Ferguson - The war of the world: twentieth-century conflict and the descent of the west

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE WAR OF THE WORLD

Niall Ferguson is one of Britains most renowned historians. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the bestselling 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 also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world.

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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

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

NIALL FERGUSON

The War of the World

Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, Penguin Books Ltd 2006

First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, a
member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006

Published in Penguin Books (UK) 2007
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2007

Copyright Niall Ferguson, 2006
All rights reserved

Excerpt from The Waste Land from Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot.

By permission of Faber and Faber and the T. S. Eliot Estate.

Illustration credits appear on .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferguson, Niall.

The war of the world : twentieth-century conflict and the descent of the West / Niall Ferguson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-61587-4

1. War. 2. WarCauses. 3. World politics20th century. I. Title. JZ6385.F47 2006

303.66dc22 2006050304

Printed in the United States of America

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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for
Felix,
Freya,
Lachlan
and
Susan

Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

Romeo and Juliet, V.iii

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

The Waste Land, V

Section 1: 19001928

Racial Map of Europe (1923).

The Yellow Peril: drawing of 1895 by Hermann Knackfuss.

European soldiers captured at the Battle of Yang-Cun are brought before the Boxer generals.

Bon appetit!: German cartoon of March 1904.

Pogrom victims and survivors, Odessa 1905.

The Archduke Francis Ferdinand meets Bosnian dignitaries in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914.

Gavrilo Princip and the other members of Young Bosnia in court in Sarajevo.

Two soldiers from Frances West African colonies during the First World War.

Scottish prisoners of war, First World War.

Russian cartoon of the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, 191718.

An anti-Semitic caricature of Trotsky from the Russian Civil War era.

The waterfront at Danzig (Gdask).

The bodies of Armenian children, Turkey 1915.

Rudolf Schlichter, Armenian Horrors, watercolour on paper c. 1920.

Greek refugees throng the docks at Smyrna, fleeing from Turkish troops, September 1922.

Section 2: 19291942

Georg Groszs Grosstadt (1917).

Poverty in the American Depression.

Look, you boob!: George Bernard Shaw on the superiority of Soviet Communism.

Soviet industrialization poster.

Ukrainian collectivization poster.

Georgian poster on self-determination.

Gulag prisoners.

Jacob Abter, one of the members of the Leningrad Society for the Deaf and Dumb executed during the Great Terror.

An ethnic German family takes a break from harvest toil.

Illustration from a childrens book published by the Strmer Verlag in 1935.

Victor Klemperer.

Isaiah Berlins diplomatic pass, issued on September 15, 1945.

Hershel and Rivka Elenberg.

Henryka Lappo before deportation from eastern Poland to the Soviet Union.

A Nazi wartime poster blaming atrocities on Jewish-Bolshevism.

Five Jewish women and girls about to be shot outside Liebau, in Latvia, in December 1941.

Victims of the Rape of Nanking.

A man tends children wounded in a Japanese raid on Shanghai railway station, 1937.

Section 3: 19431953

Marja and Czeslawa Krajewski, murdered in medical experiments at Auschwitz in 1943.

The Axis powers as aliens: American wartime poster.

Tatars in the Red Army.

A German soldier in the wake of the Battle of Kursk in July 1943.

Nazi poster for Dutch consumption.

The destruction of Dresden in February 1945.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencers caricature Mr Moto.

Phoenix war worker Natalie Nickerson with a Japanese soldiers skull.