Rating: 
Summary: Pity and Ulterior Motives
Review: 'It was worse than a tragedy,' Niall Ferguson concludes in his analysis of the First World War. 'It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.' (p 462).Every aspect of the war Ferguson describes is interpreted, in some cases reinterpreted, in order to prove this point. The horrors of war he details chapter by chapter, the inhumanity, the sacrifice, were all in his view ultimately futile, in fact counterproductive. Why was this tremendous loss in vain? The core of Ferguson's argument is his revisionist assessment of German war aims. In his view, 'All the economic clauses of the September Programme implied was the creation ' some eighty years early, it might be said ' of a German-dominated European customs union.' (p 172). This is naïve. The Europe of our timeline would be unrecognizable to the client states of the militarized Prussian superpower that would have emerged in Ferguson's vision. Ferguson himself has to admit German territorial aims were far more extensive, certainly in the east. He quotes the remark of the German chancellor Bethman Hollweg that this ''Middle European Empire of the German Nation' was merely 'the European disguise of our will to power,'' but ignores its implications, saying, 'even put like that, Germany's European project was not one with which Britain, with her maritime empire intact, could not have lived.' (p 173). The question is, for how long? Ferguson is basing his entire argument on an incredible amount of blind faith in the good intentions of the Second Reich, specifically that its imperial ambitions would be satisfied with the status quo he envisages in the September Programme. There are any number of potential future flashpoints in his counterfactual reality: the increased pressure a strengthened German/Turkish alliance would place on British interests in the Middle East; German assertion of territorial rights at the expense of Belgium and France butting up against British mandates in Africa; German economic exploitation of Latin America and China expanding in tandem with its geopolitical agenda; an expanded German naval presence on the high seas in the Pacific. Britain would have to draw the line against Germany somewhere at some point ' could she stand alone? Ferguson is absolutely right to maintain Germany would have lost the war had it not been for British intervention. That intervention would have been impossible had Germany not violated Belgian neutrality in order to strike at France. Had Germany locked down her western border she could have carved an empire out of Russia at her leisure. She chose to widen the war. France had no choice but to fight. Ferguson says Britain could have chosen to stay out, and should have. But could she? Protecting the integrity of the Low Countries was an article of faith in British strategic thought. French encroachment in this region in 1793 was the pretext for British involvement in a global war that dragged on for 22 years at appalling cost. Even though the French assessment of her vulnerability after the Revolution was far more legitimate than Germany's in 1914, I doubt Ferguson would argue Britain should have stayed aloof and allowed the creation ' some two hundred years early, it might be said ' of a French-dominated European customs union under Napoleon. Why? Pity for the human cost of war is not Ferguson's real agenda. He makes it clear that, ultimately, the real pity of the First World War was it weakened Britain and led to the dissolution of his beloved empire (a position made more explicit by his recent publication of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and its accompanying TV series). 'Had Britain stood aside ' even for a matter of weeks ' continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today ' but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars.' (p 460). Even this self-interested position is untenable. Setting aside for a moment the moral bankruptcy of attempting to do so, Britain could not have continued to rule subject peoples forever. And Britain was falling under the industrial shadow of the United States long before 1914. Ironically, in Ferguson's counterfactual world, a friendless Britain, excluded from Europe and under pressure in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, may well have had her remaining commercial assets stripped by the rising power of Germany on one side and the United States on the other. There isn't space here to critique Ferguson's arguments point by point, but among the more serious errors of omission, Ferguson has in my view chosen to deliberately underestimate the impact of the Allied economic blockade on Germany. He devotes no more than five pages (p 276-280) to the subject. C. Paul Vincent's The Politics of Hunger is listed in the bibliography but I didn't see it cited anywhere and its conclusions are so radically different from Ferguson's I wonder if he didn't choose to conveniently lay it to one side even if he did read it. Putting all the bloodshed of the world's first total war in perspective is difficult to do. But the fact remains that just because the outcome was terrible, that is no guarantee the alternatives were better.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyed this book a lot
Review: An easy read despite it's length. I found this book very compelling. The author is not a true expert on this subject and I've read some minor criticisms of this work. It's not in the style of a traditional history. Some of the details of the book come across as "gossipy" or journalistic. The book does shed light on the economics of the war, the problem of finding effective tactics, and the role of the media. Much is included in the book, but I wonder what was left out. If you haven't read a general history of the war in France already, you might want to before reading this book. Very clearly written, and exciting to read.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyed this book a lot
Review: An easy read despite it's length. I found this book very compelling. The author is not a true expert on this subject and I've read some minor criticisms of this work. It's not in the style of a traditional history. Some of the details of the book come across as "gossipy" or journalistic. The book does shed light on the economics of the war, the problem of finding effective tactics, and the role of the media. Much is included in the book, but I wonder what was left out. If you haven't read a general history of the war in France already, you might want to before reading this book. Very clearly written, and exciting to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking, but flawed
Review: An interesting book, but at times a bit far-fetched. His statistics are well documented and helpful, but his theoretical answers to many questions are curious. Theory is just that -- theory. No more, no less.
Rating:
Summary: good provocative history but a doubtful central premise
Review: Covers lots of ground. Generally reliable EXCEPT--and a big EXCEPT--for his central assertion that the Britain blundered wrongly into war. Given the 18th and 19th century Britishdetermination to prevent the continent being dominated by a single power, how Ferguson could conceive of a Britain accepting German dominance over Europe in 1914 is inconceivable.
Rating: 
Summary: The Taboo Broken
Review: Essentially Niall Ferguson has broken at long last a central taboo of British Society, namely Britain's role in the origins of WWI. Hardly surprisingly this triggers violent contoversy as seen in some of the reviews. However it is true that Sir Edward Grey did not have to involve Britain in a continental war. However I would like to take it further than him, but for the actions of Sir Edward Grey and the British War Party there would not have been a war. Essentially Niall Ferguson is right.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Information & Speculation, but a Few Gaps
Review: Ferguson apparently decided to use his considerable knowledge of World War I research and data to challenge certain "myths" about the war. My most general point is that the reader should be prepared for a very strong bias against his native Britain; Ferguson seems to want to blame Britain for a lot of negative events (i.e. driving Germany into an expensive naval arms race, creating a world war out of a European war, inflation after this huge war, the rise of Hitler...). Germany, in constrast, gets very little space and only mild rebukes for its negative acts (i.e. starting the war by invading neutral Belgium, deliberately killing hundreds of Belgian civilians, killing neutral sailors and civilians through unrestricted submarine warfare, being the first to tell its troops not to take prisioners...) While this switch of focus occasionally will be refreshing for those who have read more conventional books about World War I, reading just this book will give the general reader a very distorted view of the war. As others have noted, Ferguson's most obvious mistake was in concluding Britain did not have to enter the war because Germany's goal of a 1920s version of the current European Union did not imperil serious British interests. Besides the debate over whether Germany would have been content with that after the achievement of conquering its French enemy and the obvious fact that Britain could never have "known" this at the time, keeping one country from dominating the Continent had been the key focus of British foreign policy for two centuries! I also expected more discussion of the strategic results of the German decision to go to unrestricted submarine warfare (as I noted above, the moral aspect of this decision is also quite neglected). Since this decision did eventually bring the US into the war, its neglect in a serious World War I book is surprising. In other words, he does not try to determine how much shipping this policy cost Britain. It would have had to deny Britain a large amount of food & arms to offset dragging the large US manpower and productive capacity into the war. On other matters, I found the book enlightening. His view of the Central Powers as being better combat because they killed more men is known to serious students of the war, but his insight that the Central Powers were able to kill with so much less expenditure was interesting. I was also struck by the fact that even the huge number of dead men in this war were demographically replaceable--which means that the trenches were as useless strategically as they were wretched. This reality leads to another of his key insights--the importance of getting the other side to desert in large numbers, even though that conflicts with the short-term goal of killing men on the other side (both due to your men's emotions and having to use some of your men to escort and guard prisioners). Last, Ferguson uses his analysis of most soldiers' willingness to keep fighting and some good quotes from a wide variety of sources to support the case that a large number of men did not mind, or even enjoyed, being in the trenches and killing. I believe this reflects the unpleasant reality that humans have a violent side and it will become predominant in many under the right conditions. Since the violent side of humans is one that many of us do not like to think about, I really appreciate that Ferguson discussed it at some length in this book. To get generally philosophical at the end of my review, since the tendency to violence will always exist in us, the most civilization can do is to keep it under control by channeling it (i.e. sports), encouraging people to find other ways to express emotion (i.e. the arts)...
Rating:
Summary: The way history should be written
Review: Ferguson does it again. One of the best historians of our generation applies his wits to THE tragic event of the twentieth century. In this extraordinary piece of scholarship you will learn about the "mechanisms" (both social, economic, political and diplomatic) behind WWI. If you want a general history about the war, that follows a strict timeline of the battles, without any analysis, read another book first. But if you want to think hard about the causes and effects of the Great War, there is no better place than the Pity of War. Ferguson is not only an extraordinarily serious historian. The economics, sociology and military analysis in the book are first rate. A great contribution.
Rating:
Summary: Grey Not Black
Review: Ferguson's book acts like a child's kaleidascope, it takes an enormous number of facts, gives them a shake and produces a totally new picture of what we thought we knew about WWI. Pursuasive though he is, I cannot accept his harsh treatment of Grey and the other British interventionists. Today we know the exact size of the 'butcher's bill' but in August 1914 Grey and his friends did not - although his remark concerning 'the lamps going out over Europe and not being re-lit in his time' indicates that he knew it would not 'all be over by Christmas'! Ferguson would have us believe that a rampant and triumphant Germany led by a Kaiser under the influence of Mahan and Tirpitz, standing with its jackboot on an occupied Europe and able to deploy all that huge economic power, would have been content to do a deal with the British empire to allow us all to live happily ever after. Anything is possible, of course, but if you were Grey would you bet your country on it? The customer review by tedquirt1 should be treated with the contempt it deserves, not for his opinion's, to which he is entitled, but for his lamentable lack of facts. In 1914 Churchill was neither fat, old, stupid, drunken or an idiot, in fact he went off himself to fight in the trenches until re-called to government. Ferguson does not in fact 'blame the British' for WWI, he only suggests that for reasons of 'realpolitik' it would have been better for Britain if she had opted out and tried to cut a deal with the Germans. Visit any small village in Britain and you are likely to see an old war memorial or church wall with a distressingly long list of names on it, frequently names from the same families who had obviously been decimated between 1914-18. I should add that the names always cover every class from the ordinary villagers to the local lord of the manor. Given this everyday evidence and reminder of the 'butcher's bill' plus Ferguson's book one is forced to hesitate but, even so, I do believe that no deal was likely with Wilhemine Germany and that sooner or later we would have been forced to fight. In my view, better to chance the fight with allies than to perish alone (as we very nearly did in 1940). Since the days of Elizabeth I, it has been the policy of the British to inveigle by hook or by crook anyone and everyone to fight any European landpower seeking hegemony over our continent (see "Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind" by Peter Padfield) so Grey, Churchill and the rest were simply continuing a tried and tested policy that was centuries old. Ferguson's book is terrific history in that it makes one think.
Rating:
Summary: How Germany REALLY won the War and the Peace
Review: Ferguson's book is interesting for its voluminous stats, fresh approach and determination to be controversial. Behind criticism of previous interpretations of the causes of the First World War, Ferguson mounts an inadequate case for various propositions. Often he advances contentions that are downright silly, Russia the most efficient war maker of 1914-1918 ? Russia, a country without adequate supplies of just about anything ? Where its soldiers were deprived of all the staples of war, and whose government abdicated its reponsibilities to the zemstvos ? Even more laughable is the idea that Germany and the Central Powers came out of the war comparatively lightly because of their debt portfolio in the 1920s. By being selective about the first hand accounts of the time, economic indicators, and the like the author purports to show a "new" picture of WW1. Some times he alludes to previous interpretations, uses selective evidence and "demolishes" them. It is not convincing. For example, he stresses economic reasons for the success of early recruitment in the UK which simultaneously depreciating emotional or patriotic reasons for the same. As I came from a country (i.e Australia) which sent 8% of its entire population overseas, including my grandfather,to fight in Europe without conscription or real economic encouragement, it is difficult to accept the economic explanation for the recruitment "boom" in 1914. Similarly, the remarkable level of recruitment in the "white" Dominions during the War is indicative of emotional, rather than commercial, reasons for volunteering. Whilst the author harps on Germany's inferior economic resources, lack of martial spirit and the preponderance of Entente force, he conveniently forgets the German advantages of interior lines of communication, superiority in training and organisation and position that effectively negated the Entente's advantage for four years. Where Ferguson fails, perhaps, most miserably, is his inability to effectively explain why the German Reich lost after the Kaiserschlacht. If the German Army was so effective, why did it after August 8, 1918 start to disintegrate ? John Terraine's explanation, in "To win a war", is both more satisfying and well-founded. The presence of US forces was not crucial, the actual numbers in the field were far inferior to the Anglo-French. Germany did not come out ahead after WW1, the political systems in France and the British Empire were relatively undisturbed yet in Germany the entire edifice of the State collapsed. Ferguson claims Britain lost more territory and wealth after the War than Germany by confusing the Irish settlement with the Versailles Treaty- which is mendacious. For a new persceptive of the economics of the war this book has some merit. For the attempt to re-define the conventional picture of a warlike Europe being propelled into armageddon by foolish error rather than deliberate aggression, the book also has some merit. However, for its "trendy" revisionist idea that somehow Britain caused the carnage of the War by saving France from inevitable defeat (and thus is somehow more "guilty" than Germany) this will simply not wash.
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