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Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
Penguin
September 2006
On Sale: September 21, 2006
880 pages
ISBN: 1594201005
EAN: 9781594201004
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
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.
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