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Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on the rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter.
If you had to guess the author, what would you say? George Orwell? Isaiah Berlin? Malcolm Muggeridge? Nope. Those words were written by, of all people, Leon Trotsky, which adds a particularly sour irony to the fact that they are, and remain, exactly right. They are quoted as the epigraph to a chapter early on in Niall Ferguson’s new book and they more or less encapsulate its theme.
At the outset of the 20th century, we in the West looked as if we had it more or less taped. We had anaesthetic and anti- biotics. We had industrial production. We had thriving agriculture, efficient transport, and a never-before-seen flow of goods and services back and forth across the globe. We were able to feed our people. And we had the prospect of more, and better, of the foregoing as the years went on. We had, as Trotsky pointed out, techniques for making chocolate milk unprecedented in human history. So why on earth, Ferguson asks, did we spend the best part of the succeeding 100 years murdering each other in unimaginable numbers?
This doorstop of a book is an attempt to answer that question, arguing in the process (unexceptionably) that the century saw a web of complexly connected conflicts that defy the old-fashioned 1914-18, 1939-45 periodisations, and that need to be apprehended as a whole.
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