DOC The Deluge: The Great War; America and the Remaking of the Global Order; 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze in History

Review

97 of 98 people found the following review helpful. A brilliant reframing of the early 20th centuryBy greg taylorFirst; a comment or two on the negative reviews. The negative comments have two point- first; that the book is poorly written and edited and 2. that it is unoriginal in content.As to the first; I can only disagree. I read nothing but scholarly nonfiction and; while Tooze is not a great writer; he is a fine writer of history.I did not find that it could have been a much shorter book either. He is covering a lot of territory and he tries to do it justice. The only real problem I had with the editing occurs with Figure 3 on page 357. I have no idea what the Y axis represents. If anyone knows; please leave an explanation in the comments.As for the content; while I am no expert in this period of history; I found the content to be original and fascinating. Americans of a certain age were told that Wilson tried to change what wars were fought for and how the international community would handle conflict in the aftermath of WW1. Tooze's story is more complicated; nuanced and believable.Tooze's basic theme is the recasting of American power in the aftermath of WW1. America through its military; economic and cultural strength(by which I mean the appeal of Wilsonianism) was able to provincialize (Tooze's ugly word) Europe. America was economically able to veto or render impotent many of the governmental policies of Britain; France; Italy; Germany; Japan; China and Russia. The fact that there was real differences of opinion between the Congress and the Presidents (Wilson; Harding; Coolidge; Hoover) which made it difficult for the other powers to know what to expect from the U.S. in terms of consistent policy made it that much harder for any of them to know what to do.I feel that Tooze tells his story with great understanding of the individual politics of each of the above countries. We read how the Irish conflict and the struggle of Indian independence limited Britain's options; of the different parties contending for power in Japan and of the struggles for control by different factions of Chinese warlords and parties. We also get a good sense on how the business and political communities in each country clashed over policy.As stated above; I am no expert. If there is a book that tells this story better and more comprehensively; I wish the critics would name it so I can read it. What I can tell you is that this book has driven me to read some of his sources. Tooze has awakened my interest in this period of history by exposing my ignorance. For that; I bow in his direction.20 of 21 people found the following review helpful. An important bookBy John KIt seems the central themes are 1) economic power and public policy shaped the course of The Great War far more than is the conventional wisdom and 2) far from being an isolationist Wilson and successors aggressively sought to achieve hegemony; particularly at the expense of Britain; by ending Imperialism and employing early twentieth century American capitalism to create the great American empire. Much of the book I found compelling; however I felt at times the author made important assertions supporting his themes that did not necessarily follow from the facts as presented. My reading of this period suggests the incredibly complex dynamics preclude attribution to the flow of this history to just these factors. Still; for me a terrific read.12 of 13 people found the following review helpful. Good yet not exceptionalBy R. L. HuffCambridge-Yale historian Adam Tooze has long been a master at his craft - one can't call it a mere profession. This work supplements his earlier "Wages of Destruction" in defining the post-1918 Versailles world; by taking us back to its origins in WW I and forward to its collapse fifteen years later. Yet for all his elegance in form and exquisite detail of research - making it worthy of four stars - I have to withhold the fifth because his perspective is not an "original revision" at all. It boils down to a fairly conventional tour over well-trod paths. Three main points leaped at me as proof.First; in Wilson's about-face regarding European war; Tooze would have us believe it was the great threat of German militarism to liberal values - combined with the democratic liberation of the Russian Revolution - that tipped his hat into the ring. Yet as David Kennedy makes clear in "Over Here;" Wilson had already decided on war by late 1916; to the dismay of his early Progressive supporters. His electoral rhetoric of that year must stand beside Lyndon Johnson in 1964 in the records of campaign duplicity. Tooze himself lets it out of the bag when he recognizes that the specter of French and British default on war loans - should Germany prevail - would cause such havoc on Wall Street that it might have led to a Great Depression 12 years earlier. Thus Wilson was "forced" into intervention by factors that had nothing to do with the safety of Democracy; unless defined by dollar value.Which brings me to Professor Tooze's take on the Russian Revolution; again treated in conventional Western manner. Tooze does offer some half-forgotten insights - that the revolutionary defensists of the Provisional Government echoed Wilson's earlier idealism; and that Wilson's surrender to war left them holding the globe of peace on shoulders much too frail. Yet the collapse of Western democracy in Russia was more fundamental than the trope of "Bolshevik subversion" Tooze reiterates. Russian politicos tried to create a Western-style middle-class democracy in a country without an appreciable middle class. The rise of soviets represented a bottom-up; direct style of self-rule suited to workers; peasants; minorities and soldiers who were as segregated from official state and society as Delta sharecroppers. It's revealing that Tooze does not once use the term "soviet democracy;" the ubiquitous phrase throughout 1917. It was in this breach of opposing; class-based definitions that Lenin found his opportunity. And also in Kerensky's Wilsonian hope; in continuing the Tzar's war over the wishes of those forced to fight it; that Allied victory in Germany would rescue Russian democracy before collapse.. This proved as vain as Lenin's own hope for socialist revolution in Germany (but with better luck for him).This is also demonstrated in the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly in late 1917. Yes; it was the greatest uncorrupted example of participatory; representative democracy to date; shadowed by Lenin rather than the US Supreme Court. But Tooze makes a common mistake in believing this process; as reflected in party lists; represented reality on the ground. The Russian voter was more radicalized than the leaderships of these parties - whose ad hoc frailty should not be forgotten. Neither did his participation mean a disavowal of the October insurrection. The canny peasant voter - and many workers and soldiers with him - sought to play both against the middle by voting his choice on one hand; and with the other accepting whatever the new Soviet Power could give him. That Lenin made short-run good on slogans of land and peace had as much to do with the "loss of democracy" in Russia as closing down the Tauride Palace by force of arms; and explains why the latter was possible. The Russian Democrats feared the Constituent Assembly would be too radical; as Lenin feared it would be too "bourgeois." The Provisional Government; as good middle class liberals; repeatedly postponed it because they feared "the dark people" - the unwashed; illiterate; incitable masses of the villages; factories; and barracks - as much as they did the Germans;Finally; Tooze seems to exclude the US itself from the class of political revolutionaries who upended the postwar order. FDR's New Deal was right up there with the New Orders of Hitler; Stalin; and Japan in its radical recoordination of state and capital and in crash militarism. Tooze seems to feel that since no overt political revolution or bloodpurge was necessary in the US its democratic continuity remained. Yet the American "power state" he ascribes to the post-WW II world arose in the late 30s based on a military-industrial nexus; exactly as in the revolutionary triumvirate above. It's revealing that in Washington no revolution needed betrayal; no democracy overthrown; to do so.