War and Responsibilty: Ferguson's PITY OF WAR (book review)
© Joseph Sramek
Join the Suite TODAY!
As a member you can enjoy several features including the ability to post to articles, and participate in discussions about British history and a myriad of over 700 other topics! Be a part of our community!
At the bottom of the article you'll find a discussion area. That discussion area is for YOU to give feedback, share ideas, opinions, and viewpoints. To use the discussion area, you have to become a member of Suite101. Don't worry; joining is free, easy, quick, and painless!! Your views and opinions are very important to us here at the Suite and we can only guess at what you want to see here. Sometimes we guess right and sometimes we don't. Please help us take the guessing work out of it, by telling us what you want to see here. Remember: It's Your Suite!!!
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
In the preface to this book, Ferguson writes "That my grandfather fought on the Western Front was, and still is, a strange source of pride. If I try to analyse that pride, I suppose it has to do with the fact that the First World War remains the worst thing the people of my country have ever had to endure." [1] Also relayed in that preface are his own experiences as a child, growing up 50 years after the First World War, but nevertheless being profoundly impacted by it. These two things, more than anything else, I feel, describe the essense of this book. The author, trying to come to grips with the British experience in the Great War, asks why?, how?, if only if? Etc.
In addition to the personal reasons for writing this book, however, Ferguson's chief aim is to ask questions long thought settled. Writing rather scathingly "Historians do well to remember that they owe very little indeed to the historical profession," [2] Ferguson argues that many questions have indeed not been answered, or that their answers are wrong and need to be re-addressed. Thus, in very much an A.J.P. Taylorian fashion--his academic hero it turns out--Ferguson challenges practically everything that has commonly come to be accepted by the historiography.
In Chapter 1 he argues that militarism was a dying political force by 1914 in both Britain and Germany. Prior to the July crisis, "Europeans were not marching to war, but turning their backs on militarism." [3] Chapter 2 has him arguing that the classic Anglo-German economic rivalry has been excessively overdetermined by economic historians. Rather than focusing on the growth of German economic power during the 1890s and afterward, Ferguson argues that historians should focus on the immense extent of British financial power. [4] Germany was not a threat to Britain economically; nor was it a military threat either. Britain's decision to conclude the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 was predicated not by British apprehensions about an emerging German menace but rather by an acknowledgement of Germany's weakness. Britain appeased those powers that appeared to pose the greatest threat to her position, and whereas this group included France, Russia and the U.S., it did not include Germany. [5]
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Joseph Sramek's Modern British History topic, please visit the Discussions page.