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

powers has a predictable regularity to it. On the contrary, the most striking thing about the seventy or so empires historians have identified is the extraordinary variability in the chronological as well as the spatial extent of their dominion. The longest-lived empire of the second millennium was the Holy Roman Empire, which may be dated from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 until its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. The Ming dynasty in China (1368–1644) and its immediate successor, the Manchu or Qing dynasty, lasted together more than five hundred years, as did the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258). The Ottoman Empire (1453–1922) lasted just under five hundred years, showing signs of dissolution only in the last half century of its existence. The continental empires of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries, expiring in rapid succession at the end of the First World War. The Mughals ruled a substantial part of what is now India for around two hundred years. Of similar duration were the realms of the Mamluks in Egypt (1250–1517) and the Safavids in Persia (1501– 1736). It is more difficult to give exact dates to the maritime empires of the West European states, since these had multiple points of origin and duration, but the Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires may all be said to have endured in the region of three hundred years. The lifespan of the Portuguese empire was closer to five hundred. Nor, it should be noted, do the histories of all these empires exhibit a uniform trajectory of rise, apogee, decline and fall. Empires could rise, decline and then rise again, only to collapse in response to some extreme shock.
    The empires created in the twentieth century, by contrast, were all
    Figure I.4
Approximate duration of selected early-modern and modern empires
    of comparatively short duration. The Bolsheviks’ Soviet Union (1922– 1991) lasted less than seventy years, a meagre record indeed, though one not yet equalled by the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949. The German Reich founded by Bismarck (1871–1918) lasted forty-seven years. Japan’s colonial empire, which can be dated from 1905, lasted just forty. Most ephemeral of all modern empires was the so-called Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, which did not extend beyond its predecessor’s borders before 1938 and had retreated within them by the end of 1944. Technically, the Third Reich lasted twelve years; as an empire in the true sense of the word it lasted barely half that time. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their lack of longevity, the twentieth-century empires proved to be exceptional in their capacity for dealing out death and destruction. Why was this? The answer lies in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
    The new empires of the twentieth century were not content with the somewhat haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old – the messy mixtures of imperial and local law, the delegation of powers as well as status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the nineteenth-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; in that sense, they were more like ‘empire-states’ than empires in the old sense. The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than on merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state. It was entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler could accuse the British of excessive softness in their treatment of the Indian nationalists. This helps to