ascent of Money examining the long history of money, credit, and banking. In it he predicted financial catastrophe as a result of the United States using too much credit. Specifically he cited the China–America dynamic which he refers to as “Chimerica” where an Asian "savings glut" helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money. This book was brilliant, just as Virtual History had been, and proved to be prophetic, so maybe my dismissal of War of the World had been wrong. This is what I thought when re-reading it …..
In the first eight pages of his Introduction “The Lethal Century”, he lays out his argument: what makes the 20th century remarkable is its exceptional violence. "The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era." Why? He rejects all the intense debates there have been about last century’s wars and ventures his own causes!
According to Ferguson, the 20th-century bloodbath was the result of the murderous interplay between of racial conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. The 1900s saw wave upon wave of ethnic strife thanks to a race "meme" entering public perception. Across the world, the idea of biologically distinct races took hold of the 20th century mindset to deadly effect. His favorable explanation of socio-biology is unnerving politically, but more importantly is claiming too much for biological determinism, and the link from biology to political decision-makjng is just too populist and nebulous.
A sharp rise in assimilation, highly PC nowadays in the West at least, because mixing of the races supposedly leads to greater understanding and peace, “may actually be the prelude to ethnic conflict,” he writes. For example, intermarriage of Jews with non-Jews was 1 in 3 in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s (and as high as 1 in 2 in some cities). Ferguson illustrates that in Germany, Jewish intermarriage rose from 2 percent in 1902 to 28 percent in 1933. These and other stats quoted by Ferguson prove nothing, of course, and support the arguments of neither persuasion.
Tensions along increasingly conscious ethnic faultlines frequently spilt over into conflict during periods of economic volatility. For extremities of wealth and poverty proved far more incendiary than the steady, immiserating effects of economic depression. When ethnicity and financial turbulence then occurred in the context of retreating or expanding empires - British, German, or Soviet - the capacity for bloodshed proved even greater, Ferguson argues. Better take out life insurance, everyone, because Ferguson is surely suggesting that what we’re going through now – levels of migration and market volatility unparalleled in any period – will lead to the biggest and bloodiest war ever. It’s nonsense!
He began to think “the war” was more a collection of multiple regional conflicts, whose origins and conclusions stretched beyond the usually accepted boundaries of 1939-1945—the war against China began in 1937, even 1931; and the one against the British, Dutch, and French empires ended in 1942. This argument is probably the most embarrassing and damaging to Ferguson because the title of his book is War of the World. The Second World War was so-called because at least one combatant, the UK, was a World Power and engaged its forces and resources generally globally and totally from September 1939 until August 1945. Before and after those dates there were wars, indeed, but they engaged regional powers only, or World Powers only in a limited way. .
From the Russian Revolution in 1905 to the massacres in Bosnia in the 1990s, Ferguson sees the world at war almost continuously throughout the last century. There weren't two world wars and a Cold War, but rather a single Hundred Years' War, he argues. If you like this sort of Big Picture, MegaTrends approach, the arguments behind two books will outlive Ferguson’s, EH Carr’s The Twenty Years Crisis: 1919-1939 (1939) and Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002) on which sort of 20th century industrial nation state -- fascist, communist or parliamentarian -- would succeed to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by imperial state-nations in the 19th century. Personally I prefer a less bug-eyed view of history, The view that the 20th Century was one of Decline in the West and horrendous Death is incorrect and partial at best. As one who saw the pulling-down of the Berlin Wall first-hand and thought the collapse of the Soviet Empire a peaceful one, I have to say that an equally valid opinion of the 20th Century is one of peace, progress and prosperity, and one in which the whole world was bequeathed and wholeheartedly embraced the weltanschauung of the West.