Vast research on the origins, idiosyncrasies, and parallels, of 20th century conflict.

From a well-established unorthodox but traditional historian (oriented since he counted with the cooperation of students and colleagues in a relatively monumental effort).
Conducted by the motive of H.G. Wells´ War of the Worlds it´s an amazing journey learning and dysmistifing and giving a sometimes different personal based opinion on many of the mainstream events of the late 1800´s until the Korean War (+a chapter and epilogue reaching today).
Most unorthodox idea: Germany´s antisemitism deriving from the end of century european (pseudo)scientific racism focused inwards due to a lack of colonial tradition.
Highlights: Germany´s 20´s and 30´s history, revealing the attrocities commited by the different peoples which sometimes could hardly be distinguished, his Cold War "chicken game" representation, about Kissinger and the bashing of Stalin´s Soviet Russia.

"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.

Conflict is an unfortunate reality in our world. The War of the World brings an understanding of the various causes of war and strife that led to the world wars and others. It shows how economics, ethnic issues, and struggles for power contribute to war and lead to such unimaginable horrors like genocide. This book is a picture of the past, but it can also help us to understand the events that occur today.
This book contains many tables, charts, lists, maps, and photos. It would be very helpful to one studying the world wars or writing a research paper. The text is a bit dry for my taste but not bad. I recommend it to anyone who would like a better understanding of world conflict. History forgotten is history repeated.

Ferguson takes as his premise that H.G. Wells imagined a War of Worlds with Martians attacking Earth, but that essentially the same sort of dehumanized violence and terror played a key part in the 20th Century, just performed by humans on humans. I love history taken from different angles, and Ferguson's run through the origins of World War I, the rise of communism and fascism, and the true horrors of World War II brings fresh spins to my reading of these events from other sources. His epilogue states that there was a shift after 1953, from hot wars between large states and empires which included plenty of ethnic and religious murders and genocides, to cold wars between empires which sometimes supported and sometimes merely inspired smaller localized conflicts which included plenty of ethnic and religous murders and genocides. Ferguson puts a tad too much faith in evolutionary theory about the need for human beings to despise the Other, but he sure gives copious and detailed examples of what terrible things have occurred in the name of such a hatred. And his last paragraph, written about 15 years back, chillingly conjures up the possibility of a pandemic ending it all just as Wells did for his Martians.

Work in Progress

"For Stalin regarded certain ethnic groups within what was still a vast multinational Russian empire as inherently unreliable — class enemies by dint of their nationality.”"

Quotes:
"the hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history" (p. xxxiv)
"were not ethnic divisions actually more important than the supposed struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie?" (p. xxxvii)
"Above all, the old history books told the story of the twentieth century as a kind of protracted, painful but ultimately pleasing triumph of the West.... The world wars and the Cold War were thus morality plays on a global stage. But ... did the West really win the hundred years war that was the twentieth century?" (p. xxxvii)
"To consider twentieth-century conflict purely in terms of warfare between states is to overlook the importance of organized violence within states." (p. xl)
"relatively insignificant as a predictor of ethnic conflict is the degree of assimilation between two populations ... a sharp rise in assimilation ... may actually be a prelude to ethnic conflict." (p. xlix)
"racism ... is one of those 'memes' characterized by Richard Dawkins as behaving in the realm of ideas the way genes behave in the natural world. The idea of biologically distinct races, ironically, has been able to reproduce itself and retain its integrity far more successfully than the races it claims to identify" (p. li)
"This was another central paradox of the modern era. Even as the hereditary principle ceased to govern the allocation of office and ownership, so it gained ground as a presumed determinant of capability and conduct." (p. liii)
"The principal distinguishing feature of ... the Holocaust was not its goal of racial annihilation but the fact that it was carried out by a regime which had at its disposal all the resources of an industrialized economy and an educated society." (p. liv)
"In certain parts of the world there was an exceptional mismatch between ethnic identities and political structures." (p. lv)
"What was galling to those trapped in relatively stagnant economic sectors like traditional handcrafts and small-scale agriculture was the evident propensity of those better placed to profit from international economic integration and increased financial intermediation"
"the victory of the Western ... model of liberal democratic imperialism ... seems to fundamentally misread the trajectory of the past hundred years, which has seen something more like ta reorientation of the world towards the East." (p. lxvii)
"This was not 'the triumph of the West', but rather the crisis of the European empires, the ultimate result of which was the inexorable revival of Asian power and the descent of the West... redressing a balance between West and East that had been lost in the four centuries after 1500." (p. lxviii)
"The potential instability of assimilation and integration;l the insidious spread of the meme that identifies some human beings as aliens; the combustible character of ethnically mixed borderlands; the chronic volatility of mid-twentieth-century economic life; the bitter struggles between old multi-ethnic empires and short-lived empire-states; the convulsions that marked the decline of Western dominance." (p. lxx)

Entertaining, detailed, provocative, incredibly detailed, great insights and research (steel, surrender ratios, etc.); convincing main thesis
Meandering; doesn't look enough at ideology (Mao); many parts without obvious connection to thesis; insufficient discussion of decline of the West (imperialism, economics); maps make following difficult


Best part: looking to the future

Parts that apply to modern age:


Outline:
- Bloodiest century in modern history
- Despite unparalleled progress, the first wave of globalization, modern society
- Typical explanation focus on economic crises, class conflict, extreme political ideologies (communism and fascism), imperialism, increased destructiveness of modern weaponry -- these are necessary but not sufficient
- Three factors:
- Ethnic conflict, aided by the hereditary principle in theories of racial difference, the political fragmentation of borderland regions, and the reality of multi-ethnic nation states
- Often ambiguous, love-hate relationships (high intermarriage rates, sexual dimension, "mixture of aversion and attraction")
- The spread of the "race meme"
- Discrepancy between the reality of mixed settlement and ethnically homogeneous nation states
- Economic volatility, especially where there disproportionately affected (or were perceived to) specific groups
- "rapid growth in output and incomes can be just as destabilizing as a rapid contraction." (p. lix): " Economic volatility ... tends to exacerbate social conflict." (p.lxi)
- Empires in decline: the decomposition of the multinational, multi-ethnic European empires and the emergence of new challenging "empire-states" in Turkey, Russia, Japan, and Germany
- "What nearly all the principal combatants in the world wars had in common was that they either were empires or sought to become empires." (p. lxii)
- Violence tends to erupt at "fault lines" between empires

(1) Empires and Races:
- World was prosperous, globalized, and integrated as never before
- Empires were starting to struggle with "how to transform enfeebled [multi-ethnic] empires into strong [ethnically homogeneous] nation states" (p. 11) (Russia, China, Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary)
- Rise of Social Darwinism, revulsion against miscegenation, state-sanctioned segregation
- Economics of antisemitism
- German diaspora and Jewish Pale of Settlement; vast ethnic pathworks (Jews, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, Romanians...)

(2) Orient Express
- Rise of Japan ("Sapiens")
- Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War
- First crack in Western hegemony: first major military victory in the modern era of an Asian power over a European one.
- Disproportionate involvement of Jews in revolutionary politics
- Rise of modern antisemitism and first violent pogroms

(3) Fault Lines
- Gavrilo Princip
- WWI toppled four impreial dynaties: Habsburgs (Franz Joseph I, Austria-Hungary), Romanovs (Tsar Nicholas II, Russia), Hohenzollerns (Germany, Willheim II) and Ottomans (Sultan Mehmed VI)
- "One of the world's great fault lines - the fateful historical border betwen the West and the East, the Occident and the Orient." (p. 74) Fault line between weakening Ottaman empire and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires
- Rise of the idea of nation state, lead by the 'idea of France'
- "Such exchanges were designed to transform regions of ethnically mixed settlement into homogeneous societies that so appealed to the nationalist sentiment.... The implications were distinctly ominous for the many multi-ethnic communities elsewhere in Europe." (p. 76-77)
- Consensus was that German government turned the crisis into a world war, but "Shared responsibility of all Europeans empires" for the conflict (p. 103) Economist: 'it is fair ... to ask ... what Great Britain would have done in a like case' (p. 104) "From a modern standpoint, the only European power to side with the victims of terrorism against the sponsors of terrorism was Germany." (p. 104) It was the decision of Britain to intervene that ultimately escalated the cionflict into a world war

(4) The Contagion of War
- Factors behind eventual allied victory: naval dominance and blockade, stronger financial position of Britain, American support "too big to fail" for America,
- Beginning of ethnic hatred, dehumanizing language, along Western Front, despite the small differences between the combatants, bode poorly for future wars and theaters
- Similarities between experiences of soldiers: Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune, and Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade
- Degeneration in prisoner conditions, despite its benefits to propaganda directed at the enemy, growth of 'take no prisoners' culture', shooting civilians as reprisal, bombing of cities, unrestricted submarine warfare on merchant and passenger ships
- Various justification for prisoner killing -- need to escort, effort, rations -- but "in its most extreme form, however, prisoner killing was justified on the basis that the only good German was a dead German." (p. 129)
- "The fact that these attitudes could take root on the Western front, where the ethnic differences between the two sides were in fact quite minimal, was an indication of how easily hatred could flourish in the brutalizing conditions of total war." (p. 130)
- "In Easter Europe ... war spelt the dissolution of the old order of multi-ethnic and ethnically mixed communities" (p. 136) and exposed ethnic minorities to suspicion, deportation or rforced resettlement, and retribution; while the Jews were hardest hit, many minorities were victims in various places
- Ivo Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina "describes the impact of the outbreak of war in 1914 on the ethnically mixed Bosnian town of Višegrad." (p. 138)
- "The Western Front had reveled a new level of industrialization in warfare.... But the Eastern Front had seen an equally important transformation in warfare. There the death throes on the fold Central and East European empires had dissolved the old boundaries between combatant and civilian. This kind of war proved much easier to start than to stop." (p. 139-140)

(5) Graves of Nations
- "The peace that followed the First World War was the continuation of war by other means. The Bolsheviks proclaimed an end to hostilities, only to plunge the Russian Empire into a barbaric civil war." (P. 141) Spanish influenza and Bolshevism swept the world which "ultimately proved as lethal as the influenze" (p. 145). "The war in teh East changed into a terrible civil war, in many ways as costly in human life as the conventional war between empires that preceded it." (p. 144)
- First use of terror as a state sponsored tactic

Other interesting ideas
- WWI was not expected or inevitable (imperialism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, militarism): "many narratives of escalating crisis have been constructed by historians not to capture the past as it actually was in 1914, but to create an explanation of the war's origins commensurate with the vast dimensions of what happened in the succeeding four years.... For the reality is that the First World War was a shock, not a long-anticipated crisis. Only retrospectively did men decide they had seen it coming all along." (p. 80-81) Financial markets, WWI as a White Swan (p. 91). "the international institutions that failed in July 1914 had in fact done a reasonably good job of avoiding a major great-power war throughout the preceding century" (p. 91) "Nor, despite all that has been written on the subject, was militarism especially pronounced either in the sums the great powers spent on their armed forces, or the numbers of emn they mobilized.... It was only with hindsight that Europe appeared an armed camp, eagerly anticipating mobilization. "p. 93) "Extraordinary integration of Europe's nominal ruling class" (p. 93) which provided an important formal and informal diplomacy
- Britain and France should have gone to war in 1938
- Third World's War
- Invasions to protect ethic minorities: Russia in Manchurian (p. 50)
- Importance of surrender to defeat (France in WWI, p. 111). "The First World War confirmed the truth of the nineteen-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz's dictum that it is capturing not killing the enemy that is the key to victory in war". (p. 131.) Despite the huge casualties, a decisive breakthrough proved elusive; "it did prove possible, first on the Eastern Front and then on the Western, to get the enemy to surrender in such large numbers that his ability to fight was fatally weakened." (p. 131.) Collapse of morale with realization that the war could not be won
- Key intelligence (WWI Britain, p. 113)
- Importance of financial and economic factors (WWI britain, p. 115)

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.
talso includes:
tt-Guam
tt-Laos
tt-Micronesia
tt-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

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.

The author has a talent for writing, rare these days, so it was a pleasure to read this book, even at 600+ pages

A couple of annoying thing, in at least 3 of his books he misquotes Hobbs,
Hobbs said WHEN MAN GOES TO WAR WITH MAN, EVERY MANY BECOMES THE ENEMY OF EVERY MAN... AND LIFE BECOMES SOLITARY, SHORT, NASTY AND BRUTISH.

Hobbs put that in the tight context of people who were actually caught up in a war.
Like all other authors, Niall leaves out the first line and makes it seem that Hobbs said life was solitary...etc FOR ALL PEOPLE.

He seems to get his snappy quotes from books of famous quotations,
rather that the actual source.

There is other material he recycles from book to book

Niall Ferguson se esfuerza demasiado por aportar una visión reveladora y original sobre uno de los temas más abordados por la historiografía contemporánea.

De todas las premisas que plantea Ferguson, quizás la más interesante sea la idea de que las guerras del siglo XX acaban con un Occidente perdedor frente a un Oriente que comenzó el siglo sometido a un Occidente colonizador y lo terminó independiente y en crecimiento económico.

Review of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World is an expansive and thought-provoking analysis of the catastrophic wars and conflicts of the twentieth century. In this work, Ferguson masterfully examines the relationship between unprecedented economic growth and the simultaneous escalation of violence, war, and genocide. His exploration into the causes and impacts of both World Wars, as well as the smaller but equally devastating conflicts of the 20th century, provides a unique and insightful perspective on the political, social, and military dynamics that shaped the modern world.

Key Aspects:
t•tLink Between Economic Growth and Conflict: Ferguson’s argument that material progress and warfare often went hand-in-hand in the 20th century is compelling. He dissects how the rapid economic growth of industrial powers contributed to the scale and scope of the conflicts, turning modern warfare into something far more destructive than in previous eras.
t•tThe Politics of Decline: A critical theme of the book is the decline of the Western powers, particularly after World War II. Ferguson investigates how imperial collapse, economic pressures, and ideological shifts contributed to the political upheaval and instability of the period.
t•tThe Bloody History of the 20th Century: From the horrors of the World Wars to the genocide and ethnic cleansing that marred the century, Ferguson offers an unflinching look at the violence that defined much of the 1900s. His in-depth analysis of key moments like the events in Nanjing and the brutal campaigns of the Holocaust provides chilling insight into the human capacity for destruction.
t•tGlobal Scope: The book does not focus solely on the Western world but instead adopts a global lens, exploring the conflicts in Asia, Europe, and beyond. Ferguson’s ability to tie together disparate events—from the rise of fascism and communism to the Cold War and its global impact—is a testament to his deep understanding of history.

Final Verdict:

The War of the World is a comprehensive, engaging, and at times harrowing exploration of the 20th century’s conflicts and the forces that drove them. Ferguson’s meticulous research and nuanced arguments offer a profound understanding of how warfare, imperialism, and economics intersected during a century that shaped the modern geopolitical landscape. The work is essential reading for those interested in military history, international relations, and the complex dynamics that have shaped the modern world.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) – A powerful, authoritative work on 20th-century warfare, politics, and economics. Ferguson’s expert analysis makes this a must-read for anyone looking to understand the forces that defined the century.

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.