Adam Tooze is one of my favorite historians and I have often written about his fantastic book Wages of Destruction. It is an amazing book about the Nazi time German economy, which I strongly recommend to anybody who cares about listening to me.
Now Adam Tooze is ready with a new book – The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931. According to Amazon the book will be released on May 29 2014. Here is the book description:
On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Deluge is a powerful explanation of why the war’s legacy continues to shape our world – from Adam Tooze, the Wolfson Prize-winning author of The Wages of Destruction
In the depths of the Great War, with millions of dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. As the cataclysmic battles continued, a new global order was being born.
Adam Tooze’s panoramic new book tells a radical, new story of the struggle for global mastery from the battles of the Western Front in 1916 to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The war shook the foundations of political and economic order across Eurasia. Empires that had lasted since the Middle Ages collapsed into ruins. New nations sprang up. Strikes, street-fighting and revolution convulsed much of the world. And beneath the surface turmoil, the war set in motion a deeper and more lasting shift, a transformation that continues to shape the present day: 1916 was the year when world affairs began to revolve around the United States.
America was both a uniquely powerful global force: a force that was forward-looking, the focus of hope, money and ideas, and at the same time elusive, unpredictable and in fundamental respects unwilling to confront these unwished for responsibilities. Tooze shows how the fate of effectively the whole of civilization – the British Empire, the future of peace in Europe, the survival of the Weimar Republic, both the Russian and Chinese revolutions and stability in the Pacific – now came to revolve around this new power’s fraught relationship with a shockingly changed world.
The Deluge is both a brilliantly illuminating exploration of the past and an essential history for the present.
Damn, I look forward to reading this book!
Mike Sax
/ January 14, 2014TK for this Lars. I’ve always kind of been interested in the idea of the Nazi economy. I see that I too simply must read Tooze.
Mainstream Mike
/ April 7, 2015The biggest change of course was Communism (call it socialism, social democracy, the welfare state, the benefit society) that started in Russia, infected Western Europe, Australia & NZ, and now even the United States (although welfare is strictly forbidden by the US Constitution).
These days Russia is more capitalist than America, and the most Capitalist large power is China.