Deluge

On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Deluge is
a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape
our world - from Adam Tooze, the Wolfson Prize-winning author of
The Wages of Destruction Financial Times and New Statesman Books of
the Year 2014. In the depths of the Great War, with millions of
dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the
world began to buckle. As the cataclysmic battles continued, a new
global order was being born. Adam Tooze's panoramic new book tells
a radical, new story of the struggle for global mastery from the
battles of the Western Front in 1916 to the Great Depression of the
1930s. The war shook the foundations of political and economic
order across Eurasia. Empires that had lasted since the Middle Ages
collapsed into ruins. New nations sprang up. Strikes,
street-fighting and revolution convulsed much of the world. And
beneath the surface turmoil, the war set in motion a deeper and
more lasting shift, a transformation that continues to shape the
present day: 1916 was the year when world affairs began to revolve
around the United States. America was both a uniquely powerful
global force: a force that was forward-looking, the focus of hope,
money and ideas, and at the same time elusive, unpredictable and in
fundamental respects unwilling to confront these unwished for
responsibilities. Tooze shows how the fate of effectively the whole
of civilization - the British Empire, the future of peace in
Europe, the survival of the Weimar Republic, both the Russian and
Chinese revolutions and stability in the Pacific - now came to
revolve around this new power's fraught relationship with a
shockingly changed world. The Deluge is both a brilliantly
illuminating exploration of the past and an essential history for
the present.