The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson Page B
Authors: Niall Ferguson
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historians refer to somewhat euphemistically as decolonization. Civil wars and partitions scarred India, Indo-China, China and Korea; in the last case, internecine war escalated into interstate war with the interventions of an American-led coalition and Communist China. Thereafter the two superpowers made war by proxy. The theatres of global conflict changed, from Central and Eastern Europe and Manchuria-Korea to Latin America, Indo-China and sub-Saharan Africa.
It might therefore be said that the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the crescendo of an entire century of organized violence – a global Hundred Years War. Even to speak of ‘a second Thirty Years War’ is to understate the scale of the upheaval, for in truth the era of truly global conflict began ten years before 1914 and ended eight years after 1945. Nor will Hobsbawm’s attractive idea of a ‘short twentieth century’ from 1914 to 1991 quite do. There were discontinuities just as important as that of 1989 – perhaps more so – in 1979. On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet empire saw the revival of ethnic conflicts that had been dormant during the Cold War, not least in the Balkans – a resumption rather than the end of history. In the end, I have elected to locate the war of the world between two dates: 1904, when the Japanese struck the first effective blow against European dominance of the Orient; and 1953, when the end of the Korean War drew a line through the Korean peninsula, matching the Iron Curtain that had already been drawn through Central Europe. But what followed this Fifty Years War was not a ‘long peace’ but what I have called the Third World’s War.
Historians always yearn for closure, for a date when their narratives can end. But in writing this book I have begun to doubt whether the war of the world described here can genuinely be regarded as over even now. Rather like Wells’s science-fiction
War of the Worlds
, which has been reincarnated as an artefact of popular culture at more or less regular intervals, * the War of the World chronicled here stubbornly refuses to die. As long, it seems, as men plot the destruction of their fellow-men – as long as we dread and yet also somehow yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste – this war will recur, defying the frontiers of chronology.
PART I
The Great Train Crash
1
Empires and Races
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!
John Maynard Keynes
Out of the oil-smooth spirit of the two last decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, throughout Europe, there rose a kindling fever… people were enthusiastic hero-worshippers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in the Street; one had faith and was sceptical… one dreamt of ancient castles and shady avenues… but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and rolling-mills… Some [people] hurl[ed] themselves… upon the new, as yet untrodden century, while others were having a last fling in the old one
.
Robert Musil
9/11/01
The world on September 11, 1901, was not a bad place for a healthy white man with a decent education and some money in the bank. Writing eighteen years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes could look back, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, to the days when the class to which he belonged had enjoyed ‘at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages’:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and
It might therefore be said that the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the crescendo of an entire century of organized violence – a global Hundred Years War. Even to speak of ‘a second Thirty Years War’ is to understate the scale of the upheaval, for in truth the era of truly global conflict began ten years before 1914 and ended eight years after 1945. Nor will Hobsbawm’s attractive idea of a ‘short twentieth century’ from 1914 to 1991 quite do. There were discontinuities just as important as that of 1989 – perhaps more so – in 1979. On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet empire saw the revival of ethnic conflicts that had been dormant during the Cold War, not least in the Balkans – a resumption rather than the end of history. In the end, I have elected to locate the war of the world between two dates: 1904, when the Japanese struck the first effective blow against European dominance of the Orient; and 1953, when the end of the Korean War drew a line through the Korean peninsula, matching the Iron Curtain that had already been drawn through Central Europe. But what followed this Fifty Years War was not a ‘long peace’ but what I have called the Third World’s War.
Historians always yearn for closure, for a date when their narratives can end. But in writing this book I have begun to doubt whether the war of the world described here can genuinely be regarded as over even now. Rather like Wells’s science-fiction
War of the Worlds
, which has been reincarnated as an artefact of popular culture at more or less regular intervals, * the War of the World chronicled here stubbornly refuses to die. As long, it seems, as men plot the destruction of their fellow-men – as long as we dread and yet also somehow yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste – this war will recur, defying the frontiers of chronology.
PART I
The Great Train Crash
1
Empires and Races
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!
John Maynard Keynes
Out of the oil-smooth spirit of the two last decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, throughout Europe, there rose a kindling fever… people were enthusiastic hero-worshippers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in the Street; one had faith and was sceptical… one dreamt of ancient castles and shady avenues… but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and rolling-mills… Some [people] hurl[ed] themselves… upon the new, as yet untrodden century, while others were having a last fling in the old one
.
Robert Musil
9/11/01
The world on September 11, 1901, was not a bad place for a healthy white man with a decent education and some money in the bank. Writing eighteen years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes could look back, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, to the days when the class to which he belonged had enjoyed ‘at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages’:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and
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