The deluge
"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"
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What Hacker News says
- > then Germany couldn't realistically win in the West anymore.
They don't need to win in the West. That's my point. Germany has no interest in the West. The only thing they care about is stopping the French from passing over the border.
> Thing is, they didn't.
My point was, the analysis that 'Germany couldn't win a 2 Front war' is wrong. Its central to German conception of strategy in that period and it was incorrect.
The overestimated both France and Russia in terms of their abilities.
> US played a much smaller role in WW1 than people think
Actually is played a much bigger role. Read Adam Tooze book 'The Deluge'. The US economy was essentially fully mobilized by Britain with the help of JP Morgan.
And once they joined they provided even more. That's why after WW1 the US was basically a financial super-power.
And the military reserves were very important, and influenced allied strategy.
- I listened to the audiobook version of 3 books by Adam Tooze in the past year and found them to be excellent for understanding how finance works, through 3 separate case studies/examples if you will ..
1. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order describes how most of the current global financial structures were formed, through the lens of WW1 policy
2. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy .. moves you forward to WW2/post-depression economy
3. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (recommended elsewhere in this thread) .. brings things up to current times
- My idiosyncratic picks, all of them history:
Civil War, David Armitage
Meaning in History, Karl Lowith
Manifest Destiny, Anders Stephanson
The Deluge, Adam Tooze
The Moral Economists, Tim Rogan
The Guardians, Susan Pederson
I also enjoyed properly getting to grips with Keynes, Du Bois, Schmitt and Freud for the first time.
- For those interested, this is covered with detail and nuance in the beginning of Adam Tooze's book "The Deluge"
https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1...
- It's true. Also, the UK has never repaid its WW1 debt to the US.
The US joined WW1 when it became clear that the UK would not be able to repay its debt to JP Morgan and its clients if Germany won. Of course, that was not the only reason, but it was a huge factor. (Source: Adam Tooze, The Deluge)
(London had, bizarrely, decided to bankroll the Russian and French war efforts in addition to its own, so its debts were vast.)
