Published: 1 June 2008
Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2008

The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson. Penguin Group USA (http://us.penguingroup.com), 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, 2006, 544 pages, $35.00 (hardcover).

In H. G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds (1898), Martian invaders launch a series of catastrophic attacks, decimating major cities throughout the world and ravaging their inhabitants. According to Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard University and author of The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, Wells’s description of death and destruction is an apt metaphor for the nature of conflict during the bloodiest century in modern history:

Invaders approach the outskirts of a city. The inhabitants are slow to grasp their vulnerability. But the invaders possess lethal weapons: armored vehicles, flame throwers, poison gas, aircraft. They use these indiscriminately and mercilessly against soldiers and civilians alike. The cities’ defenses are overrun. As the invaders near the city, panic reigns. People flee their homes in confusion; swarms of refugees clog the roads and railways. The task of massacring them is made easy. People are slaughtered like beasts. Finally, all that remains are smoldering ruins and piles of desiccated corpses (p. xxxiii).

Unlike Wells’s war between worlds, the war of the world and surreal acts of violence described by Ferguson in his history of twentieth-century conflict are perpetrated not by aliens but by human beings.

With two world wars that resulted in the killing of significantly larger percentages of the world’s population than had died in any previous war of comparable magnitude and at least a dozen other conflicts that had death tolls exceeding a million, The War of the World explores the question of why the twentieth century, a time of unparalleled progress, was so bloody. Ferguson’s premise is that the typical historical rationales for the extreme levels of violence in the twentieth century—expanding populations living closer together, class conflict, economic crises, emergence of the modern state, and increasing destructiveness of weaponry—do not provide a satisfactorily complete explanation. Instead, he proposes three phenomena to account for the outbreak of conflict at specific times and locations: ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires.

Ferguson analyzes the contribution of those phenomena to twentieth-century conflict within three time frames. The first period covers World War I through the Korean War. According to the author, this period was characterized by a “succession of head-to-head collisions between the world’s empires played out in the crucial conflict zones at either end of the Eurasian land mass” (p. 606), which he calls the “War of the World.” One of the many interesting observations he offers is that World War I was not “an inevitable consequence of deep-seated great-power rivalries” (p. 91), as postulated by some historians. Instead, Ferguson analyzes economic factors such as the relative stability in bond markets during 1914, concluding that “rather than a long road to catastrophe, there was but a short slip” (p. 91), thus bolstering the idea that World War I resulted from an avoidable political error.

During the second time period, defined by the Cold War, conflict shifted to more remote regions of the world and involved proxy wars between the superpowers. Ferguson believes that this change resulted from the diminished possibility of ethnic conflict in the western and eastern borderlands of Eurasia, a reduction in the volatility of growth in the world’s seven biggest economies, and imperial decline in those regions where conflict occurred. He calls this era the “Third World’s War” and highlights the absurdity of remembering the Cold War as a time of peace and stability by pointing out that 19 to 20 million people died in approximately 100 military conflicts between 1945 and 1983.

Finally, the period after the collapse of communism and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the “New World Disorder,” has featured fewer wars between states but a soaring number of civil wars. The author examines the breakup of Yugoslavia, the resulting carnage in the Balkans, and the genocide in Rwanda. Citing one estimate that global warfare has decreased by over 60 percent since the mid-1980s and is now at its lowest level since the late 1950s, he offers some reason for optimism. However, Ferguson anticipates the end of the New World Disorder and the potential for future conflict with the rise of China and demographic advantages of radical Islam.

Exhaustively researched (the book includes 109 pages of endnotes) and well written, The War of the World is a fascinating study of the nature of conflict in the twentieth century. Readers of Air and Space Power Journal will find the sections describing the effects and effectiveness of the strategic-bombing campaign during World War II worthwhile. Ferguson devotes the bulk of his study to the origins of ethnic conflict in the interwar years as well as the events and battles comprising World War II (he has previously written about World War I in Pity of War: Explaining World War I [Basic Books, 1999]). A more in-depth look at the last four decades of the twentieth century, which he addresses in the epilogue, would have proved beneficial but likely would have pushed the length of the book beyond 1,000 pages and intimidated many potential readers. Furthermore, placing all maps in the relevant chapters for easy reference rather than at the very beginning of the book seems more sensible. Finally, although Ferguson identifies the descent of the West and reorientation of the world to the East as the most important developments of the twentieth century, he devotes only a few pages in the introduction and epilogue to exploring this topic, failing to adequately explain how the emergence of the United States as the world’s lone superpower at the end of the millennium fits into his thesis. Still, I highly recommend The War of the World, especially in light of the global war on terrorism and the United States’ recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Ferguson notes at the end of his book, “We shall avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one—the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity” (p. 646).

Col Thomas A. Henwood, USAF
Air Force Fellow
Georgetown University

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.