Niall Ferguson: War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the Cold War, the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history. This was an age when multicultural communities were torn apart by the irregularities of economic boom and bust. It was also an age poisoned by an idea: the idea of irrevocable racial differences. Above all it was an age of struggle between decaying old empires and predatory new 'empire-states'. Who won the war of the world? We tend to assume it was 'the West'. Some even talk of 'the American century'. But for Niall Ferguson the biggest upheaval of the twentieth century was the decline of Western dominance over Asia. Drawing on history, economics and evolutionary theory, The War of the World is a revolutionary new interpretation of the modern era.

The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch, and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar … So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning - the stream of light rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations … Did they dream they might exterminate us?
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Published on the eve of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) is much more than just a seminal work of science fiction. It is also a kind of Darwinian morality tale, and at the same time a work of singular prescience. In the century after the publication of his book, the nightmarish scenes Wells imagined became a reality in cities all over the world - not just in London, where Wells sets his tale, but in Brest-Litovsk, Belgrade and Berlin; in Smyrna, Shanghai and Seoul.

Invaders approach the outskirts of a city. The inhabitants are slow to grasp their vulnerability. But the invaders possess lethal weapons: armoured vehicles, flame throwers, poison gas, aircraft. They use these indiscriminately and mercilessly against soldiers and civilians alike. The city's defences are overrun. As the invaders near the city, panic reigns. People flee their homes in confusion; swarms of refugees clog the roads and railways. The task of massacring them is made easy. People are slaughtered like beasts. Finally, all that remains are smouldering ruins and piles of desiccated corpses.

All of this destruction and death Wells imagined while pedalling around peaceful Woking and Chertsey on his newly-acquired bicycle. Of course (and here was the stroke of genius), he cast Martians as the perpetrators. When such scenes subsequently became a reality, however, those responsible were not Martians but other human beings - even if they often justified the slaughter by labelling their victims as 'aliens' or 'sub-humans'. It was not a war between worlds that the twentieth century witnessed, but rather a war of the world.

The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era. Significantly larger percentages of the world's population were killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude. Although wars between 'great powers' were more frequent in earlier centuries, the world wars were unparalleled in their severity (battle deaths per year) and concentration (battle deaths per nation-year). By any measure, the Second World War was the greatest man-made catastrophe of all time. And yet, for all the attention they have attracted from historians, the world wars were only two of many twentieth-century conflicts. Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in at least a dozen others.* Comparable fatalities were caused by the genocidal or 'politicidal' wars waged against civilian populations by the 'Young Turk' regime during the First World War, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say nothing of the tyrannies of Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Pol Pot in Cambodia. There was not a single year before, between or after the world wars that did not see large-scale organized violence in one part of the world or another.

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*The Mexican Revolutionary War (1910-20), the Russian Civil War (1917-21), the civil wars in China (1926-37), the Korean War (1950-53), the intermittent civil wars in Rwanda and Burundi (1963-95), the post-colonial wars in Indochina (1960-75), the Nigerian Civil War (1966-70), the Bangladeshi war of independence (1971), the civil war in Mozambique (1975-93), the war in Afghanistan (1979-2001) and the on-going civil wars in Sudan (since 1983) and Congo (since 1998).