The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page A

relatively stagnant economic sectors like traditional handcrafts and small-scale agriculture was the evident prosperity of those better placed to profit from international economic integration and increased financial intermediation. As a rule, sudden and violent punctuations like stock market bubbles and busts had a bigger impact than long-run structural trends in prices and output. The polarizing social and political effects of economic volatility proved to be a recurrent feature of the twentieth century.
EMPIRE-STATES
    Twentieth-century violence is unintelligible if it is not seen in its imperial context. For it was in large measure a consequence of the decline and fall of the large multi-ethnic empires that had dominated the world in 1900. What nearly all the principal combatants in the world wars had in common was that they either were empires or sought to become empires. Moreover, many large polities of the period that claimed to benation states or federations turn out, on close inspection, to have been empires too. That was certainly true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; it remains true of today’s Russian Federation. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (after 1922 only Northern Ireland) was and is to all intents and purposes an English empire; for brevity’s sake, it is still commonly referredto as England. * The Italy created in the 1850s and 1860s was a Piedmontese empire, the German Reich of 1871inlarge measurea Prussian one. The two most populous nation states in the world today are both the results of imperial integration. Modern India is the heir of the Mughal Empire and the British Raj. The borders of the People’s Republic of China are essentially those established by the Qing emperors. Arguably, even the United States is an ‘imperial republic’; some would say it always has been.
    Empires matter, firstly, because of the economies of scale that they make possible. Thereis a demographic limittothe number of men most nation states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less constrained; among its core functions are to mobilize and equip large military forces recruited from multiple peoples and to levy the taxes or raise the loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of more than one nationality. Thus, as weshall see, manyofthe greatest battlesofthe twentieth century were fought by multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners; Stalingrad and El Alamein are only two of many examples. Secondly, the points of contact between empires – the borderlands and buffer zones between them, or the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control – are likely to witness more violence than the imperial heartlands. The fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea was a zone of conflict not just because it was ethnically mixed, but also because it was the junction where the realms of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans met, the fault line between the tectonic plates of four great empires. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East. With the rise of oil as the twentieth century’s principal fuel, so too did the Persian Gulfin the Near East. Thirdly, because empires are often associated with the creation of economic order, the flows and ebbs of international commercial integration are closely associated with their rise and fall. Economic constraints and opportunities may also determine the timing and direction of imperial expansion, as well as the duration of an empire’s existence and the nature of post-colonial development. Finally, the widely varying life expectancies of empires may offer a clue as to the timing of violence, since warfare would appear to be more prevalent at the beginning and especially at the end of an empire’s existence.
    It is an error not unlike the old economic historians’ search for perfectly regular cycles of business activity to suppose that the rise and fall of empires or great