Ferguson maintains that the United States is unquestionably an imperial power, but because Americans don’t like to think so, the US often fails to fulfill its imperial responsibilities. One crucial case in point for Ferguson is Iraq, where, in his view, an imperial power less in denial about itself would have known that such an invasion required forethought, vast resources, and the willingness to stick around for a very long time.
The theme of empire is central to the new book, as well. Ferguson believes the real problem with an empire shows up when it declines, at which time genocidal hatred is liable to break out among the ethnic groups it had governed. That’s what happened, he argues, in the extraordinarily-often interethnically-violent 20th century, and what he worries may be underway in the Middle-East.
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Niall Fergusson’s most important book to date-a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing.
From the conflicts that presaged the First World war to the aftershocks of the cold war, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of human history. How can we explain the astonishing scale and intensity of its violence when, thanks to the advances of science and economics, most people were better off than ever before-eating better, growing taller, and living longer? Wherever one looked, the world in 1900 offered the happy prospect of ever-greater interconnection. Why, then, did global progress descend into internecine war and genocide? Drawing on a pioneering combination of history, economics, and evolutionary theory, Niall Ferguson-one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People”-masterfully examines what he calls the age of hatred and sets out to explain what went wrong with modernity.
On a quest that takes him from the Siberian steppe to the plains of Poland, from the streets of Sarajevo to the beaches of Okinawa, Ferguson reveals an age turned upside down by economic volatility, multicultural communities torn apart by the irregularities of boom and bust, an era poisoned by the idea of irreconcilable racial differences, and a struggle between decaying old empires and predatory new states. Who won the war of the world? We tend to assume it was the West. Some even talk of the American century. But for Ferguson, the biggest upshot of twentieth-century upheaval was the decline of Western dominance over Asia.
A work of revelatory interpretive power, The war of the World is Niall Ferguson’s masterwork.
20 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
Ferguson writes a book analyzing the bloodthirsty nature of the world during the 20th century., September 23, 2006
Reviewer: KAB (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)
“The war of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West” is an interesting book, in which the writer and historian, Niall Ferguson, attempts to answer some crucial questions dealing with the reasons for which 20th century was allowed to manifest itself into such a tumultuous, bloodthirsty time period in the history of the world. The focal point of Ferguson’s book is essentially mounting tensions as they relate to suffering economies, faltering empires, and systematic ethnocentrism by global superpowers such as the U.S. and Great Britain. From this book, one learns that the two World Wars, as well as other minor conflicts such as the Cold war and the Fifty Years war may have been fueled not only by struggling economies, but also by ethnic tensions between the global superpowers and their opponents, including the Germans and the Hispanics. “The World of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West” will be an ideal choice for readers interested in a detailed, well-researched source that will teach them about the two World Wars, why the 20th century was a time period that was anything but peaceful, and why some areas in the world tended to be more violent than others.
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