Jacob L. Hamric |
Review of Niall
Ferguson, The War of
the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the
West. New York: Penguin, 2006. Pp. lxxi, 808. ISBN
978-1-59420-100-4. |
Niall Ferguson's recent book, The War of the World,
seeks to explain an age of destructive wars and unrest that killed
more people than any other century in human history. A world-renowned
British historian, now a professor at Harvard University, Ferguson has written earlier volumes,
including The Pity of War, Empire, and Colossus,[1]
that
offer challenging and well-argued interpretations of major topics in
world history. The War of the World is in the same vein. In his
book and the accompanying highly successful television documentary of
the same
title,[2]
Ferguson
offers a bold new elucidation of twentieth-century world history.
Ferguson claims that traditional explanations for twentieth-century
violence, while certainly helpful and necessary to scholarship on the
subject, are not sufficient: specifically, ethnic conflict, economic
volatility, and empires in decline best explain twentieth-century
violence and power shifts (xli). He further argues that the first half of
the century featured a disproportionate amount of bloodshed, from the
Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) to the Korean War (1950-53), termed
here the "Fifty Years' War" (lxix-lxxi). Another main thesis
of the book is that the twentieth century witnessed not a triumph of
the West but a "reorientation towards the East," or, put differently,
a "descent of the West" (lxvii-lxix). Finally, Ferguson recasts the
question "why was the twentieth century more violent than
previous centuries" to "why was twentieth-century violence so
concentrated in space and time?" In other words, why such extreme
violence in regions like Eastern Europe and Southeastern Asia and at
specific moments such as the decade from 1936 to 1945 (649)?
Ferguson elaborates his principal argument in the introduction, discussing
in detail the connections among ethnic conflict, economic volatility,
and decaying empires in fueling twentieth-century violence. He
observes that "the fatal triangle of territory" between the Black Sea,
the Baltic Sea, and the Balkans was a zone of conflict because it
comprised so many ethnic groups and lay along the junction of the
German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires (lxiii). In
addition, economic volatility--rapid swings between growth and
contraction--leads to increased sociopolitical tensions, since
economic resources are rarely distributed evenly. This was certainly
the case in Eastern Europe before, during, and after the First World
War (lix-lxii). Due to rising social and political tensions, Ferguson
writes, that the imperial powers already faced at the turn of the
century, it is no surprise that economic volatility further
destabilized them and hastened their collapse. In short, sharp economic
changes were bound to cause extraordinary violence and transform
multiethnic empires; the early twentieth century was a time of such
change.
Ferguson gives many examples to support his case. For
instance, he devotes ample coverage to the role of Jews in
twentieth-century empires (56-70, 136-40, 154-59, 164-74), especially
Tsarist and Communist Russia. He notes that, although not uniquely a
Russian policy, the nineteenth-century Tsarist regime undertook
measures to make Jews second-class subjects, ranging from efforts to
convert them to Christianity to promoting and carrying out systematic
pogroms. When the Russian populace experienced enormous economic
opportunity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews
acquired disproportionate wealth and consequently became easy
scapegoats for those who did not benefit from such opportunity.
Moreover, Ferguson demonstrates that the First World War and the
Russian Revolution, which resulted in the fall of the Tsarist Russian
Empire and the rise of economic volatility, in turn perpetuated ethnic
conflict in the region. Like other minorities residing in Russia, many
Jews initially welcomed the coming to power of Vladimir Lenin and the
Bolsheviks as a sign of an end to Russification, subordination, and
exploitation. However, this hope proved short-lived, as Joseph Stalin,
serving as People's Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs, used the
existence of ethnic strife among many of Russia's minorities, such as
Georgians, Armenians, Abkhazians, and Slavs, as a pretense to crack
down on all of Russia's minorities, but especially Jews. In a shocking
turnabout, Bolshevik sympathizers and other minority groups such as
Ukrainians pillaged Jewish homes and businesses during the Russian
Revolution and Civil War. Consequently, even though Russia had moved
from an absolute monarchy to a communist dictatorship by the 1920s,
the daily lives of the Jews changed for the worse. Russian Jews had
become the main victims of converging ethnic conflict, economic
volatility, and imperial decline.
Ferguson also considers the extraordinary violence that accompanied
the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire (174-84). He boldly
calls the Empire a perfect case of what happens when a multiethnic
empire evolves into a nation state--carnage. Like the Jews in Russia,
the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were "doubly vulnerable" as a
"relatively wealthy" religious minority (176). The Ottoman state
sponsored frequent attacks against the Armenians, who lived mostly in
the eastern portion of the Empire. These culminated in outright
massacres during the First World War, when ethnic minorities were
often viewed as a direct threat to states fighting for their very
survival. Another large ethnic minority, the Greeks, had resided in
communities along the western Anatolian coast since ancient times.
However, both the Ottoman government and the Ottoman populace viewed
the Greeks as enemies of the state much like the Armenians. As a
result, most of these Greek communities were deported or massacred
even before Greece joined the Entente against the Ottoman Empire and
the Central Powers in 1917. Using contemporary consular reports and
newspaper accounts, Ferguson compares the vividly described Ottoman
atrocities against Greeks to the bloodshed and carnage in H.G. Wells'
The War of the Worlds. The only notable difference between
Wells' futuristic fantasy novel and reports in London's Daily
Mail was that the latter portrayed human beings as both victims
and perpetrators. Even the 1919 Treaty of Sèvres did not stop the
violence. Within months, the treaty was practically a nonissue, as
Mustafa Kemal led a fierce Turkish resistance against the Entente
powers in hopes of forming an independent and homogenous Turkish
nation state. By 1923, "more than 1.2 million Greeks and 100,000
Armenians had been forced from their ancestral homes," and the Greeks
in turn expelled Muslims from western Thrace and Macedonia (184). Once
again, the triad of ethnic violence, economic volatility, and an
empire in decline had led to murderous campaigns of violence in the
early twentieth century.
In arguing for his "descent of the West" thesis, Ferguson focuses on
the rise of Japan (43-56, 285-311). He begins by stating that the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 signaled the "waning" of Western
domination over the East, as the West had to recognize Japan as an
equal on the diplomatic scene and acknowledge its military, economic,
and political control over East Asia (56). He then addresses the rise
of the Japanese Empire in the early twentieth century, identifying
several similarities with the British Empire. For instance, both
Britain and Meiji Japan "had emerged from an era of civil war to
embrace constitutional monarchy," both became the first industrialized
nation in their continent, both featured rigid social hierarchies and
a devotion to monarchy, and both "venerated and romanticized the
chivalric codes of a partly imagined feudal past" (285). As Britain
had acquired an empire centered on the remnants of Mughal India, so
too Japanese leaders sought living space and economic hegemony over
East Asia, centered on the "no less defunct Qing empire" in China
(286). The only major difference, according to Ferguson, was that
Japan's advancement came over a century later than Britain's, which
meant it would face a much more difficult task in establishing a
long-term empire due to the growth of other great powers, including
the Soviet Union and the United States. However, Ferguson does note
other significant differences between the British and Japanese empires
during Japan's expansion in China in the 1930s: whereas the
British subjugation of India "had been based as much on co-optation as
coercion" and the influence of important businessmen, the Japanese
military dominated the more moderate civilian leadership in determining
their country's foreign policy (308). Consequently, Japanese military
aggression in China spurred much greater opposition from the Chinese
than the British had encountered from the Indians. Nevertheless, the
rise of Japan brought not only "another great fault line, running
through Manchuria and northern Korea, between the Amur and the Yalu,"
leading to shocking violence, death, and destruction, but also the first direct challenge to
Western hegemony, a critical precedent in modern history (56).
A mere review cannot do justice to the depth and sophistication of
Ferguson's study. Besides making the case for his major theses, he offers quite
detailed analyses and interpretations of the First World War, the
Versailles Treaty, the origins and sheer brutality of the Second World War, and the dictatorships of Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin's Soviet Union. To cite just one
example, Ferguson acutely evaluates the German military's predicament
in conducting a world war rather than a European war beginning in 1914.
In the end, the Germans simply could not overcome three crucial
disadvantages in fighting a global conflict--naval inferiority,
Entente imperialism, and financial weakness (112-18). Ferguson also
stresses economics as a historical force to very good effect (he holds
a joint appointment in the Harvard Business School). Although
his narrative assumes a basic knowledge of economic terminology,
his use of charts and figures makes his assertions about the
significance of economic volatility intelligible and cogent. Taken as
a whole, this some 800-page study offers a wide-ranging
interpretation of twentieth-century world history that is both novel
and compelling.
There are some weaknesses, however. Although Ferguson's general
approach may be original, key components of his chief arguments are
not. For starters, he is certainly not the first scholar to argue that
ethnic conflict and crumbling empires led to horrific violence in the
twentieth century. Nor is he the first to observe that European
diplomacy and militarism were as responsible for the outbreak of
the First World War as Germany and Austria-Hungary (102-8); that the
Treaty of Versailles failed because of the ideology of national
self-determination and the minority problem (166); that Nazi Germany
and Stalin's Russia shared important similarities as totalitarian
regimes (416-38, 576-89). Moreover, Ferguson's argumentation, much
like the notable European historian A.J.P. Taylor's, is often
explicitly provocative and highly disputable. Like Taylor,[3]
he offers a
revisionist interpretation of the origins of the Second World War
(312-82), explaining at length why appeasement failed and the British
should have intervened sooner against Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
He seems to engage in a personal vendetta against Neville Chamberlain
and blame the British government for not stopping the Second World
War, instead of placing the blame where it belongs--on Hitler. At the
same time, Ferguson is elsewhere clearly biased in favor of Britain.
His claim that the supremacy of the Japanese military over its
civilian leadership, in contrast to Britain's imperial system, led to
a more humane British Empire is dubious. This bias is again striking
in his otherwise fine discussion of the treatment of prisoners of war,
where he maintains that British troops behaved much more humanely in
dealing with prisoners than did the troops of other nations
(537-52). In addition, military historians are sure to take issue with
Ferguson's contention that the British set the standard for military
tactics and operations in the interwar years, and that the Wehrmacht
drew much of its Blitzkrieg doctrine from the British
military strategist Liddell Hart (385-96). Ferguson even refers to
Nazi Germany as "Mordor," the evil empire in the Lord of the Rings
epic, and to the British as its chief opponent (409-15).
Despite such flaws, The War of the World assesses the horrors
of the first half of the twentieth century in extraordinary breadth
and depth. Ferguson's controversial book should generate vigorous
discussion of an already well-known topic and its clarity of argument
makes it suitable even for college students with some background
knowledge of European and world history.
The
University of Tennessee
jhamric@utk.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] The Pity of War (NY: Basic Books, 1999),
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power (NY: Basic Books, 2003), Colossus:
The Price of America's Empire (NY: Penguin, 2004).
[2] First aired in the United States (PBS) in 2008
and available in DVD format.
[3] See his The Origins of the Second World War
(1961; rev. NY: Atheneum, 1983).
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