The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931

Undoubtedly Adam Tooze is one of the top historical and economic writers of the day - every article I have read of his is deeply intelligent and well written. His scope of ability could not be matched by most modern day historians. This is the second book I have read of his (after Crashed) and I came away with the same impression - this book is utterly illuminating, though at times it seemed some of the detail was a bit much.That seems like an unfair comment for a book where every second sentence reveals some fascinating insight, and thus what does one exclude?Well The Deluge starts absolutely excellent. Adam Tooze makes a very sound argument that American financing of the Entente effort was a bet on their victory, and when Russia collapsed and the outcome was uncertain, America had no choice but to enter to make that bet turn good. Adam Tooze also draws a brilliant narrative around Wilson, who although a devout anti-imperialist, it seems was really no better in his aims to increase American influence globally through the Open Door policy.The chapter around Bretsk-Litovsk is excellent which reads really well and tells a fascinating story of the rise of the Bolsheviks and all the complexities around their anti-imperial aims. while launching an authoritarian regime in their own country.Following that, the book then stumbles around the myriad of knots to be tied-up after the war. This was the overthrow of the old world order of major monarchies of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, Ottomans etc and the launch of small states which as mentioned in the book, would only lead to another war.And although the premise of this book is to cover between 1916-1930, the vast majority is dedicated to 1918 -1920. The Balfour declaration, Sykes-Picot, Irish revolution, Amritsar and of course Versailles are all covered in good detail with Versailles getting an exhaustive quantity of pages. Deservedly so I suppose and there is great detail on the reparations etc and a nice summary of the role of Keynes.Tooze paints a picture - similar to the book The Vanquished - that the war took a while to really end, which France entering the Ruhr and everyone else doing nothing about it. There is an interesting point it seems that France's territorial ambitions were not much difference from Germany's.An absolutely fascinating part of the book is the forgotten recession post WW1, which actually launched most countries down a deflationary path. The collapse of farming prices in the US led to a major rise in the KKK. There was a major spike in unemployment in the UK.Thereon follows a series of conferences culminating in the Hoover moratorium and cessation of payments from Britain and France to the US. Thus it seems, despite the US entering the war to guarantee France and the UK would be the victors, they still ultimately failed to pay back the US.....While I really enjoyed a lot of this book, there were a few chapters that dragged for me with a lot of politics that seemed maybe superfluous. The depth of detail and information in this book is difficult to find in any popular work of history and thus it surely deserves 5 starts? Unfortunately not all the paragraphs and chapters ran seamlessly together and although there was a fascinating narrative overall, the density of information around 18-1920 detracted from some big picture events. The Great Depression only gets 20 or so pages and the causes are left for other books. The contrasting economic fortunes of countries in the later 1920's is not really covered.Picking the book up didn't quite make as giddy with excitement as when I read The Dark Valley by Piers Brandon nor did I quite grasp the economic picture as much as Lords of Finance. Still, I am a big fan of Adam Tooze's work and onto Wages of Destruction next.

I have red "The wage of destruction" with delight and expected this book to be of the same vein. In this respect, the book is disapointing. The books is not based on new materials or a new reading of existing ones. It rely on secondary sources. It does not provide much context or deeper analysis. The thesis remains obscure. The book is long, sometimes not clear and rather boring. Nothing new comes out of it at the end. I think the author had great ambitions but achieved little. It's a pity, as I found "the wage of destruction" to be one of the best book I have ever red.

This is a fascinating, ground-breaking piece of historical writing, truly relevant to our times. Tooze is an economic historian, and he writes here about the aftermath of World war One, and the interim years of intermittent crises that culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Most historians tend to view these years as a series of non-events, separating the botched peace of Versailles and the catastrophes of militarized regimes in Germany, Italy and Japan. Tooze shows that great efforts were made in these years, via what he terms liberal realpolitik, to create a stable liberal order. Certainly, the peace wasn't a great achievement (Tooze is kinder to its authors, most of all Clemenceau but even Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, than some) but efforts were made to diminish its bad effects - through endless efforts to diminish the effect of debts and reparations. There was an effort to disarm, and his account of the League of Nations is not as negative as those of most historians. Bad luck as well as bad economics dogged these liberal efforts, but there was also an imbalance between real power, increasingly held in the U.S., which remained reluctant to use it creatively; and the diminished liberal practitioners in France and Britain, who now lacked power to impose their ideas. In Tooze's nuanced account, these bad fits in the world come to seem tragic. But they also highlight the notion of how badly the world needs and open order, based on freedoms and compatible with some form of wold supervision. Such an order, Tooze believes, half existed in the 1920s, and it came to flower after the second global catastrophe, by 1950. But we are in danger of losing it now in an era where, yet again, no single source of power exists, and liberal practitioners seems reluctant to act coherently and in concert. It's possible to finish Tooze's great book with a sense of alarm as well as hope. We can, if we try hard, keep the world together - if that's what we want. But we have to know that our enemies aren't always the obvious ones - liberal lack of conviction can be finally fatal. I'd hope that all those wishing for the end of supranational institutions such as the UN and the European Union read this book carefully - it shows that they should be careful what they wish for. This is also a good book because it shows how hard it is to achieve anything in politics, even with the best will - not a message that will find favour among contemporary zealots, but alas profoundly true.

A fine report, well-sourced and splendidly-written, of how the balance of power in the world changed totally and lastingly during the period between the outbreak of WW1 and the mid-thirties.The USA, a powerful nation in its own right, but isolated within itself, kept away from the European Great War, whilst funding the exorbitant military spending of the British, French, Italian and, up to a point, Russian governments. At the end of the war, naturally all these countries (except Bolshevik Russia) were heavily indebted to Uncle Sam and the banks.In 1917 America, under President Woodrow Wilson, with heavy domestic - and even Entente - opposition, fully flexed its massive industrial muscle and sent nearly five million Doughboys into the brutal combat against Imperial Germany and its allies. On the Entente side : 5.5 million military and 4 million civilian dead. On the Central Powers' side 4.4 million military and 3.7 million civilian dead. Almost 18 million human beings were slaughtered during this industrial-scale war.We are all familiar with the rest of the story, from our history books : the 1918 Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, the text of which was influenced by Wilson's Fourteen points, which were to serve as a basis for the League of Nations, designed to mediate between belligerent nations. It triggered the irresistible rise of the USA in its role, as sought for by Wilson, as arbiter of world affairs.The rise of Nazism in Germany, as Hitler exploited the deep humiliation and devastating economic crisis hitting the Germans after the Versailles Treaty, to develop a massive arms industry, seemed an unavoidable development.Tooze's book is remarkable in the sense that it provides a comprehensive worldwide assessment of the economic, strategic, geopolitical and social issues locked in mortal combat in the first 30 years of the 20th century. His essay stitches everything together, and spotlights those catastrophic events of a century ago, and the ensuing rise of US world dominance.It is also a fascinating account of bitter personal and political rivalry among world leaders and brutal and frequent betrayals and turnabouts in national alliances and loyalties - if those words have any meaning in human affairs. Muhammad the Prophet is quoted as saying :"Do not love thy friends to excess : they can become thine enemies. Do not hate thine enemies to excess : they can become thy friends."Good advice to try and keep a clear and informed mind about world events. In this respect "The Deluge" is a major contribution. A must read, to comprehend today's world.

Adam Tooze belongs to the new category of historians who, in the wake of Eric Hobsbawn, have broken the academic circles and have got to be best-sellers. Christopher Clark, Ian Kershaw, Robin Lane Fox and the late Toni Judt, to name just a few, belong in this class that have contributed with excellent works and which have sold by the many thousands. The last decade and a half has been a good one for these writers as it has been buy the educated reader looking for deep yet highly readable works on history and essay.As I said above, Mr Tooze is one of the writers who deserve to be name here. However, this book, The Deluge, is perhaps his less accessible, perhaps for the topic at hand - the economics and politics right after WWI.The book is well written, but too long as to appeal a large amount of readers. Also, Mr Tooze is an Economist and it shows. Some economics comments on very arid matters go on for pages and pages.In the end, the effort to read and fully follow the book is very trying, almost exhaustive.The best book of the author and much more accessible, a shocking essay on the economics of the Third Reich, is "The Wages of Destruction". Any informed reader on history should try this one title, which reads as a thriller. The Deluge is a bit too much, only for specialist in the topic or the decades it covers.