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Niall Ferguson. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict

and the Descent of the West .:The War of the World: Twentieth‐
Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

Article  in  The American Historical Review · June 2008

DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.3.797a

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 Comparative/World
portance of another site of production in the industrial
age, namely, the production of social knowledge.
MICHAEL ZAKIM
Tel Aviv University
MICHAEL C. COLEMAN. American Indians, the Irish, and
Government Schooling: A Comparative Study. (Indige-
nous Education.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press. 2007. Pp. xii, 367. $49.95.
Michael C. Coleman’s book provides a superb history
of U.S. government Indian schools (mainly boarding
schools run by whites) and British government Irish
schools (day schools administered by the Irish) from the
1820s to the 1920s. Coleman makes a compelling case
for comparative history. He offers more than a history
of education in a narrow sense because what Indian and
Irish students experienced was a comprehensive, yet
never total, process that “extended influences into ev-
ery area of Irish [and Indian] life” (p. 266). Reading it
I was reminded of Ann Laura Stoler’s provocative com-
parative histories and also Katherine Ellinghaus’s fas-
cinating Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of
White Women to Indian Men in the United States and
Australia, 1887–1937 (2006). Coleman studies how
schools functioned as a “weapon of state” (p. 38) de-
signed to assimilate what the ruling groups viewed as a
“‘problem population’ ” (p. 57).
Coleman combats the framework of both American
and Irish exceptionalism by analyzing the similar—as
well as distinct—patterns of institutionalized “decul-
turation” and “enculturation” (p. 64) in “hegemonic
systems of domination” (p. 240). The comparison of at-
tempted Americanization and Anglicization casts light
on institutional strategies, the mixed attitudes of tribes
and local communities in this process, and the issue of
native language loss. By comparing the two systems,
Coleman can better highlight aspects of conditions and
patterns that might not otherwise have been visible. He
shows that American Indian history can illuminate Eu-
ropean history and vice versa.
Coleman also focuses on why some Indian and Irish
students and parents favored such schooling even
though it meant negotiating an attempted detribaliza-
tion of Indian students and an Anglicization of Irish
students. Some Indian and Irish students strategically
embraced “education” because it equipped them with
self-defensive weapons. However, if schooling was at-
tempted assimilation, it was not only that. Government
Indian schools never fully attained top-down power
over students. Some students took intellectual joy in
learning varied ways of contemplating themselves and
their world. Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux who
attended Indian schools before matriculating at Dart-
mouth College and Boston University Medical School,
wrote, “The more [education] I got, the larger my ca-
pacity grew, and my appetite increased in proportion”
(p. 153). Considering ways in which government edu-
cation has advanced Indian political, economic, and
cultural struggles for self-determination and pan-In-
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dian organizing, Coleman goes so far as to suggest “that
schooling played a crucial role in the very physical sur-
vival of Indians” (p. 262). Similarly, he speculates that
Irish schooling “may actually have stimulated Irish na-
tionalism” (p. 241). Never forgetting the unequal power
relations, Coleman also makes the case that students
and teachers influenced and indeed “needed each
other” (p. 265). Coleman prizes “complexity” and he is
sensitive to conflicting evidence and “messy” “reality”
(pp. 269–270).
Coleman’s work generated several questions in my
mind. He, like some other historians, characterizes
what most Indian and Irish students underwent as “pro-
letarianization” (p. 268). The reproduction of class is
clear in the Irish history. Coleman notes that the cat-
egory of class might not apply to Indians because they
were classified as “culturally different” (p. 268). But
might historians revisit how class formation related to
Indians? Indian boarding school students were trained
vocationally to be skilled and semi-skilled laborers. The
Society of American Indians founded in 1911—mostly
made up of boarding school students, some of whom
made it to college—tactically considered their oppor-
tunities in the class structure. If Indians thought about
themselves in terms of class, should not historians do
so? As noted, Coleman frames school as a weapon of
state. Might capitalism, not just the state, play a greater
causal role in Coleman’s explanations? At times U.S.
federal policies were formed on the premise that pred-
atory land grabbing was unstoppable.
This impressively researched and argued compara-
tive history inspires as well as instructs the historical
imagination.
JOEL PFISTER
Wesleyan University
NIALL FERGUSON. The War of the World: Twentieth-Cen-
tury Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York:
Penguin. 2006. Pp. lxxi, 808. Cloth $35.00, paper $18.00.
The big question motivating this lengthy book is noth-
ing less than that which troubled Oswald Spengler in his
analysis of the decline of the West. But in his magis-
terial overview of twentieth-century conflict, Niall Fer-
guson’s responses differ substantially from those artic-
ulated by Spengler. In this treatment, Ferguson
identifies three main sources of the endemic conflict
that ultimately precipitated the decline of the West:
empires in decline (e.g., Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman,
Russian), economic volatility, and ethnic conflict, the
last of these verging on race war.
Throughout this work, Ferguson is careful to marshal
considerable evidence in support of his propositions. In
contrast to many diplomatic historians, he makes much
use of economic data, especially in support of the vol-
atility conjecture. Indeed, the book is filled with bar
graphs and other summary measures, not only of eco-
nomic trends, but demographic as well. Some of the in-
formation is startling, such as the high rate of inter-
marriage between European Jews and non-Jews right
JUNE 2008
 798 Reviews of Books
up to the start of the Hitler era. Not only were Jews
intermarrying at a high rate, but so were Bosnians until
their time of troubles in the 1990s. In southern Rwanda,
intermarriage between Hutu and Tutsi was becoming
the norm before the genocide of 1994. Sigmund Freud’s
“tyranny of small differences” may well be operating
here.
In addition to the three overarching themes that
guide the inquiry, two additional foci stand out. The
first is the enactment of revenge, principally on the bat-
tlefield, but also among ethnic groups. The shooting of
prisoners during the two world wars was quite common,
especially after the death of a well-liked comrade or in
an ambush in which several mates (or “buddies,” de-
pending on English-language provenance) were killed.
In one important sense, ethnic conflict and battlefields
in war share at least one important property: the ab-
sence of clear “rules of engagement” among contending
protagonists. Only those wearing one’s own uniform, or
belonging to one’s ethnic group, fall within the universe
of moral obligation. All others are excluded. Even eco-
nomic volatility was found on the battlefield, for sol-
diers always were in the hunt for food and drink, never
more content than when they were able to purloin a
goose or bottles of fine wine from an abandoned cellar.
Revenge has its geopolitical counterpart in revanche,
the desire to reverse the consequences of earlier defeat.
And here Ferguson demonstrates quite clearly the fu-
tility of Adolf Hitler’s revanchism. No matter how one
constructs the counterfactuals of strategic choice that
Ferguson allows, and they are many, he nevertheless
concludes, correctly, that there was no way the Axis
powers could overcome the vastly greater material re-
sources available to the Allies. In this, Ferguson is right
on the mark, as he is in his arguments against Neville
Chamberlain’s foolish appeasement at Munich in 1938
and against those who minimize the value of Allied stra-
tegic bombing during the war. Ferguson is acutely
aware of the balance of forces that would have favored
Britain and France had they made war in 1938, but not
later when German rearmament had escalated substan-
tially. In the matter of Allied strategic bombing, the
bombing had the consequence of diverting sorely
needed fighter aircraft from the Eastern front, which
allowed for crucial Soviet victories such as that at Kursk
in 1943, the real turning point of the war in the East.
Later, the loss of these aircraft in the air war over Ger-
many was to be felt keenly by a Wehrmacht defending
Normandy on D-Day virtually without Luftwaffe pro-
tection.
The second theme that emerges is the pre-eminence
of the military in facilitating the onset of World War I,
and its importance in the origins and conduct of World
War II, especially in East Asia. One also cannot un-
derstand the genocide of the Armenians in Anatolia by
the Ottoman military without appreciating the military
difficulties of that period.
Inevitably, errors will appear in a work of this mag-
nitude. Ferguson appears to have some difficulty with
Polish names and origins. The extreme nationalist
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leader of interwar Poland was Roman Dmowski, not
Dwomski, as spelled in one instance (and in the index);
the Polish successor to Józef Piłsudski was Edward
Rydz-Śmigły, not Śmigły-Rydz; and Felix Dzerzhinsky,
the notorious first leader of the Cheka, the Soviet secret
police, was not a Jew as Ferguson describes him. Al-
though Dzerzhinsky’s wife was Jewish and he himself
spoke Yiddish as the result of his birth in the Vilna
(Vilnius) region, then home to many Jews, Dzerzhinsky
himself was the son of Polish nobility. Unfortunately,
Ferguson also is mistaken in his discussion of the young
“Adolf Schicklgruber” (Hitler) in comparison with the
young Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin). Schicklgruber was
the maiden name of Hitler’s grandmother. He himself
was indeed named Adolf Hitler. Although many Old
Bolsheviks assumed noms de guerre in order to evade
the tsarist secret police, this was unnecessary in the
Weimar democracy. Some of the economic bar graphs
also are not as clearly labeled as they should be.
Nevertheless, in his introduction to the 1977 edition
of Nobelist Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina (cited
several times by Ferguson), William H. McNeill states
that “no better introduction to the study of Balkan and
Ottoman history exists.” Paraphrasing McNeill, I con-
clude that no better overarching analysis of twentieth-
century conflict exists outside the broad confines of Fer-
guson’s book.
MANUS I. MIDLARSKY
Rutgers University,
New Brunswick
SADAO ASADA. Culture Shock and Japanese-American
Relations: Historical Essays. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press. 2007. Pp. xi, 290. $44.95.
This book is a collection of scholarly works on U.S.-
Japanese relations published between the 1960s and
1990s by Sadao Asada, a Japanese diplomatic historian.
Topics for analysis include the Yellow Peril, Alfred T.
Mahan, the Washington and London naval confer-
ences, Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombs. Asada ex-
plains that the theme of culture shock brings together
these diverse topics and shows how both Japan and the
United States dealt with such shocks in their relations,
with successes and failures.
One chapter demonstrates how in the 1920s America
developed for Japan the paradoxical images of cherry
blossoms and the Yellow Peril. Another chapter shows
how the Japanese Navy learned the Mahanian strategic
doctrine and pursued a collision course with the United
States, suggesting that the extensive intellectual and
cultural contacts between the two nations did not nec-
essarily ensure peace. The chapter on the Washington
Naval Conference illustrates how both the Japanese
and American delegates, representing the Old Diplo-
macy of imperialism and the New Diplomacy of Wil-
sonianism, respectively, learned to accommodate each
other’s style and created rapprochement. The chapter
on Japanese surrender in World War II regards the
atomic bombs as a kind of culture shock that forced
JUNE 2008