The Deluge: The Great War And The Remaking Of Global Order 1916 1931

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.

Reviews

One of the most important and original books to be published about the Third Reich in the past twenty years -- Niall Ferguson (praise for Wages of Destruction) A magnificent demonstration of the explanatory power of economic history... even those whose bookshelves groan under feet of Hitlerism will find their view of the period challenged, and perhaps altered radically The Times (praise for Wages of Destruction) Virtually every page of his book contains something new and thought-provoking -- Michael Burleigh (praise for Wages of Destruction) Adam Tooze has rewritten the history of the Second World War History Today (praise for Wages of Destruction) A powerful and provocative reassessment of the whole story -- Richard Overy (praise for Wages of Destruction)

Author description

Adam Tooze is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He taught for many years at the University of Cambridge. His last book, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was universally acclaimed as one of the most important books written on the Third Reich. It was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and won both the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Wolfson Prize for History.