Adam Tooze’s magnificent 2007 book, “The Wages of Destruction,” provided a thorough re-evaluation of the economic life and death of Nazi Germany. It was a challenging but satisfying read. In his new work, “The Deluge,” Tooze embarks on an even bigger and more ambitious undertaking. Economics is still the main focus, but the scope is global, with the narrative moving from striking metalworkers in Buenos Aires to imperial brinksmanship between Japan and China to postwar U.S. investment in Australia. The center of the story is the huge upheaval of World War I and the social and financial shockwaves it sent through international society. As Tooze writes, the war “may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more charged — a victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order.”
The lead actor of that new world order was the United States, and Tooze dramatically depicts the full extent of that shift, digging into the details with rigorous but accessible scholarship. The United States and Woodrow Wilson (and to a lesser extent his Republican successors Harding, Coolidge and Hoover) loom over Tooze’s story, presenting both the old powers of Europe and the rising powers of Asia and Eastern Europe with something they’d never imagined before, a new world power in which economics was the pre-eminent medium of power, with military force essentially “a by-product.”
By the end of World War I, the banks and financiers of Wilson’s America had loaned billions of dollars to the Allies. Tooze details the not-so-subtle ways by which Wall Street and Washington wielded these large debts in order to re-shape the balance of world power, summoning European leaders to the White House instead of waiting on them in their own capitals, and adopting the condescending and slightly contemptuous tone creditors so often use with their debtors.
The United States was now the banker and loan officer for half the world. It became the fulcrum of the entire international financial system and expanded its hegemony in the following years.
“Britain’s governments in the 1920s again and again found themselves confronting the painful fact that the United States was a power unlike any other,” Tooze writes. “It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.” By offering gigantic war-bond loans, Wilson had saved Britain, France and Italy from being driven to bankruptcy by their crippling wartime expenditures; in exchange, through the leverage of onerous repayment schedules, America increasingly expected an influence far beyond mere debt-collecting. Countries complaining about the severity of their repayment installments, for instance, could be patronizingly “advised” to cut back the amounts they were spending on armaments or imperial adventures. “Henceforth,” as Tooze notes, “down to the beginning of the 21 century, American economic might would be the decisive factor in the shaping of the world order.”
NONFICTION: HISTORY
The Deluge: The Great War, American and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
by Adam Tooze (Viking)
