The United States and President Woodrow Wilson (and to a lesser extent his Republican successors Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover) loom over Tooze’s story, presenting both the old powers of Europe and the rising powers of Asia and Eastern Europe with something they’d never imagined before: a new world power in which economics was the preeminent medium of power, with military force essentially “a by-product.” The lead actor of that new world order was the United States, and Tooze dramatically depicts the full extent of that shift, digging into the details with rigorous but accessible scholarship.

As Tooze writes, the war “may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more morally and politically charged - a crusading victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order.” The center of the story is the huge upheaval of World War I and the social and financial shock waves it sent through international society. Economics is still the focus, but the scope is global, with the narrative moving from striking metalworkers in Buenos Aires to imperial brinkmanship between Japan and China to postwar U.S. In his new work, “The Deluge,” Tooze embarks on an even bigger and more ambitious undertaking. It was a challenging but satisfying read.

The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931Īdam Tooze’s magnificent 2007 book, “The Wages of Destruction,” provided a thorough reevaluation of the economic life and death of Nazi Germany.

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