I came upon this book by way of the six-part documentary of the same name which based on the book and narrated by Ferguson. I knew of Ferguson prior but only his work on Economic History. Anyhow, the documentary is good but it doesn't give you an idea of the sheer detail contained in this book. In fact I willingly left this book after it's coverage of WW2 concluded. I felt two things at that moment: that if I read on it'd be lost in a sea of twentieth century politico-military history, and; that I immediately needed to read more on the two world wars and the events that lead up to them.

While this book is very detailed and decently long, it's consistently interesting and quite often riveting. It's definitely a book I hope to get to re-read (and maybe even finish) in the future.

Talk about and effing tome! Sheesh!

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.

This is, by far, Niall Ferguson's most dangerous book. In what many believe to be a far-flung example of historical revisionism, Ferguson attempts to explain the 20th Century as one long episode of racial conflict. In the process, the line is often blurred as to who the heroes and villains of the century actually were. Ferguson's critique of the allied forces at the end of the WWII might leave a good many allied vets more than a little chafed. This book also takes a foray into interpretive history, which is one of Ferguson's passions, but again may leave the civilized westerner a bit cold in the end. If you would like to believe that conventional history's take on the 20th Century is flawed, then this is the book for you. As for me and my house, I'll stick with the classic story.

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.

This book has two glaring flaws: 1) It's poorly organized and 2) It has many loose ends: A provocative thesis, that is desultorily pursued, and therefore not convincingly substantiated. It was frustrating going over the book again and again, in hope of finding evidence, only to be disappointed anew.

But however tentative our conclusions, the questions this book grapples with are perennially relevant and concern us all. Will the 21st century be less violent than the 2oth ? What factors contributed to the unprecedented violence of the 20th century, and should therefore be taken into consideration by every serious politician and intellectual ? If ethnic conflict was more widespread than class conflict in the 20th century, how wise is it that our politicians have embraced multiculturalism ? Especially if we agree with Ferguson, and view economic volatility as the second most important ingredient contributing to the rise of conflict. On the other, handtwithout the influx of young people into their borders, how will the EU countries maintain their social welfare systems, whenon average they are getting older every year ? Will automation be the deus ex machina here?

After and during WW2 multi-ethnic regions were homogenized: for instance, Germans were expelled from Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czecho-Slovakia. In our time, due to to the inequality of opportunities and income that exists between countries, the process has been reversed, as immigrants are flowing as never before into Europe, making the population more heterogeneous.

Ferguson has some challenging suggestions like

1) Hobsbawm's short 20th-century (1914-1991) should arguably have been even shorter. Because in 1979 in three cases, a major break from the past was achieved, whose consequences we still cope with today:

i) The economic reforms in China

ii) Thatcher's neo-liberal turn

iii) Khomeini's revolution in Iran

The first had led to the greatest re-shuffle in hierarchy of incomes since the Industrial Revolution. A person at the median of Chinese urban income distribution went from being better off than 44% of world population in 1988 to 74% in 2011. The second to the staggering inequality within nations today, and the virtual hollowing out of democracy.

As I said, this book is inadequately argued. It's as though the author, having thoroughly convinced himself of the soundness of his conclusions, thought he could dispense with the necessary task of painstakingly convincing his readers. Some of the issues not addressed in this work, are addressed in Georg Lichtheim's Europe in the twentieth century (1972).

Finally, Ferguson's account of Hitler's appeasement by Chamberlain is riveting.

This book is a very healthy "patch" fixing a few small but dangerous and reality distorting bugs inherited by everyone minted by Soviet/Russian education system. Aside from that, the book is worth a reading till the end, see a reference to the discussion between Einstein and Freud regarding the human character and war

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.

A book of great scope and one that does justice to it. A comprehensive look at the turbulent first half of the 20th century, comprising of the two world wars and many internecine conflicts that took place between them.
Apart from an outsized tribute to British Empire and an overlong dissection of its war strategies, theres not much one can argue against this book.
(Moving on to Ian Kershaw's 'To Hell and Back' from here..)

Niall Ferguson writes thick history books with controversial ideas. His argued in the Pity of War that Britain should have just sat out World War One and dealt with a German dominated Europe. In Colossus, he put forth the idea that the world needs America to be a real empire, but believed the country isn't up to the tasks. One of more recent books is War of the World which explores the incredibly violent 20th century. His argument is that the break up of empires and the expansion of the national/ethnic idea fuel the intense ferocity of century's killing.

So many American books about the war focus on the technology, whether it be aircraft carriers, tanks or planes. That's fine, it is how Americans tend to look at things. It also tends to make the conflict seem a bit more bloodless. This ship sank, forty planes were destroyed. We know that people died when we read this, but it removes the horror of it somewhat.

None of that for Ferguson. He goes straight down to the village level. He shows the remarkable breadth of the cruelty in the century. We've tended to focus all of our horror on the Holocaust. This makes sense as it is a uniquely terrible series of events, but our focus has obscured all else that happened and even the share of guilt in the Holocaust. Germans, naturally, get the blame for the Holocaust, but Ferguson shows the horrid but willing participation of many other Europeans.

He also shows the incredible terrors and evil of Stalin's regime, the terrors of bombing, the Japanese atrocities in China, the fate of African-Americans in the early 20th century and more. It makes for fairly grim reading. Thankfully, Ferguson is a strong and often witty writer, which alleviates the sadness quite a bit.

One strange bit is the subtitle. It is called the Descent of the West. He doesn't really support the declinist idea in the book, which is too bad, as it is certainly on the tops of peoples minds.

Thanks to that problem and a fair amount of bloat, I have to say that The War of the World isn't Ferguson's best book, but it remains a good, if dark, read.

An excellent attempt to summarise such an intense and action packed epoch. Written in a way that is received in the voice of Dan Carlin, the author encapsulates and holds our attention. A momentous task given the morbidity of the subject.
Lost a star for me as I was expecting a little more detail in some of the topics discussed outside of the 2 major wars, only because Ferguson argued the case that the 20th century was much more than these wars. My curiosity was sparked and I can look for other resources on the topics that Ferguson has lit in me. There is also a slight air of bias stemming from the book.
I will be reading this book for a second time and studying all it has to offer. A great effort worth every minute passing through it.

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.