- Very rarely, you read a book that inspires you to see a familiar story in an entirely different way. So it was with Adam Tooze’s astonishing economic history of World War II, The Wages of Destruction. And so it is again with his economic history of the First World War and its aftermath, The Deluge. They amount together to a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.
Yet Tooze's perspective is anything but narrowly American. His planetary history encompasses democratization in Japan and price inflation in Denmark; the birth of the Argentine far right as well as the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.
I went from feeling bad about blocking The Atlantic to putting the book on my wishlist to looking up unemployment statistics from 1921 to shaking my head, brow furrowed. Who writes this shit? "True, mustard gas was a much less pleasant experience than the Bataan death march..." This is not a period of history I feel I have any mastery of, but it's not one I feel completely in the dark about. The truth - as I understand it - is hidden in amongst the scattershot randomness of it all. Here, lemme edit: Okay, let's turn that sentence into something straightforward... After World War I, Europe suffered largely as a result of war bond repayment. After World War II, Europe recovered largely as a result of American aid. See, that's the thing people fuck up about Wilson: he saw WWI as a distinctly European conflict with distinctly European causes. He also advised Truman after VE day: "You can have peace or you can have vengeance. You can't have both." That's why the US pushed so hard for armistice - we needed to get our goddamn money back. That's why we took it easy on Germany - they needed to buy shit from us. That's why we took it so hard on England and France - they were so far in the hole that they owed us for decades. The United States profiteered hard core on WWI. If the US had straight-up refused to get involved in it at all, they'd probably still be patrolling the Maginot Line.True, World War I was not nearly as positive an experience for working Americans as World War II would be;
After World War II, Europe recovered largely as a result of American aid; the nation that had suffered least from the war contributed most to reconstruction. But after World War I, the money flowed the other way.