Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Yet as World War I entered its third year-and the first year of Tooze’s story-the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The magazine founded by pro-war intellectuals in 1914, The New Republic, took its title precisely because its editors regarded the existing American republic as anything but the hope of tomorrow. On the other hand, European states mobilized their populations with an efficiency that dazzled some Americans (notably Theodore Roosevelt) and appalled others (notably Wilson). The United States might claim a broader democracy than those that prevailed in Europe. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,” Tooze writes. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. And what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916, as recorded by one of his advisors. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which-at least by one economic measure-that supremacy came to an end. The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. His planetary history encompasses democratization in Japan and price inflation in Denmark the birth of the Argentine far right as well as the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Yet Tooze's perspective is anything but narrowly American. output overtook that of the entire British empire. They amount together to a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. And so it is again with his economic history of the First World War and its aftermath, The Deluge. So it was with Adam Tooze’s astonishing economic history of World War II, The Wages of Destruction. Very rarely, you read a book that inspires you to see a familiar story in an entirely different way.
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