I like some of this book
I really really loathe other parts of this book

---

Amazone

An Absolute Mess Of A Book
2/10

I think that this was an absolute mess of a book because Ferguson spends the majority of the book discussing well established historical facts that he does not even bother to connect to his overall thesis.

Ferguson, in the introduction of his book, explains that the extreme violence of the twentieth century requires a serious explanation. He then says that since the majority of those killed were non-combatants one cannot rely upon a study of military history to explain this violence, one has to look elsewhere.

For Ferguson, “three things seem necessary to explain the extreme violence of the twentieth century, and in particular why so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places.... These may be summarised as ethnic conflict, economic volatility” and the end of empire.

When I first read these comments I was struck by the upmost banality of them (seriously, how the heck could anyone think that writing a book advocating for such a position could be developing our understanding of the twentieth century?).

In addition, I do not think that it is remotely helpful to attempt to explain the violence of this century through such generalisations about its causes when you are dealing with such a vast and diverse period of history.

Finally, we come to the biggest problem of the book: the way Ferguson makes his argument.

In sections of this book, I do think that Ferguson does make a good case that his three factors led to violence within the twentieth century.

However, that vast majority of the book I don’t think even attempts to support argument and that, at minimum, 75% of this book should be cut.

For example, in the epilogue of his book - a section that should focus upon supporting his argument that the rest of the violence post-1953 was caused by these three factors.

The only problem is, Ferguson does not even both and he just lists historical facts and he does not even attempt to connect these facts with his thesis.

For example, in a section of his epilogue he engages in a discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis and then completely forgets to explain the impact that this crisis has on his thesis.

I would say that the biggest lesson I learnt from this book is that, why you may have a decent argument, you need to ensure that you don’t go off on random tangents.

Tywin Considine

---


Did he just not do any research...?
4/10

As frustrating as this book was to read (I was assigned it for school and normally enjoy learning about the World Wars), there is some genuinely good information, hence the two stars.

While almost every historian has their own spin, Ferguson's was so easy to spot for someone who is aware of the history of both world wars in any capacity whatsoever, as well as the interwar period. It's either a spin or he is simply unaware of important facts and events.

Ferguson tries to be contrarian by saying that the Second World War started when Japan invaded China in 1937 even though that was quite obviously an Asian War. Japan didn't enter the world war until late 1941.

Ferguson shows either a general lack of knowledge (or spin) to Benito Mussolini, simply lightly touching upon Italy and lumping Italy in with other dictatorships of the time as far as bloodshed goes, despite this having no bearing on the reality of Mussolini's government.

Ferguson shows hostility to Mussolini at every turn, saying his invasions of Abyssinia and Albania were tantamount to Japan's invasion of China (seriously, he does this). Despite the fact that Abyssinia was a slave-holding nation, where several tribes joined with the Italians to fight against the ruling monarchy, Ferguson compares this to Japan's invasion of China and the Rape of Nanjing.

He believes, or is trying to convince his audience to believe that Mussolini was an evil, bloodthirsty megalomaniac

his is not the impression I have gotten from Christopher Hibbert's Rise and Fall of Il Duce, Richard Lamb's Mussolini as Diplomat, and Luigi Vallari's Italian Foreign Policy Under Mussolini.

So either Ferguson thought Mussolini wasn't important enough to research adequately or he just thought that it would be better for his narrative that Mussolini just (he doesn't mention the his proposed Four-Power Pact, his defense of Austria, Stresa Front, his domestic policies which improved Italy's living standards and production, his construction projects for Libya and East Africa).

Ferguson makes no mention of the British blockade's effect on Germany during World War I (the reason Germany lost the war). He downplays the Allied war/post-war crimes while magnifying the German, Japanese, and Soviet. Shockingly, he devotes much time to describing how bloodthirsty and untrustworthy the Soviets were but when he comes to the months leading up to the Danzig Corridor, he says that an alliance with the Soviets would have been brilliant to stop Germany from confronting Poland, despite Germany having done nothing comparable to the Soviets by then, even according to him. Ferguson leaves out things inconvenient to his own narrative and his history of World War I is mindbogglingly short.

Joel Thomas

---

Niall Ferguson approaches history from an economic point of view. This gives them something most histories of the 20th century do not have. His research is careful and he thinks about things in a new way. This was one of the best books I've read in the last year. Here's what Publisher's Weekly has to say:

"Why, if life was improving so rapidly for so many people at the dawn of the 20th century, were the next hundred years full of brutal conflict? Ferguson has a relatively simple answer: ethnic unrest is prone to break out during periods of economic volatility-booms as well as busts. When they take place in or near areas of imperial decline or transition, the unrest is more likely to escalate into full-scale conflict. This compelling theory is applicable to the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated against Bosnians, but the overwhelming majority of Ferguson's analysis is devoted to the two world wars and the fate of the Jews in Germany and eastern Europe. His richly informed analysis overturns many basic assumptions. For example, he argues that England's appeasement of Hitler in 1938 didn't lead to WWII, but was a misinformed response to a war that had started as early as 1935. But with Ferguson's claims about "the descent of the West" and the smaller wars in the latter half of the century tucked away into a comparatively brief epilogue, his thoughtful study falls short of its epic promise."

The book was written in conjunction with a BBC TV production which I have not seen.

The First World War was sudden and a surprise, the Second World war started not in 1939 in Poland but in 1937 by Japan in China, even during their pinnacle of power in 1942 Germany and Japan were doomed.

While there are many unexpected revelations in "War of the World", Ferguson didn't set out on a mission to overturn what we know about the events of the 20th century, his plan was to deliver deeper understanding of the forces that propelled the civilization. The book stays away from chronicling battle maneuvers or military tactics, instead it delves into the forces behind the moving parts.

= First World War, the beginning =

The First World War was so atrocious that when it ended the natural desire was for historians to search for one grand explanation of it, yet, in fact, the war had an apparently low probability in the eyes of the contemporaries. Financial data in the prices of government bonds give the impression that the war was a surprise to the people who had the biggest incentive to anticipate it -- the financiers in the City of London. Until early July 1914, bond prices indicated decline in risk for investors, volatility was also low. These levels held until the last week of July.

The Times, July 22 (3 weeks after the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo) was concerned with the Ulster crisis, same from The Economist from its July 24th edition. Only on August 1st, after Austria's declaration of war in July 28th, did The Economist write about the "collapse of prices, produced […] by the fear of a war between some of the great powers of Europe".

On July 30th, consol (perpetual bond) prices fell 7%, French debt by 6%, and German bonds by 4%, Russia and Austria by about 8%. These were by no means unprecedented market movements. After that events developed swiftly, after the weekend the markets were already closed. On July 31, The Economist wrote that the City only "saw the meaning of war in a flash".

= Fault Lines =

The ethnically pure nation state was a novelty, people of the continent lived in heterogeneous empires. In the eyes of political nationalists these dinosaurs had to be consigned to past.

France provided the model of nation-building that Italy and Germany followed in the 1860s. Albeit these were imperfect nation states: to Sicilians the north felt foreign, and many Germans lived outside Bismarck's new Reich.

Ottoman Empire was retreating from the Balkans. Russia's pan-slavists were incensed by the Austrian's annexation of Bosnia. For the local nationalists, it no longer sufficed to acquire foreign territory, now people also had to move. It was in some cases spontaneous -- in the case of Macedonia, Muslims, Bulgarians, and Greeks fled in opposing directions. Sometimes populations were deliberately expelled -- after Turkey's defeat it was agreed that 48000 Turks would move one way and 46000 Bulgarians the other across the new border. This example was ominous for the many multi-enthnic communities of Western and Central Europe.

Similarly to the glacial grind of tectonic fault lines Ferguson finds the European empires of early 20th century to be a kind of geopolitical tectonic plates.

= Interwar period =

The events between the two wars were shaped mainly by two factors.

First were the ethnic tensions brought up by the clash of the newly established nation state's borders and the ethnic realities on the ground. Diverse and mixed settlements, result of centuries of loose empire structures, didn't easily fit into clear-cut nation state territories.

For example, "...prior Bukovina's incorporation in Romania, Germans and Jews attended the same schools and been members of the same cultural associations. Few towns in Eastern Europe had seen a more advanced German-Jewish symbiosis. Between the wars this harmony gradually vanished."

The second factor was the forming of fascist regimes.

At first, nearly all twenty-eight European countries established some form of representative government. By 1925 eight were dictatorships, by 1933 the number went up to thirteen, by 1938 their number increased to eighteen.

In many of these countries dictatorships transformed, to varying degrees, into fascist regimes. The reactionary conservative movements, supported by monarchy, the aristocracy, and the officer corps, united by the fear of socialism, had as their main objective the crushing the Left.

Only in Germany did fascism achieve the electoral success of the National Socialists. The statistics show that of all votes cast to extreme nationalist parties on the continent, 96 percent were German.

Other fascist movements depended on the ruling elites for support, the German Nazis didn't need that. They exhibited genuine dynamism by appealing to the intellectual elite, to the man with university degree, who signed with enthusiasm in the building of the Third Reich.

= The Second World War =

The biggest surprise was the fall of France. To prevent anything of the kind of the First World War from repeating France built the fortified Maginot Line. It had enormous impact on the French psyche, "a feeling of sitting behind an impregnable iron fence". But it didn't hold! And the French fighting spirit crumbled, but there was more to French defeatism than this, "to many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for".

For Britain the Second World War was one of miscalculated timing. Had Britain attacked Germany in 1938 it would have overwhelmed the underdeveloped, albeit feverishly expanding, German army. But it didn't, it tried appeasement instead.

Nazi Germany was building the thousand year Reich, with the Germanic race destined to be the top dog. The Slavic nations of the east were to be completely annihilated, to free needed living space for the future rulers of the world. But for the nations of the west different policy was meted. For example, the Dutch were judged to be essentially Germanic. The French people were regarded as "worthy of life", there was no thought that France should cease to be France. Occupied Paris became the preferred destination for Wehrmacht and SS officers on leave.

= The Axis powers were doomed from the start =

A Second offensive in late 1941 brought the German army to the outskirts of Moscow. So hopeless was the Soviet position that the majority of the government was moved 500 miles East. A refrigerated railway car moved the embalmed body of Lenin to safety. On November 1st the front line was 40 miles away from the Red Square.

By the summer of 1942 the Germans took Crimea, they reached the banks of River Don and were pressing toward Volga. The swastika flew on the peak of Mount Elbruz. On the Balkans Greece fell. In Africa General Romel thrust into Egypt to reach 50 miles west of Alexandria. As one Russian official put it: "Paris, Vienna, Prague and Brussels had become provincial German cities."

By the middle of 1942 the Axis powers dominated so convincingly that to a casual observer the war was all but won. How on earth did they end up losing?!

Many historians explore "what if-s", mostly what if Hitler had focused to do things one by one instead of simultaneously -- take over the Mediterranean, focus the invasion of the Soviet Union into taking Moscow first, etc. All these alternatives are based on expert military opinion and none of them suggest a way in which the Axis powers could have overcome the economic odds of fighting the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union at the same time.

It is important to take into account that Germany, by taking over much of Europe's industrial base, narrowed the gap. In 1943, for example, transfers from France amounted to 8% of German GDP. Significant contributor was Czechoslovakia, Operation Barbarossa and the subsequent offensive captured more than half of the Soviet economic capacity. Captive labor accounted for 20% of the civilian force. Between 1941 and 1943 weapons production was tripled.

Yet it was nowhere near enough.

The Allies had vastly superior material resources. In 1940, combined GDP of Germany and Italy was 70% of that of Britain and France had together. With the entering of the United States the scales all but toppled over. Combined Allies GDP was twice that of the principal Axis powers in 1942. It was roughly three time as large in 1943, and the ratio continued to rise as the war went on. Between 1942 and 1944 the military spending of America alone was twice the size of Germany and Japan combined.

It is difficult to see how any strategic military decisions could have altered the odds.

And so much of the material and production lay beyond the reach of the Axis powers in the United States and East of the Urals in the Soviet Union.

One example of "had Hitler been fighting the war differently" is the possible success of the strategic objective of capturing Mesopotamian oil fields from the British. In August 5th, 1942, Hitler declared that "If we succeed there, the whole war will come to an end." But 70% of total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, combined with just 7% from the whole of North Africa and the Gulf.

By April 1944 there were only 500 single-engine fighters left on the Eastern Front, facing around 13,000 Soviet aircraft.

At the time of D-Day, the Germans had barely 300 serviceable planes available to repel the invaders, against 12,000 on the British and American side.

In 1942 the era of the Blitzkrieg was over.

While the Axis powers might have been able to defeat Britain alone or even Britain and the Soviet Union combined, that is not the war they choose to fight. They challenged the combined forces of all three empires: the British, the Russian, and the American. It was an overwhelming combination.

Again, interesting indicator for the mood of the world present the prices of German debt that was traded in Switzerland. They plunged 39% when the war started, rallied during 1940, and stayed elevated until the end of Operation Barbarossa.

By the end the war had cost the lives of at least 5.2 million German soldiers -- 30% of all that were mobilized -- and more than 2.4 German civilians. More German soldiers lost their lives in the last twelve months of fighting than in the whole of the rest of the war.

= But there is more =

The book doesn't end with the Second World War, its chronicle continues until 1989. While the Great Powers didn't fight any more direct wars they waged many proxy wars in the decades between 1950 and 1990. Ferguson considers the entire time from 1914 to 1989 one uninterrupted continuum where unsolved problems from the first war were carried in the second and into all the other wars. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

=
I immensely enjoyed reading this book, enthusiastic 5 stars.

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.

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.

Someone tweeted that if a British man doesn't have a hobby by 31, then its WW2 history by default. I found this worryingly compelling.

The chapters as stand alone artifacts are generally excellent. He picks his RAs well. The big narrative strains too much in being iconoclastic.

His main argument is that the 20th century should be understood as one of ethnic conflict. It would have held if he scoped this argument a bit better, maybe the first half of the century only? The chapter mapping out ethnic demographics in Eastern Europe was excellent and helped set the scene for the nazi history chapters, one I hadn't appreciated when I last heard that history in school. But then he turns to the second half of the century and skips straight to the 1990s genocides. I would've appreciated more attention paid to the role of ethnicity in the Soviet Union for example.

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.

Una cosa extraordinaria para flipados por la historia del siglo XX como un servidor

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.

This is a weighty study of the two world wars and related issues of the Twentieth Century. If someone wants to read about war in the trenches, the personalities of leaders and generals, and the battle by battle accounts, look elsewhere.
Ferguson focuses on larger issues, particularly the motivations for many of the brutalities of both the wars and the ideologies behind them. His contrast of Auschwitz and Hiroshima was right on point. The discussion of how many soldiers were still in the ranks when both Germany and Japan surrendered was frightening. Having read many books on World Wars I and II, I am still astounded at the immensity of the wars.
The inhumanity and brutality of individuals, whole nations, leaders, and ideologies are all a testimony to the presence of evil in the human heart. One could wish that books like this, or at least a glimpse of the information, would be enough to cause mankind to change. That change is a matter of grace, not of more information.

The most original account of WWII I've ever read.

An interesting thesis is advanced: that the West was at the peak of its world dominance just before WWI, and that it has declined since. There used to be vast multi-ethnic empires that managed reasonably peaceful internal relations; since the end of WW2, decolonialization ended them, and ethnic conflicts withing nation-states are a source of civil warfare.