Politicians like Lloyd George and Churchill argued that the war was not only necessary, but inevitable.įerguson asks and answers ten specific questions about the First World War, one of the most important being whether the war, with its total of more than nine million casualties, was worth it. Professor Ferguson, however, has written an iconoclastic attack on one of the most venerable patriotic myths of the British, namely that the First World War was a great and necessary war in which the British performed the noble act of intervening to protect Belgian neutrality, French freedom, and the empires of both the French and British from the military aggression of the hated Hun. Those are the credentials of an establishment, or “court,” historian, whose main purpose is to protect the patriotic and political myths of his government. He is the bestselling author of "Civilization", "The House of Rothschild", "The Pity of War", "The Cash Nexus", "Empire", "Colossus", "The War of the World" and "The Ascent of Money".Niall Ferguson is a history professor who taught at Cambridge and is now a tenured Oxford don. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians.
"At one massive stroke, Niall Ferguson has transformed the intellectual landscape". (Paul Kennedy, "New York Review of Books"). "Possibly the most important book to appear in years both on the origins of the First World War.Ferguson can confidently claim to have inherited A. It is one of the very few books whose own scale matches that of the events it describes".
"Must take a permanent place at the top of the War's historiography. Far worse than a tragedy, it was the greatest error of modern history. In this provocative book Niall Ferguson asks: was the sacrifice worth it? Was it all really an inevitable cataclysm and were the Germans a genuine threat? Was the war, as is often asserted, greeted with popular enthusiasm? Why did men keep on fighting when conditions were so wretched? Was there in fact a death wish abroad, driving soldiers to their own destruction? The war, he argues, was a disaster - but not for the reasons we think.
The First World War killed around eight million men and bled Europe dry. Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War: 1914-1918" is a provocative and boldly-conceived history that explodes many of the myths surrounding the First World War.
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