Adam Tooze
Author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
About the Author
Adam Tooze teaches in the history faculty, University of Cambridge.
Works by Adam Tooze
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) — Author — 938 copies, 17 reviews
The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014) — Author — 644 copies, 12 reviews
The Cambridge History of the Second World War : Volume III: Total War: Economy, Society and Culture (2015) — Editor — 29 copies
Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001) 27 copies
Potop 1 copy
Associated Works
Property Will Cost Us the Earth: Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement — Contributor — 6 copies
Deux guerres totales, 1914-1918, 1939-1945 - la mobilisation de la nation (BIBLIOTHEQUE ST) (2012) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Tooze, Adam
- Legal name
- Tooze, John Adam
- Birthdate
- 1967
- Gender
- male
- Education
- London School of Economics (Ph.D|1996)
Lancaster University
University of Cambridge, King's College (B.A. | Economics | 1989) - Occupations
- professor
historian - Organizations
- Yale University (Professeur, Histoire allemande, 2009 | 2015)
University of Cambridge (1996 | 2009)
University Berlin, Allemagne (Chercheur, 1989 | 1991)
Columbia University (2015 - ) - Awards and honors
- LA Times Book Prize for History (2014)
Wolfson Prize (2006)
Leverhulme Prize (2002)
Longman History Today Prize (2006)
Gelber Prize (2019)
Historisches Buch Preis H-Soz-Kult (2002) (show all 7)
Scouloudi Prize (1994) - Relationships
- Milward, A.S. (Directeur de thèse)
Wynn, Arthur (Grand-père) - Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Londres, Angleterre, Royaume-Uni
- Associated Place (for map)
- UK
Members
Reviews
Когда речь заходит о Третьем Рейхе, касается она в основном либо эпических баталий, либо нечеловеческих зверств. Приземленные вопросы финансов, ресурсов и организации обычно остаются в тени (кстати, черного рынка в нацистской Германии не было до осени 1944 г.; почти всю show more войну немцы питались хорошо). Однако без рассказа об экономике понять каким образом Рейх так долго боролся с Союзниками, превосходящими его по ВВП в несколько раз, невозможно. В 2007 г. тема нашла достойного автора, получившего за этот полный откровений труд многочисленные книжные награды в Великобритании, а в этом году его, наконец, издают и у нас. «Книгой года» работу А. Туза назвали абсолютно заслуженно. Ему удалось избежать фокусирования на цифрах производства, добычи и ограбления в ущерб общему нарративу происходящего на фронтах, в дипломатических кулуарах и советах директоров ведущих фирм.
Некоторые элементы экономического чуда, последовавшего за приходом Гитлера и вытащившего Германию из пучин Великой Депрессии, до сих пор на слуху, например, «народный автомобиль» Volkswagen, автобаны (а еще были и «народная квартира», и «народный холодильник» - Volkskuehlschrank). Впрочем, спустя некоторое время фюрер заявил, что «Войну с Англией не выиграть кухонными плитами и стиральными машинами», и он не шутил. Расходы на оборону достигли неслыханной доли ВВП, налоги на прибыль для юрлиц выросли до 55%, сбережения граждан (если их не отобрали) предлагалось вкладывать исключительно в гособлигации. Наиболее драматичными были целенаправленные усилия государства по пресечению частного строительства – самой важной формы частных инвестиций. Осенью 1938 г. Рейхсбанк полностью запретил выдачу новых ипотечных займов.
Рассказ об экономике фазы войны не менее захватывающ. Аншлюс Австрии спас Рейх от банкротства. На следующий год плечо подставил СССР, ставший помимо поставок нефти и руд главным источником кормов для скота. Оккупированные страны платили ренту за оккупацию, а на самые лакомые их предприятия немцы старались наложить лапу. Получалось не всегда: голландские Philips, Unilever и Shell избежали немецкого проникновения, переведя права собственности в офшоры. Подробно освещена тема рабства – на предприятиях ВПК иностранцы составляли до 40%, а согласно шутке 1943 г. бомбардировщики Ju-87 «Штука» на 80% производились русскими. Приводится и таблица выгодности использования рабов – даже при производительности на 40% ниже немецкой оставались конкретные области, где они были выгоднее.
Химфирма IG Farben сыграла поистине незаменимую роль в качестве поставщика новых технологий: например, ее завод в Освенциме и сегодня является третьим по величине производителем синтетического каучука в Европе, удовлетворяя примерно 5% глобального потребления. Однако, как замечает Туз, если где-либо и произошло настоящее «оружейное чудо», то это случилось не в Германии, а на военных заводах Урала. show less
Некоторые элементы экономического чуда, последовавшего за приходом Гитлера и вытащившего Германию из пучин Великой Депрессии, до сих пор на слуху, например, «народный автомобиль» Volkswagen, автобаны (а еще были и «народная квартира», и «народный холодильник» - Volkskuehlschrank). Впрочем, спустя некоторое время фюрер заявил, что «Войну с Англией не выиграть кухонными плитами и стиральными машинами», и он не шутил. Расходы на оборону достигли неслыханной доли ВВП, налоги на прибыль для юрлиц выросли до 55%, сбережения граждан (если их не отобрали) предлагалось вкладывать исключительно в гособлигации. Наиболее драматичными были целенаправленные усилия государства по пресечению частного строительства – самой важной формы частных инвестиций. Осенью 1938 г. Рейхсбанк полностью запретил выдачу новых ипотечных займов.
Рассказ об экономике фазы войны не менее захватывающ. Аншлюс Австрии спас Рейх от банкротства. На следующий год плечо подставил СССР, ставший помимо поставок нефти и руд главным источником кормов для скота. Оккупированные страны платили ренту за оккупацию, а на самые лакомые их предприятия немцы старались наложить лапу. Получалось не всегда: голландские Philips, Unilever и Shell избежали немецкого проникновения, переведя права собственности в офшоры. Подробно освещена тема рабства – на предприятиях ВПК иностранцы составляли до 40%, а согласно шутке 1943 г. бомбардировщики Ju-87 «Штука» на 80% производились русскими. Приводится и таблица выгодности использования рабов – даже при производительности на 40% ниже немецкой оставались конкретные области, где они были выгоднее.
Химфирма IG Farben сыграла поистине незаменимую роль в качестве поставщика новых технологий: например, ее завод в Освенциме и сегодня является третьим по величине производителем синтетического каучука в Европе, удовлетворяя примерно 5% глобального потребления. Однако, как замечает Туз, если где-либо и произошло настоящее «оружейное чудо», то это случилось не в Германии, а на военных заводах Урала. show less
Was 2023 too soon to read a book about the economic ramifications of COVID-19 during 2020? Was 2021 too soon to write one? I'm not really sure of the answer to either question. Tooze admits to writing [b:Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy|53491553|Shutdown How Covid Shook the World's Economy|Adam Tooze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630755364l/53491553._SY75_.jpg|83768280] as coping mechanism for lockdown, which I respect. At the time he was show more supposed to be working a completely different book but understandably struggled to focus on it. I found the blow-by-blow narrative of the pandemic's progress a compelling and stressful reminder of 2020. For much of that year I was limiting my news access in order to function as a person, so didn't know a lot about what was going on in the world economy. Thus I found [b:Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy|53491553|Shutdown How Covid Shook the World's Economy|Adam Tooze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630755364l/53491553._SY75_.jpg|83768280] informative as to the policy choices of central banks, the IMF, and governments outside Europe. However it is such recent history, written in the midst of events, that it inevitably resembles reportage rather than history. Tooze acknowledges that he cannot put events in context when they've only just happened. Nonetheless, his analysis is insightful, particularly when discussing the actions of central banks and the paradoxically similar radicalism of centrist, hard right, and left wing governments.
I mean, Marx's answer would be NOPE. [b:Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy|53491553|Shutdown How Covid Shook the World's Economy|Adam Tooze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630755364l/53491553._SY75_.jpg|83768280] serve as an enraging reminder that in 2020 the richest got even richer, the poor died of covid in their thousands, and there was no transformative economic change to speak of. Perhaps it won't look that way in seven, fifteen, or thirty years time, by which time perhaps I'll be able to read a book on the topic without taking it personally. This one provoked more of an emotional than intellectual response. show less
The scale of government interventions was so large in 2020 as to prompt comparisons to models of war finance. Central bank bond buying was the functional twin of fiscal policy. But as tempting as the idea may be, we cannot travel back in time to the days of postwar Keynesianism. And that is certainly not the ambition of twenty-first century bankers, who are far from revolutionary. Their practice is that of the Bismarkian conservatives in the second half of the twentieth century: 'Everything must change so that everything remains the same.' In 2020, at least as far as the financial system is concerned, manegerialism once again prevailed, but it was less an exercise in all-powerful technocratic manipulation than a scrambling effort to preserve a dangerous status quo. 'Too big to fail' has become a total systemic imperative. The effect is to underwrite successive rounds of escalating debt-fueled speculation and growth. Can it go on? There is no fundamental macroeconomic limit that anyone can discern. The question rather is whether technocratic governance can keep up and whether society and politics can handle it. Can it be democratised? If not, can it at least be legitimated? And can we find ways to absorb or offset the inequalities that this growth model produces? The full force of those questions was first recognised after 2008. After 2020, they still awaited an answer.
I mean, Marx's answer would be NOPE. [b:Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy|53491553|Shutdown How Covid Shook the World's Economy|Adam Tooze|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630755364l/53491553._SY75_.jpg|83768280] serve as an enraging reminder that in 2020 the richest got even richer, the poor died of covid in their thousands, and there was no transformative economic change to speak of. Perhaps it won't look that way in seven, fifteen, or thirty years time, by which time perhaps I'll be able to read a book on the topic without taking it personally. This one provoked more of an emotional than intellectual response. show less
For all its horrors, World War 2 is undeniably a really cool war to look at from a military perspective. However, anyone who plays the Could Germany Have Won game (or even a few rounds of Axis & Allies) is confronted sooner or later by the fact that a lot of Germany's military decisions seem a bit... eccentric, to put it mildly. Taking over Austria, yes; seizing the Sudetenland, sure; closing off the Polish Corridor, of course; but why go to war barely 6 years after taking power, way before show more your own rearmament timetable is done? Why fight Britain and France first off, when you don't even want their land? Why open up another front with Russia when Britain hasn't been beaten yet? In fact, why start a war at all with the countries around you, when every single one has an economy that's at least a match for your own? The traditional answer for questions like these is that Hitler simply wasn't a very good military commander, but while this is perfectly true, Tooze looks deeply into the economic background of Nazi Germany and finds that a lot of the wackier-seeming choices the Nazi leadership made do make a bit more sense given the economic options available to them, and even some of the more appalling facets of the Holocaust were driven as much by industrial considerations as by ideology. Tooze's decision to look at the war from an economic viewpoint is very refreshing, and allows him to bust a truly impressive number of myths, most notably for me the idea that Germany had any chance at all to win the war.
Though it's hard to appreciate now, Germany in the 1930s was not a very rich or developed country at all. The deprivation of World War 1, followed by Weimar hyperinflation, followed by Great Depression deflation, all overlaid on the fact that Germany had been a single unified country for barely a half-century, meant that though individual German firms were very competitive and productive, as a whole Germany was quite backwards in many ways (one graph on page 146 shows Germany in 1933 as having only 70% the income per capita as it had before 1914). The single goal of the Nazi Party was to transform Germany from the hemmed-in, middle-weight power it was into a true competitor to Britain, with its world empire, and America, with its continental resources. This primarily meant acquiring land, and Tooze assembles masses of agricultural statistics to show that the goal of Lebensraum, which strikes the modern reader as a bit weird (21st century Germany is much denser than even the most claustrophobic nightmares of Nazi planners), made a lot more sense in what was almost literally a peasant society in many regions. Expanding to the east would also have the benefit of allowing Germany to gather enough resources to be closer to self-sufficiency, a major concern for a country almost totally lacking in vital strategic materials like oil or steel. Removing the need to import important resources would have reduced the need to acquire foreign currency through export, as well as lessening the tension between production for domestic use and production for rearmament.
The beginning sections outlined Germany's struggles to emerge from the Great Depression with both a strong military and a robust consumer economy. They got fairly technical (it helps to know basic macroeconomic concepts like current account deficits, currency revaluation, or the relationships between deficit spending, taxation, and inflation), but they were necessary to understand why Germany chose to start the war in 1939, even though their own plans showed that they weren't ready. Putting yourself in the shoes of a Nazi economic planner, once you've taken the goal of Germany conquering all of Europe as a given, now you just have to figure out some way to implement it, and it would seem that waiting until you have a strong advantage would be the most prudent course. Unfortunately for Germany, despite their massive military spending at the expense of the civilian economy (much touted public works like the autobahn or the Volkswagen made surprisingly negligible contributions to Germany's recovery from the Depression), and even after years of treaty-defying rearmament, they were barely at parity with Britain or France. The reason for war beginning in 1939 was simply that waiting would have put Germany farther and farther behind those two powers, who were also beginning to accelerate their own military preparations.
Germany's stunning victory over Britain and France was both good and bad for them. Good, in that Germany at a stroke disabled the entire military of one of its enemies and most of the military of another. Bad, in that in a real way they were no closer to victory. Over the course of the war, though Germany helped itself to French tanks and military hardware, in an absolute sense captured French industry did not contribute very much materially to Germany's war effort, and Germany found itself in the position of having to expend its own resources on administering conquered territories. Tooze didn't use this metaphor, but I found myself reminded of a sort of military Ponzi scheme, where Germany kept having to conquer new territories to make up for the losses incurred in acquiring its last conquests. To make matters worse, different military initiatives required completely different production, so Nazi war planners found themselves jumping from priority to priority as targets shifted. There's a fascinating graph on page 148 of armament production from September 1939 to November 1941 that shows the sudden production surges and reversals, as well as the overwhelming focus on aircraft and ammunition. I had never realized that tanks were such a small percentage of the overall military budget, but as Tooze points out, aircraft gave by far the biggest bang for the buck.
Speaking of production shifts, I had always been under the impression that German war production had been dominated by political hacks, but Tooze makes a fairly convincing case that, aside from a few ill-advised late-stage "experiments" like the V2 rocket and the Type XXI U-boat, Germany's war economy ran about as well as could be expected, second only to the Soviet war economy, which he should definitely write another book about. More myths busted: that German women did not participate in the economy to the degree that their counterparts did for ideological reasons (false, German women were actually more involved), or that Germany did not have a total war economy until late in the war, also for ideological/propaganda reasons (false, Germany had been gradually letting its military cannibalize the civilian economy since day 1 of Nazi rule), or that people like Speer were miracle workers (false, production surges Speer took credit for were often statistical illusions or were due to other people). The main problem for German planners was that there was simply not enough of everything to go around; a precious resource like steel could be used for a gun, ammo for that gun, a railroad to transport that ammo, or a million other things, and there were just too many needs. By the end of the war Germany was being outproduced at least 4:1 in every single category, and even if every battle had been a crushing victory they still wouldn't have been able to last.
The most depressing parts of the book were where he discussed slave labor and Germany's economic relationship to its conquests. Here's how the logic went: Germany took basically all of its able-bodied men off the farm, and required huge food imports to avoid the mass starvation of World War 1. Those imports came from territories like Poland and Ukraine, directly at the expense of the Polish and Ukrainians, which meant that the Polish and Ukrainians had a direct incentive to help kill Jews, who were merely extra mouths to feed out of the leftover food. "... By comparison with a German ration of 2,600 calories in early 1940, the 'ration' for the inhabitants of Poland's major cities was set at 609 calories. Jews were provided with 503 calories per day." Of course, German factories also required extra labor for the same reason, and so there was a continuous stream of captive workers coming into concentration camps to be worked on substandard rations until they dropped dead, to be replaced by others. Even with millions of free disposable workers, by the end of the war Germany's economy was on its last legs and could no longer be sustained. While Tooze raised my opinion of the quality of German wartime economic planning, he really brought home what a stupid idea it was to try to conquer all of Europe. While individual military goals made more sense (even still-questionable ones like Barbarossa), from a practical standpoint Germany might as well have been trying to conquer the solar system. After having read this book, I don't think Germany ever could have won, but they could have failed even more spectacularly than they did in real life. show less
Though it's hard to appreciate now, Germany in the 1930s was not a very rich or developed country at all. The deprivation of World War 1, followed by Weimar hyperinflation, followed by Great Depression deflation, all overlaid on the fact that Germany had been a single unified country for barely a half-century, meant that though individual German firms were very competitive and productive, as a whole Germany was quite backwards in many ways (one graph on page 146 shows Germany in 1933 as having only 70% the income per capita as it had before 1914). The single goal of the Nazi Party was to transform Germany from the hemmed-in, middle-weight power it was into a true competitor to Britain, with its world empire, and America, with its continental resources. This primarily meant acquiring land, and Tooze assembles masses of agricultural statistics to show that the goal of Lebensraum, which strikes the modern reader as a bit weird (21st century Germany is much denser than even the most claustrophobic nightmares of Nazi planners), made a lot more sense in what was almost literally a peasant society in many regions. Expanding to the east would also have the benefit of allowing Germany to gather enough resources to be closer to self-sufficiency, a major concern for a country almost totally lacking in vital strategic materials like oil or steel. Removing the need to import important resources would have reduced the need to acquire foreign currency through export, as well as lessening the tension between production for domestic use and production for rearmament.
The beginning sections outlined Germany's struggles to emerge from the Great Depression with both a strong military and a robust consumer economy. They got fairly technical (it helps to know basic macroeconomic concepts like current account deficits, currency revaluation, or the relationships between deficit spending, taxation, and inflation), but they were necessary to understand why Germany chose to start the war in 1939, even though their own plans showed that they weren't ready. Putting yourself in the shoes of a Nazi economic planner, once you've taken the goal of Germany conquering all of Europe as a given, now you just have to figure out some way to implement it, and it would seem that waiting until you have a strong advantage would be the most prudent course. Unfortunately for Germany, despite their massive military spending at the expense of the civilian economy (much touted public works like the autobahn or the Volkswagen made surprisingly negligible contributions to Germany's recovery from the Depression), and even after years of treaty-defying rearmament, they were barely at parity with Britain or France. The reason for war beginning in 1939 was simply that waiting would have put Germany farther and farther behind those two powers, who were also beginning to accelerate their own military preparations.
Germany's stunning victory over Britain and France was both good and bad for them. Good, in that Germany at a stroke disabled the entire military of one of its enemies and most of the military of another. Bad, in that in a real way they were no closer to victory. Over the course of the war, though Germany helped itself to French tanks and military hardware, in an absolute sense captured French industry did not contribute very much materially to Germany's war effort, and Germany found itself in the position of having to expend its own resources on administering conquered territories. Tooze didn't use this metaphor, but I found myself reminded of a sort of military Ponzi scheme, where Germany kept having to conquer new territories to make up for the losses incurred in acquiring its last conquests. To make matters worse, different military initiatives required completely different production, so Nazi war planners found themselves jumping from priority to priority as targets shifted. There's a fascinating graph on page 148 of armament production from September 1939 to November 1941 that shows the sudden production surges and reversals, as well as the overwhelming focus on aircraft and ammunition. I had never realized that tanks were such a small percentage of the overall military budget, but as Tooze points out, aircraft gave by far the biggest bang for the buck.
Speaking of production shifts, I had always been under the impression that German war production had been dominated by political hacks, but Tooze makes a fairly convincing case that, aside from a few ill-advised late-stage "experiments" like the V2 rocket and the Type XXI U-boat, Germany's war economy ran about as well as could be expected, second only to the Soviet war economy, which he should definitely write another book about. More myths busted: that German women did not participate in the economy to the degree that their counterparts did for ideological reasons (false, German women were actually more involved), or that Germany did not have a total war economy until late in the war, also for ideological/propaganda reasons (false, Germany had been gradually letting its military cannibalize the civilian economy since day 1 of Nazi rule), or that people like Speer were miracle workers (false, production surges Speer took credit for were often statistical illusions or were due to other people). The main problem for German planners was that there was simply not enough of everything to go around; a precious resource like steel could be used for a gun, ammo for that gun, a railroad to transport that ammo, or a million other things, and there were just too many needs. By the end of the war Germany was being outproduced at least 4:1 in every single category, and even if every battle had been a crushing victory they still wouldn't have been able to last.
The most depressing parts of the book were where he discussed slave labor and Germany's economic relationship to its conquests. Here's how the logic went: Germany took basically all of its able-bodied men off the farm, and required huge food imports to avoid the mass starvation of World War 1. Those imports came from territories like Poland and Ukraine, directly at the expense of the Polish and Ukrainians, which meant that the Polish and Ukrainians had a direct incentive to help kill Jews, who were merely extra mouths to feed out of the leftover food. "... By comparison with a German ration of 2,600 calories in early 1940, the 'ration' for the inhabitants of Poland's major cities was set at 609 calories. Jews were provided with 503 calories per day." Of course, German factories also required extra labor for the same reason, and so there was a continuous stream of captive workers coming into concentration camps to be worked on substandard rations until they dropped dead, to be replaced by others. Even with millions of free disposable workers, by the end of the war Germany's economy was on its last legs and could no longer be sustained. While Tooze raised my opinion of the quality of German wartime economic planning, he really brought home what a stupid idea it was to try to conquer all of Europe. While individual military goals made more sense (even still-questionable ones like Barbarossa), from a practical standpoint Germany might as well have been trying to conquer the solar system. After having read this book, I don't think Germany ever could have won, but they could have failed even more spectacularly than they did in real life. show less
Adam Tooze is a British historian currently serving as Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. The Deluge, which won the 2015 LA Times Book Prize for History, is an incisive, extensively researched, and comprehensive retelling of the consequences and immediate aftermath of World War I.
Most historians have described the end of World War I as a return to old-fashioned power politics, with the winning states scrambling over the leftovers for influence and show more domination. Tooze sees it differently. Tooze avers that “[t]he Great War weakened all the European combatants irreversibly, even the strongest amongst them and even the victors.” The United States, on the other hand, came out of the war as the world’s dominant economic power, not having squandered its wealth or manpower on the war, and not as interested in empirical or colonial aggrandizement.
Tooze shows that Churchill, Hitler, and Trotsky were prescient in their understanding that a fundamental change had been effected in world affairs. In particular, Britain would no longer be acting as an arbiter of world affairs; that role had been assumed by a much greater economic power, the United States. Prior to the war, America barely registered in Europe. As Tooze pointed out in an interview:
"This year in Europe we’ve spent much time commemorating and discussing the outbreak of WWI, and in virtually none of those discussions does the U.S. even figure. It’s the war that transforms this, because in fighting the war, Britain, France and Russia make themselves financially dependent as never before on the U.S. Because their fighting depends on the blockade and the blockade impinges on the U.S. — and the one dimension of military power in which the United States has emerged is naval — it becomes clear that the decisive strategy … against Germany and its allies hinges on America’s willingness to go along.
There’s a really radical transformation from a position in which America is really … a nonentity in global politics to being really the decisive factor.”
But that Power (with a capital “P”) was reluctant to exercise its new found power (with a lower case “p”). President Wilson wanted a “peace without victors,” and he did his best to promote “self-determination” among various (predominantly white European) ethnic groups, and to prevent the war’s big winners from taking too much from the losers. Moreover, he was too enamored of his own ideas to lend support for the ideas of others. In Tooze’s words:
"Why did the western Powers lose their grip in such spectacular fashion? When all is said and done, the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans, and the Japanese to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security.”
Furthermore, the reluctance of America to assert its new hegemony in world affairs may have not only discouraged the development of genuine democracy in China but conversely allowed for the rise of fascism and communism in Europe and Russia. Differing from many other historians of the period, Tooze contends that “[w]e grasp movements like fascism or Soviet communism only very partially if we normalize them as familiar expressions of the racist, imperialist mainstream of modern European history…” Rather, for Tooze,
"It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action.”
Evaluation: This is an excellent book, with a well-written and powerfully argued thesis presenting a novel view of a very important historical period. While some may argue about the relative influence of the new American hegemony on the ideological fanaticism of other parts of the world, it cannot be denied that Tooze gives the student of history much to consider. show less
Most historians have described the end of World War I as a return to old-fashioned power politics, with the winning states scrambling over the leftovers for influence and show more domination. Tooze sees it differently. Tooze avers that “[t]he Great War weakened all the European combatants irreversibly, even the strongest amongst them and even the victors.” The United States, on the other hand, came out of the war as the world’s dominant economic power, not having squandered its wealth or manpower on the war, and not as interested in empirical or colonial aggrandizement.
Tooze shows that Churchill, Hitler, and Trotsky were prescient in their understanding that a fundamental change had been effected in world affairs. In particular, Britain would no longer be acting as an arbiter of world affairs; that role had been assumed by a much greater economic power, the United States. Prior to the war, America barely registered in Europe. As Tooze pointed out in an interview:
"This year in Europe we’ve spent much time commemorating and discussing the outbreak of WWI, and in virtually none of those discussions does the U.S. even figure. It’s the war that transforms this, because in fighting the war, Britain, France and Russia make themselves financially dependent as never before on the U.S. Because their fighting depends on the blockade and the blockade impinges on the U.S. — and the one dimension of military power in which the United States has emerged is naval — it becomes clear that the decisive strategy … against Germany and its allies hinges on America’s willingness to go along.
There’s a really radical transformation from a position in which America is really … a nonentity in global politics to being really the decisive factor.”
But that Power (with a capital “P”) was reluctant to exercise its new found power (with a lower case “p”). President Wilson wanted a “peace without victors,” and he did his best to promote “self-determination” among various (predominantly white European) ethnic groups, and to prevent the war’s big winners from taking too much from the losers. Moreover, he was too enamored of his own ideas to lend support for the ideas of others. In Tooze’s words:
"Why did the western Powers lose their grip in such spectacular fashion? When all is said and done, the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans, and the Japanese to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security.”
Furthermore, the reluctance of America to assert its new hegemony in world affairs may have not only discouraged the development of genuine democracy in China but conversely allowed for the rise of fascism and communism in Europe and Russia. Differing from many other historians of the period, Tooze contends that “[w]e grasp movements like fascism or Soviet communism only very partially if we normalize them as familiar expressions of the racist, imperialist mainstream of modern European history…” Rather, for Tooze,
"It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action.”
Evaluation: This is an excellent book, with a well-written and powerfully argued thesis presenting a novel view of a very important historical period. While some may argue about the relative influence of the new American hegemony on the ideological fanaticism of other parts of the world, it cannot be denied that Tooze gives the student of history much to consider. show less
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