Ferguson - The abyss: World War I and the end of the first age of globalization: a selection from the War of the World

CONTENTS

THE ABYSS
World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization

EXTRA!

PENGUIN TRACKS

THE ABYSS

World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization

NIALL FERGUSON is one of the worlds most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, and Civilization. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a regular contributor to Newsweek and Bloomberg television.

Also by

Niall Ferguson

* * * *

CIVILIZATION:

The West and the Rest

HIGH FINANCIER:

The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg

THE ASCENT OF MONEY:

A Financial History of the World

THE WAR OF THE WORLD

Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

COLOSSUS:

The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

EMPIRE:

The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

THE CASH NEXUS:

Money and Power in the Modern World, 17002000

THE PITY OF WAR:

Explaining World War I

THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD:

Volume 1: Moneys Prophets, 17981848

Volume 2: The Worlds Banker, 18481999

PAPER AND IRON:

Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 18971927

ABOUT THE BOOK

The first quarter of Niall Fergusons classic 2006 book The War of the World stands on its own as one of the most thrilling short histories of World War I ever written. Now, on the cusp of the 100th anniversary of that war, Penguin Tracks is offering this section as an original e-book, with a new preface by the author.

Most books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military, and its consequences as economic. This is a gross oversimplification. The most remarkable thing about the war, Niall Ferguson shows us, is how shockingly unexpected it was. The worst war in human history until that point came at a time when economic integration and technology seemed to be rendering war between the great powers impossible. The wars deeper causes were obvious only in retrospect. Its course, after the opening offensives, was unplanned. Its consequences were mostly unintended.

The Abyss is emphatically not a conventional military history, a book about battles and generals. World War I saw the birth of total war, in the sense that it was fought between societies as much as armies. It therefore needs to be understood in terms of the financial crises that it unleashed; the multinational empires that it destroyed; and the hateful ideas that it propagated.

A century after its outbreak, we can now see World War I as more than just four years of industrialized slaughter. It was the moment when the process of global integration went into reverse and the lethal forces of ethnic disintegration took over. Weaving together the economics of empire and the ideology of race, The Abyss is world history at its finest.

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First published Penguin Books 2012

Copyright Niall Ferguson, 2006, 2012

All rights reserved

The contents of this book first appeared in Niall Fergusons The War of the World (The Penguin Press, 2006; Penguin Books, 2007).

ISBN 978-1-101-61620-8 (ePub)

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Preface

The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic. This book is altogether different. It was originally written as a prehistory of World War II. These were in fact the first five chapters of a much larger study, The War of the World (2006). However, they can also be read in isolation as a postmortem for the first age of globalization.

Only one era in history remotely resembles our own in terms of the degree of international economic and social integration, and that is the period from around 1875 to 1914. World trade grew to an unprecedented volume. Capital flowed across borders as never before. In some countries, notably the United States, immigration attained heights that have yet to be matched. Moreover, unlike today, this was a time of political globalization, when a dozen empires accounted for astounding shares of the worlds territory, population and wealth. There was even a global monetary system of fixed exchange rates: the gold standard.

Then, as in our time, books were published that confidently asserted the obsolescence of war. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have constructed elaborate narratives, tracing the origins of the war back into the nineteenth century. Few contemporaries were conscious that this was the direction of history. On the contrary, even the best-informed people in Europe were surprised by the events of the summer of 1914. At the time, the probability of such a conflagration had appeared to be falling rather than rising. Recent experience suggested that an assassination in the Balkans or even a war there was not likely to produce a full-scale war involving all the great powers. It had been almost exactly a century since the last such conflagration. Waterloo was beyond living memory.

Part of my purpose, then, was to show the unexpectedness of war to liberate the reader from the teleological chains of causation that retrospectively lead from the unification of Germany or the Anglo-German naval arms race or even the Balkan wars to the infamous guns of August. For I believe it is important for us to understand the suddenness and speed with which an integrated world can disintegrate.