Niall Ferguson

This is a big book! Essentially a history of WW2, but looking more at the big picture, at patterns. Some concrete details to make the pattern clear, but then lots of statistics too. There's a grand theory here to provide a thread... empires just coming off their peak, economic instability, and ethnic diversity at the block by block level, turning into neighbor against neighbor, families against themselves. But really the thread of theory is not enough to carry the weight of the facts, or I couldn't fit it all together anyway. But the theory does give a perspective, a way to organize the facts. It works well enough for that.

People treating other people as sub-human. That seems like the new feature of 20th Century brutality. Hmmm. That'd be another angle that would be useful here, that Ferguson doesn't bring in, not that I recall. Philosophers have remarked on Mass Man... Dostoevsky and the existentialists... how ideology somehow aligns people in any crazy direction... perhaps it's mass media, radio, TV...

The Epilog discusses events since WW2. Yeah Western Europe has been pretty peaceful, but the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia... crazy ideological ethnic slaughter has hardly slowed. Strange, the book was published in 2006, but there is no mention of bin Laden and al Qaeda.... but the book must have been pretty far along by then...

This book doesn't really answer anything. The explanatory framework really just makes more coherent the real questions. Yeah another monster here... one statistic, in the WW2 timeframe, the USA produced 75% of world petroleum. Ferguson does not look at the big picture of resource depletion. We have moved largely from empires to a global society. As this whole network crumbles... it is sure hard to be optimistic... if this kind of mechanized slaughter is the wave we are caught up in... it has yet to crest...… (mer)

One approaches this volume with great expectations, as the editor's other works have been popular and readable. The topic itself is somewhat problematic, as it could lead into a sort of dead end, akin to asking for the purpose of life (life is to be lived; history is that which has already happened, thus a fait accompli, and not all your king's horses and all your king's men can do a thing about it). However, such an approach could hypothetically serve as a guide to current actions on the nationaland internationaal stage, if there were an effort to tease out where things went wrong, and what could have been done differently. Some of the contributions in this volume do serve this purpose, but on the whole I am not impressed; many of the chapters have limited interest to a general audoence (I confess that I gave up two-thirds into an interminable and dreary account of Ireland's problems; and I am a guy who usually persists doggedly to the bitter end out of respect to the writer). Ironically, the editor's own contribution at the end works the least well of all the chapters, degenerating as it does into a fantasy of Hitler occupying Britain, and does not really serve the purposes of improving our understanding of how history happens.… (mer)