Niall Ferguson on World War I

“The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”

“The First World War changed everything. In the summer of 1914 the world economy was thriving in ways that look distinctly familiar. The mobility of commodities, capital and labour reached levels comparable with those we know today; the sea lanes and telegraphs across the Atlantic were never busier, as capital and migrants went west and raw materials and manufactures went east. The war sank globalization - literally. Nearly thirteen million tons of shipping went to the bottom of the sea as a result of German naval action, most of it by U-boats. International trade, investment and emigration all collapsed. In the war's aftermath, revolutionary regimes arose that were fundamentally hostile to international economic integration. Plans replaced the market; autarky and protection took the place of free trade. Flows of goods diminished; flows of people and capital all but dried up. The European empires' grip on the world - which had been the political undergirding of globalization - was dealt a profound, if not quite fatal, blow. The reverberations of Princip's shots truly shook the world.”

“On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives. It brought forth new and terrible methods of destruction, hitherto the stuff of Wellsian science-fiction: cavalry charges by armed and armoured vehicles, lethal clouds of poison gas, invisible fleets of submarines. It rained down bombs from the air and cluttered the Atlantic seabed with sunken ships. It lasted longer than any major war in Europe in living memory, dragging on for four and a quarter years. And, besides the Habsburgs, it toppled three other imperial dynasties: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans. Even when an armistice was proclaimed, the war refused to stop; it swept eastwards after 1918, as if eluding the grasp of the peacemakers.”