Dark victory

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
By Niall Ferguson
Penguin, 808 pp., illustrated, $35

Bertrand Russell thought the universe is all ``spots and jumps." He said that only governesses believe in the unity and coherence of history.

That day in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand's chauffeur took a wrong turn into Franz-Josef Strasse. Was it historically inevitable that the chauffeur should take a wrong turn -- that particular wrong turn? Or was his wrong turn merely contingent on his confusion because a Serbian anarchist named Nedjilko Cabrinovic had earlier bounced a bomb off the car's folded roof?

As a matter of fatal, historical fact, the chauffeur's error brought the archduke's car into pistol range of the spot where Gavrilo Princip , a tubercular little terrorist, was disconsolately waiting to buy his lunch, thinking that he and his fellow conspirators had bungled the assassination. Princip recovered his presence of mind and blasted away at the archduke and the Duchess Sophie, and then tried to kill himself. What might the 20th century have become if the archduke's driver had known where he was going? Instead, his solecism set in motion the great Rube Goldberg demolition: Micro-cause (a Balkan quarrel, a confused chauffeur) blossomed into macro-effect ( chain reaction of history) -- coincidence and convulsion -- that comprised the collapse of empires, two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima: terrible ``spots," like the Somme and Nanking and Auschwitz, and ``jumps" into the abyss. Such micro-macro disproportions, which did violence to the mind's old Newtonian expectations, got their ultimate confirmation on the day in August 1945 when the world saw that the diddling of an atom could flatten a city.

Niall Ferguson has been over some of this territory before. His controversial 1998 book, ``The Pity of War," was an analysis of the First World War and its causes. (He said it was not necessarily inevitable at all.) Ferguson set out to write a sequel, a history of the Second World War. But the more he thought about the matter, the more he widened his scope, the more he pushed his dates backward toward 1900 and forward toward 2000, until, writes Ferguson, who is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, he came ``to appreciate just how un-illuminating it would be to write yet another book within the chronological straitjacket of 1939 to 1945. . . . Was there, I began to ask myself, really such a thing as the Second World War? Might it not be more correct to speak of multiple regional conflicts?"

The sum of those multiples, Ferguson concludes in ``The War of the World," was a global series of collisions that began in 1904 with the Russo-Japanese war, and ended -- sort of -- in 1953 with the truce that divided the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel. The century's great carnage, Ferguson writes, occurred particularly in borderland regions of mixed ethnic population, where the tectonic plates of declining empires ground against one another, and amid economic volatility, meaning ``the frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment, with all the associated social stresses and strains."

Ferguson, only 42, is an ambitious, sometimes audacious historian with a talent for publicity that his academic colleagues might envy ( Time magazine lists him among its 100 ``Most Influential People" ). His previous books include an impressive two volumes on the House of Rothschild. In ``The War of the World" he has produced a sweeping and handsomely controlled narrative in which he balances wide-screen storytelling and close-focus anecdote, character sketch, and psychological insight with analysis and counterfactual speculation. Even those who have read widely in 20th-century history will find fresh, surprising details . ``The War of the World" bristles with statistics -- but the numbers are generally telling. Discussing political assassinations, Ferguson mentions that ``between 1900 and 1913 no fewer than forty heads of state, politicians and diplomats were murdered, including four kings, six prime ministers and three presidents."

There is a bracing self-confidence and equilibrium in this big-box synopticon, a moral energy and impatience with cant: Ferguson dismisses the idea, for example , that it was the West's imperial exploitation that accounted for the East's abjectness: rather it was ``the decadence of Eastern empires that made European domination possible."

Ferguson's background as an economic historian brings him into the narrative at interesting angles, as when he demonstrates that, contrary to the retrospective war-was-inevitable school of thought about August 1914, the keenest observers in the London financial markets at the time -- people with sharp eyes and an anxiously realistic self-interest in events -- were taken completely by surprise by the degringolade after Sarajevo.

Ferguson asks the ambitious question of why a century that saw so much progress in science and technology should also have been the bloodiest by far in human history. Macaulay wrote that ``the most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of civilization without its mercy." The 20th century was neither uniquely civilized nor uniquely merciless but, as it were, simply more so on both counts. Ferguson observes that the world as it existed in, say, 1901 was globalized in its trade and in the reach of the European empires . The West decisively dominated the East. It is Ferguson's thesis that while the 20th century's usual narrative line gives the triumph to the West , the century's most important outcome has been the end of the West's domination of the East: has been, therefore, a fundamental reorientation of the world with the rise, for example, of Japan and especially, now, of China.

Ferguson ends on a (somewhat predictably) ominous note. The first age of globalization, he says, ended in 1914. He worries: ``Could a similar fate befall the second age of globalization in which we live?" The motifs of alienation -- religious and ethnic hatred, deep cultural antipathies -- remain strong and, with the help of 21st- century technology, have found terrible new ways to express themselves. Ferguson writes in his last paragraph, ``We remain our own worst enemies." The reader thinks mordantly of the punch line of the old joke: ``What you mean we, Paleface?"

Lance Morrow is the author, most recently, of ``The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948" and ``Second Drafts of History," a collection of his essays. He is working on a biography of Henry Luce.