The eighteenth century CE witnessed an eruption of European progress on a scale never seen before. Propelled by steam engines, backed by unmatched firepower, incited by the competition for status and foreign markets, and facilitated by the domination of seas and oceans, the Europeans became unstoppable. By the end of the nineteenth century, a large part of the world had been colonized; and even the greatest powers that remained free from rule by those of white European stock – the Ottoman and Qing Empires – were tottering. In 1900, around 1.6 billion people lived on the planet. About 280 million of them inhabited Western and Central Europe, but those European societies governed at least 425 million people in their colonies.1 Those ratios are perhaps not so exceptional, nor the violence with which this expansion happened. Many small polities had conquered vast empires and shown no mercy. Yet never before had it happened so rapidly and so widely. The eternal pursuit of imperialism had become industrialized and globalized.

Out of those 280 million Europeans, only a small elite held the reins of power. Until the twentieth century, most Europeans lived in poverty, worked in dangerous conditions, had almost no political rights, and risked being imprisoned or killed if they agitated for a better life. As Charles Dickens wrote ironically in 1859: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’2 The real breakthrough in European democracy and welfare came when the continent’s imperial dominance was in steep decline, after the two World Wars (1914–18 and 1939–45). Its global supremacy passed to the Soviet Union and the United States of America, with the latter becoming the ultimate victor of their rivalry in the Cold War (1947–91). The United States took centre stage as yet another exceptionalist power pledging to be a force for good. Its geographical position, separated by two oceans from the Eastern Hemisphere, meant that its leadership was expressed more indirectly, for example by developing unequalled potential in terms of air and sea power, by dominating digital and communications technology, and by spearheading the global economy. But the more power the United States gained, the more it too gave in to the temptation to use it.

What made this age truly different from previous ones was its immense economic progress. The gradual spreading of industrialization caused incomes to rise faster than ever before, the population to boom, international trade to expand, and mobility to increase. If production per capita, in constant dollar values, had increased by around $100 between 1500 and 1800, it grew by more than $5,000 between 1800 and 2000.³

This was the ideal of the European Enlightenment in practice: man using his intelligence to shape the world around him. But that other great ideal of the Enlightenment was realized much less, namely that rational man would come to see others’ success as an opportunity instead of a threat, and compete by peaceful means instead of relapsing into war. As a result, progress in this period was what happened in between the hugely destructive wars, wars fought with the same ingenuity that had revolutionized the fields of industry, science, and medicine.

Prolific Abundance

In the Eastern Hemisphere, the rise of Europe first eclipsed and then contributed to the decline of some of its largest powers. The Mughal Empire was one of the first to collapse. By the mid-eighteenth century, European countries had been allowed to operate trading posts, or factories, on the coasts of South Asia for decades. But they wanted more. The British East India Company, for example, declared war on local Mughal rulers whenever they refused to allow them greater access to the interior. In 1757, its vastly outnumbered and outgunned forces won a decisive victory at the Battle of Plassey, which led to it gaining control over the Mughals’ wealthiest province, Bengal. Over the next century, Indian rulers continued to resist the gradual British advance across the subcontinent. In 1858, after more than 100,000 people had been killed in the great rebellion traditionally known as the Indian Mutiny (1857–8), the British government took over the administration of the Raj from the East India Company. With the inauguration of crown rule, the Mughal Dynasty – for so long a shadow of its earlier mightiness – was formally ended.

The other powers to be weakened were the Safavid Dynasty’s successors in Persia and the Ottoman Empire. Persia’s new rulers were heavily pressurized by the growing strength of the Russian Empire. A famous dictum attributed to Tsarina Catherine the Great (1762–96) bluntly summed up Russia’s policy of expansionism: ‘I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.’4 In 1783, the Treaty of Georgievsk forced Georgia to accept Russian protection in place of its original dependence on Persia. In 1828, the Persian shah had to consent to the even more humiliating Treaty of Turkmenchay. Russia gained the last regions of the Caucasus not yet within its control, received a large indemnity, and was granted free access for its traders to all of Persia.

Meanwhile, Russia’s desire to control the Black Sea region and gain access to the Mediterranean led it to support rebellions in the Ottoman Empire wherever they might further its goals. But when France incited an uprising in Ottoman Egypt, the Russians opportunistically agreed the Treaty of Hunkar Iskelesi with the Turks in 1833. In return for Russian military aid, the Ottomans promised to close the Dardanelles to foreign warships at Russia’s behest. But as Russia resumed its strategy of chipping away at the Ottoman Balkans, the sultan became increasingly dependent on military and financial support from Western European powers seeking to maintain their own balance of power with the Russian Empire.

Europe also triggered decades of turmoil in what was still the world’s wealthiest and most populous empire, China. Under the Qing, the Chinese Empire reached its greatest extent and ruled over a third of the global population.⁵ ‘Heaven has left us this vast wilderness,’ explained the early nineteenth-century political theorist Wei Yuan.⁶ Although some strategists proposed establishing clearly defined defensive borders, others, like the Qianlong Emperor (1735–96) – who ruled the Qing Empire at its apogee – considered expansion to be the best defence. ‘What’s this about “inner and outer” being divisible?’ he asked rhetorically.7

Since ancient times, the way of governing the country has been to manage civil affairs, while simultaneously exerting oneself in military affairs. Indeed, soldiers may not be mobilized for one hundred years, but they may not be left unprepared for one day. Although the state has been at peace for a long time, military preparedness should remain a top priority.⁸

The Chinese desire to dominate and to civilize other peoples was thus not very different from the views of European imperialists.

Although China’s production per capita at the end of the eighteenth century was only half that of Western Europe, its economy remained the largest in the world. That led Great Britain to approach the Chinese emperor with proposals for closer trading relations in 1793. The British ambassador, Lord Macartney, brought the Qianlong Emperor a model steam engine, while the Chinese expected Macartney to fall on his knees and offer tribute.⁹ The British delegation was dismissed with a letter from the emperor to the British king. ‘Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders,’ it read. ‘Should your vessels touch the shore, your merchants will assuredly never be permitted to land or to reside there, but will be subject to instant expulsion. In that event your barbarian merchants will have had a long journey for nothing.’¹⁰

Soon after, the British tried another tactic: addicting the Chinese to opium imported from India. Seeking to reduce the trade deficit with China, they discovered that opium produced in India was about the only commodity they had to offer for which there was much Chinese demand. The emperor’s attempts to halt the destructive trade were violently resisted by the British in the two Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60), which ended with both territorial and commercial concessions being forced from the defeated Chinese. ‘The Qing government was already becoming weak and decadent,’ assessed the historian Liang Qichao. ‘The whole nation was drugged by the enjoyment of peace.’11 The deliberate destruction of the Chinese emperors’ Summer Palace outside Beijing by the British and their French allies in 1860, in retaliation for the murder of European prisoners, symbolized a watershed in the long era of Chinese instability between 1839 and 1949 – an unhappy period that China still refers to today as the century of humiliation. As the Qing Empire crumbled, Europe came to dominate perhaps not the whole world, but at least the whole Eastern Hemisphere.

France versus Britain

In 1761 the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote down his proposals to end Europe’s wars for ever. All the powers should combine in a system bound together by a shared religion, law, customs, commerce, and a sort of equilibrium that would prevent one state from upsetting others too easily.¹² Many British thinkers – from the economist Charles Davenant and the polemicist Daniel Defoe to the philosopher David Hume – similarly vested their hopes for European harmony in a combination of commerce and the balance of power. The great liberal economist Adam Smith went further, arguing in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the rising affluence of a neighbouring nation was less a political threat than an opportunity for trade. ‘As a rich man is likely to be a better customer to the industrious people in his neighbourhood, than a poor, so is likewise a rich nation.’13

For a brief moment, when the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the Seven Years War (1756–63), it looked as if these intellectuals would be confirmed in their optimism. The war had been the first true world war: two coalitions, led by Great Britain on one side and France on the other, had fought in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, leaving more than a million people dead. In the treaty’s first article, the signatories agreed that ‘There shall be a Christian, universal, and perpetual peace, as well by sea as by land’.¹⁴ But the assumptions on which the optimism of Rousseau and others rested were shaky from the outset. Previous treaties, such as the one that ended the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, had also been founded on exactly the same principles of universal peace, mutual friendship, and the balance of power.¹⁵

The ink on the Treaty of Paris was barely dry before the states of Central Europe embarked on a new war with Russia, while France and the Netherlands continued their efforts to undermine British rule in North America. Much as the ancient Caledonian chieftain Calgacus had denounced Roman imperialism, or the states of Germany and the Dutch provinces rejected the fiscal, political, and religious oppression of the Habsburg Empire, the radical thinker Thomas Paine justified the revolt of the American colonies against the British Empire in 1776: ‘Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then there is not such a thing as slavery upon earth.’16

Although American victory in the War of Independence (1775–83) was a severe setback, Great Britain remained Europe’s greatest maritime power, its economic strength and still vast overseas possessions counterbalancing the might of the continent’s leading land power, France. Indeed, it was France that suffered the most from the eighteenth century’s many wars. The French population may have been far larger, but its production per capita declined to about half that of Britain’s as the latter’s steam engines, spinning machines, coke-fired blast furnaces, and countless other inventions spearheaded the industrial revolution. Despite the efforts of the finance minister Jacques Turgot to liberalize the French economy and control government spending, public debt was staggering, and so was the burden of taxation, especially on peasant farmers. ‘Let them eat cake!’ was Queen Marie Antoinette’s alleged solution to bread shortages. These, in combination with King Louis XVI’s feeble government and his reluctance to make the rich pay more taxes, led the citizens of Paris to start the French Revolution in July 1789. In comparison, Britain proved far more resilient, thanks mostly to more efficient taxation and the fact that, unlike France following the surrender of most of its North American colonies, British merchants managed to resume trade with the United States soon after the 1776 revolution.

When Louis XVI was dragged to the guillotine in January 1793, centuries of absolute rule were brought to an end in France. Even so, the First Republic wanted revenge for past French defeats, despite its continuing economic woes. Rumours spread in Paris that blue-blooded refugees in London were conspiring with foreign powers to restore the Bourbon monarchy. But while the more restless members of the republican leadership called for the revolution to be exported, others put the case for a new balance of power with Britain based on French annexation of the Low Countries. ‘Your Indian Empire has enabled you to subsidize all the powers of Europe against us and your monopoly of trade has put you in possession of a fund of inexhaustible wealth,’ one French official informed a British diplomat. ‘Belgium, by belonging to France would remove what had been the source of all wars for two centuries past; and the Rhine being the natural boundary of France, would ensure the tranquillity of Europe for two centuries to come.’17 To defend the republic, a new army was raised through mass conscription and sent into battle against Austria, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. A first British intervention to preserve the autonomy of Flanders failed in 1795, and so did a second expedition together with Russia to liberate Holland four years later. The coalitions sponsored by Britain against France failed miserably: Russia was distracted by rivalry with Austria, Prussia with Denmark, and Spain with Portugal. As the French attacked Europe from its heart, London’s allies quarrelled with each other on the fringes. War and politics had stopped everything, wrote the German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt in 1798: ‘the world is closed’.¹⁸

By 1800, France had fallen under the spell of its leading general, the military genius Napoleon Bonaparte. The British government, led by William Pitt, tried to counter Napoleon’s aggressive expansionism by establishing naval supremacy, blockading seaborne trade with France, and financially supporting new coalitions to wage war against the French. The cost of these strategies was immense, but Pitt had always been unapologetic about such expenditure. ‘The relieving by every such means as my duty will suffer me to adopt, the burdens of the people and removing that load of debt by which it is oppressed, is the grand and ultimate end of my desire,’ Pitt had explained in 1786. ‘But let it be well understood. What a certain security there is in a defencible and powerful situation and how likely weakness and improvidence are to be the forerunners of war.’19

Napoleon, meanwhile, was frustrated by his inability to prevent Britain conquering French overseas colonies. The ‘tyranny of the seas,’ he later called it, while recognizing that war with Britain would always be inevitable because ‘it is impossible for that country to remain long at peace. The territory of England is become too small for its population. She requires a monopoly of the four quarters of the globe to enable her to exist. War procures this monopoly, because it gives England the right of destruction at sea. It is her safeguard.’²⁰ In 1803, he proposed a deal with Britain: ‘If you are masters of the seas, I am master of the land. Let us then think of uniting rather than going to war, and we shall rule at pleasure the destinies of the world.’²¹ The idea was to buy time in which to defeat the threat posed by France’s continental foes. Six weeks after Admiral Nelson annihilated the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in October 1805, Napoleon won his great victory at Austerlitz, driving the Austrian Empire out of the war.

Austerlitz also led to the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 – but Napoleon had already granted himself imperial honours two years earlier. ‘I am a true Roman Emperor,’ he later declared; ‘I am of the race of the Caesars, and of the best of their kind, the founders.’22 The French artist Ingres painted Napoleon in 1806, seated in majesty on his throne, like a Roman god, a golden laurel wreath on his head, Charlemagne’s sceptre in his hand, and an imperial eagle at his feet. Many Germans had considered Napoleon a counterweight to the rule of the Habsburgs – Goethe had hailed him as a demigod; Beethoven had dedicated a symphony to him – now they were horrified that he appeared to be the Habsburgs’ successor.

Britain’s main ally on the continent became the Russian Empire. Tsar Alexander I declared the fight against France a holy war, calling Napoleon the oppressor of Europe and the enemy of the Orthodox faith. But when Napoleon repeated the tactic he had tried with Britain and offered to divide the world between France and Russia, the tsar surrendered to temptation and, in 1807, made peace. Neither side kept their promises; relations worsened until 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia. It was a disastrous miscalculation. As one soldier in the French army noted: ‘There was no hospital for the wounded; they died of hunger, thirst, cold, and despair … our sick … were left to themselves; and only deathly white faces and stiffened hands stretched toward us.’²³ Of the more than 680,000 men in Napoleon’s Grand Armée who invaded Russia, barely a twentieth were still effective combatants by the end of the campaign. The Russian tragedy sealed Napoleon’s fate, as the other continental powers now rebelled against French rule. He was decisively defeated in 1813 in the Battle of Leipzig, which led to his abdication, and finally in 1815 at Waterloo, when he attempted to return from exile.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1802, 1803–15) left millions dead and changed the political map of Europe. Against this bloody backdrop, however, the thinkers of the Enlightenment had never stopped issuing new proposals for European peace. In 1795, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant published his influential essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. He called for a political order without secret treaties and standing armies, but founded instead on three ‘definitive articles’ or principles: republicanism in place of belligerent monarchs, a league of nations, and the recognition of world citizenship. After the defeat of Napoleon, European countries competed for the moral high ground. The treaty between Russia and Prussia in 1813 had set the tone. ‘The time will come,’ it said, ‘when treaties will no longer be mere truces, when they will once more be observed with that religious faith, that sacred inviolability which underlies the esteem, the power and the preservation of empires.’24

The Congress of Vienna

In 1814–15, Vienna hosted the biggest peace conference ever held in Europe. Over nine months, more than 16,000 delegates, correspondents, and what we would now call lobbyists participated in its deliberations. Plenipotentiaries – ministers with full responsibility to negotiate – combined formal talks with informal conversations and endless parties. The Austrian hosts laid on banquets, balls, hunts, and sleigh rides where Dutch milkmaids performed ballets on the ice. Delegates were often spotted drunk in the streets; when one of them was asked how much progress had been made in the talks, he quipped: ‘Le Congrès ne marche pas: il danse.’25 The conference’s mastermind, the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, believed this approach would facilitate diplomatic breakthroughs: ‘The tongue is untied, the heart opens and the need to make oneself understood often takes over from the rules of cold and severe calculation.’²⁶ His British counterpart, Viscount Castlereagh, concurred: ‘The advantage of this mode of proceeding is that you treat the Plenipotentiaries as a Body, with early and becoming respect.’²⁷

The leaders of the war against Napoleon – Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain, and Spain – formed a steering committee to ensure that their underlying aims would be achieved. These were threefold: to re-establish a multipolar European order in which no one power could predominate; to ensure that future disputes between states were resolved peacefully through regularly held diplomatic conferences; and to prevent the sort of revolution that had destabilized first France in 1789 and then the old European order from ever occurring again.

The outcome of the Congress of Vienna did not resemble in the least Kant’s republican perpetual peace. Instead it upheld the power of the crowned heads of Europe. The main victors in Vienna were the absolute monarchies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Tsar Alexander received most of Poland and Finland. Prussian sovereignty was confirmed around the Danzig Corridor, as well as in portions of Saxony and the Rhineland. Austria was cushioned from Prussia by a newly formed German Confederation and granted control of Tyrol, Lombardy, and Tuscany, as well as strategic Adriatic ports like Trieste. In France itself, the Bourbon dynasty was restored to power, while at the same time being kept in check by buffer states such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Piedmont. Great Britain, meanwhile, secured permanent ownership of many of the colonies it had acquired during the course of the Napoleonic War, including the Cape Colony (South Africa) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Guaranteeing these decisions was a series of further arrangements between the leading powers which became known as the Congress System, or Concert of Europe. These were formalized initially by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, in the socially conservative, politically reactionary Holy Alliance. This became the Quadruple Alliance when Britain joined them in November 1815, and the Quintuple Alliance with the addition of France three years later.

The Concert of Europe was soon being put to the test. When Prussia, Russia, and Austria agreed on repressing a liberal revolution in Naples in 1820, and then backed a French intervention to subdue a popular uprising in Spain in 1822, Britain opposed these interventions on the grounds that they were flagrant attempts to gain influence within other states and so alter the balance of power. Meanwhile, the French Revolution continued to inspire liberals and nationalists across Europe. In 1830, Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire was recognized by Britain, France, and Russia. In that same year, the French king himself was overthrown, Belgium seceded from the Netherlands, civil war continued to rage in Portugal, and there were uprisings in Italy and Poland to which Austria and Russia responded brutally.

It was the revolutions of 1848 that dealt the Concert of Europe its fatal blow. This Spring of Nations, as it was called, rippled through about a dozen European countries. Protesters demanded greater civil liberties and the end of imperial overlordship. These popular uprisings were exploited politically by the great powers. France backed an Italian rebellion against Austria. Prussia supported German rebels in Schleswig-Holstein against Danish rule. The revolutions were opposed by the Russian and Austrian Empires, but the tsar and the emperor themselves differed on how to handle turmoil in Poland and Hungary. In addition, unrest in the decaying Ottoman Empire elicited conflicting responses from Russia, France, and Britain. Britain wanted to avoid at any cost Russia establishing a naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The new French emperor, Napoleon III, was intent on increasing his prestige by becoming the protector of Christians in the Holy Land and by deploying a warship to the Black Sea. It incensed the Tsar, who responded by dispatching a small contingent to Moldavia in 1853. Even though France and Britain preferred a diplomatic settlement to the crisis in the Balkans, the Ottomans assumed their support for stronger measures and declared war on Russia. With anti-Russian passions inflamed, there was no way back. By 1854, a coalition of nearly a million mainly Ottoman, French, and British troops was fighting the Russian army in the Black Sea region. The Crimean War (1853–6) was the first industrial war in Europe. Long-range artillery was deployed and supplies were brought up to the lines by a purpose-built military railway. By the end of the war, which Russia lost, close to half a million soldiers had died, mostly from disease.

Prussia lay low throughout the Crimean War and focused on its economic development instead. Partly due to British investment, Prussia became the fastest industrializing country on the continent. Siemens led the development of the telegraph, Bayer in producing aspirin, and Krupp in armaments. The smaller German states were absorbed into a new Prussian-led customs union and slowly knit together with a network of Prussian railways. But it was not enough. In 1862, the newly appointed Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, proclaimed that the position of Prussia in Germany would not be determined by its promulgation of liberal values but by its military power: ‘The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions but by blood and iron.’28 Prussia wanted German unity – but under its own leadership.

With Britain, France, and Russia still licking their wounds from the Crimean War and the Austrian Empire embroiled in another rebellion in its Italian domains, Bismarck got his way. In 1864, he provoked a new crisis in Schleswig-Holstein. Austria again sought to stop Prussian interference in Schleswig-Holstein, but this time it was utterly defeated thanks to the much more mobile and better commanded Prussian armed forces. Prussia’s victory led to the establishment of the North German Confederation in 1867. Nominally it was a federal state, consisting of over twenty kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities; in reality, it was a tool of Prussian hegemony. Alarmed by the threat to the European balance of power posed by Prussia’s ambitions for German unification, France mobilized against it in 1870. It was swiftly overwhelmed by the rapid Prussian advance, Napoleon III captured, and Paris occupied. In 1871, as France plunged once again into revolution and republicanism, the birth of the German Empire was proclaimed by Bismarck in Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors.

Victory in 1871 left Germany as Europe’s leading continental power. But Bismarck was afraid that it could lead to overconfidence and overreaching. To try and avert the dangers of German triumphalism, he refused to recognize the day of France’s surrender as a national holiday, he invited Austria and Russia to re-establish the Holy Alliance, and he facilitated new diplomatic conferences and initiatives to resolve further European conflicts peacefully. Despite his reassurances that Germany was now a sated power, the next generation of political leaders were far from satisfied. In 1897, the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, engineered Bismarck’s downfall. Two years earlier, Bismarck had warned: ‘The crash will come if things go on like this.’29 Now he proffered a final piece of advice:

We ought to do all we can to weaken the bad feeling which has been called out through our growth to the position of a real Great Power, by honourable and peaceful use of our influence, and so convince the world that a German hegemony in Europe is more useful and less partisan and also less harmful for the freedom of others than that of France, Russia, or England.³⁰

The Rise of Germany

Despite Bismarck’s counsel, frictions only increased between all the European powers in the decades following the unification of Germany. Revanchism simmered in France as a consequence of its defeat in 1871 and the reparations that had to be paid. Russia continued to distrust all the other European powers, who repaid the compliment. Austria, which considered the Balkans part of its sphere of influence, was angered by Russia’s growing presence in the region after the latter defeated the Ottoman Empire there in 1878. And Britain distrusted any activities by Russia that brought it closer to the Mediterranean. France, meanwhile, collided with the recently unified kingdom of Italy over North Africa. The main source of tension, however, seemed to be envy at Britain’s vast empire. Although, by the 1890s, Britain was mostly pursuing its imperialism indirectly, via protectorates instead of formal colonies, and was continuing to advocate free trade with other powers, the imperial ambitions of France, Germany, and Russia led to ever more frequent clashes with the United Kingdom.

This competition was partly about status and partly about economic interests. The industrial revolution led to growing demand for raw materials. As Europe’s economic production often expanded faster than domestic demand, profits came under pressure. This led to protectionism, and it sparked an urgent search for export markets and opportunities to invest capital more profitably.31 Writing in 1902, the English economist J. A. Hobson referred to over-production as the ‘taproot of imperialism’.32 Much as the British had developed imperial trading arteries in Africa and Asia, the French started building railways in Senegal and the Germans in the Ottoman Empire, while the United States joined the scramble for markets too. This economically motivated imperialism led to numerous minor wars and the deaths of countless young men in distant lands.

In 1880, the twenty-six-year-old Irish poet Oscar Wilde lamented the cost of empire:

Wave and wild wind and foreign shore

Possess the flower of English land –

Lips that thy lips shall kiss no more,

Hands that shall never clasp thy hand.

What profit now that we have bound

The whole round world with nets of gold,

If hidden in our heart is found

The care that groweth never old?³³

The German foreign secretary, Bernhard von Bülow, summarized the situation more dramatically in a speech to the Reichstag in 1899:

The rapid growth of our population, the unprecedented blossoming of our industries, the hard work of our merchants, in short the mighty vitality of the German people have woven us into the world economy and pulled us into international politics. If the English speak of a ‘Greater Britain’; if the French speak of a ‘Nouvelle France’; if the Russians open up Asia; then we, too, have the right to a greater Germany, not in the sense of conquest, but indeed in the sense of peaceful extension of our trade and its infrastructures.34

The more the powers’ foreign trade grew, the greater the steps they were prepared to take in order to defend their interests. The German Grand Admiral, Alfred von Tirpitz, was ordered to build a fleet strong enough to secure access to German colonies and deter Britain from challenging Germany at sea. The American naval captain and strategist Alfred Mahan also called for a larger fleet: ‘Within, the home market is secured; but outside, beyond the broad seas, there are the markets of the world, that can be entered and controlled only by a vigorous contest, to which the habit of trusting to protection by statute does not conduce.’³⁵ At that time, Britain was officially referred to as a threat. It was often impossible, however, to discern the desire to defend trading interests from more aggressive objectives. Tirpitz’s fleet, for instance, was ostensibly built to protect German trade, but it could also be used to deter Russia and Britain in the Baltic.

As Germany flexed its muscles, the French started building new fortifications along its Rhine frontier. In 1882, Germany formed a defensive triple alliance with Austria and Italy. France formed its own alliances, first with Russia in 1892 and then with Britain in 1904. With the establishment of an Anglo-Russian alliance in 1907, and finally the Triple Entente between France, Britain, and Russia in 1912, the battle lines were drawn across Europe.³⁶

Tensions between the great powers increasingly focused on the Balkans, where the ever more fragile and fractious Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires alternated between repressing nationalist insurrections within their own realms and fostering them in their neighbours. Matters came to a head in June 1914, when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo. Austria responded by declaring war on Serbia, causing the Russians to intervene on the side of their fellow Slavs. Germany mobilized in support of Austria, then launched a pre-emptive strike on France to try and prevent it aiding Russia. The violation of Belgian neutrality by this German offensive ended any hopes that Britain might have stayed on the sidelines. Within five weeks from the firing of the fateful shot in Sarajevo, the five great powers of Europe were at war.

Most parties assumed the fighting would soon be over. Instead, it lasted more than four years and was fought over the entire Eastern Hemisphere. The mobilization of Europe’s full industrial, technological, and imperial might resulted in battles of unprecedented scale and intensity, and the deaths of more than 15 million people. Writing in the first months of the conflict, H. G. Wells observed: ‘Probably there have never been before in the whole past of mankind so many people convinced of the dreadfulness of war.’37 Recollecting the fighting he took part in around the same time, one German infantryman wondered: ‘What was it for that we soldiers stabbed each other, strangled each other and went for each other like mad dogs?’³⁸ His question remained unanswered.

The great war of 1914–18 was the tragic culmination of a century of great power politics; but, paradoxically enough, those hundred years had also been an age of political optimism. The French diplomat Dominique de Pradt, who attended the Congress of Vienna, vested new hopes in what he was the first to call ‘public opinion’. ‘The people have acquired a knowledge of their rights and dignity,’ he announced.39 The American diplomat Elihu Burritt encouraged working men to band together internationally in what he described as ‘people-diplomacy’.⁴⁰ In Britain, even conservative statesmen acknowledged the influence of popular feeling: Lord Aberdeen, for example, joked that any prime minister had to please the newspapers, while Lord Salisbury praised the electric telegraph for ‘assembling all mankind upon one great plane, whence they can see everything that is done and hear everything that is said and judge of every policy that is pursued at the very moment those events take place’.⁴¹

Peace conferences were held, assembling prominent intellectuals like the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, the novelist Victor Hugo, and the English politician and free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden, who famously criticized the imperialism of his own country because it ‘usurped the dominion of the ocean, and attempted to extend the sphere of human despotism over another element, by insolently putting barriers upon that highway of nations’.⁴² There were international conventions on women’s rights, humanitarian law, the abolition of slavery, constraints on maritime warfare, and free trade.

‘Commerce,’ wrote the British former prime minister Robert Peel in 1846, is ‘the happy instrument of promoting civilization, of abating national jealousies and prejudices, and of encouraging the maintenance of general peace.’⁴³ By 1860, sixty commercial treaties were signed; by 1900 over 200. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the major powers had also agreed on an International Telegraph Union, an international bureau for trademarks and patents, the Universal Postal Union, the Permanent International Peace Bureau, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. The series of world fairs that began in 1851 with the Great Exhibition in London became celebrations of cosmopolitanism and progress, leaving lasting monuments like the Crystal Palace in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. This was the Belle Époque, the time of playful art nouveau, Claude Monet’s dreamy water lilies, and Auguste Renoir’s bourgeois picnics at Le Moulin de la Galette. Less than a year before the First World War broke out, the Peace Palace was opened in The Hague.

But nineteenth-century bourgeois cosmopolitanism was also challenged by liberal and romantic nationalism. One of its early critics was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. ‘Is it enough,’ he asked in 1847, ‘to preach peace and non-intervention, and leave force, unchallenged ruler over three-fourths of Europe, to intervene, for its own unhallowed ends, when, where, and how, it thinks fit?’44 He begged people to resist and to take their fate in their own hands. ‘From the absence of this spiritual religion, of which but empty forms and lifeless formularies remain, and from a total lack of a sense of duty and a capacity for self-sacrifice, man, like a savage, has fallen prostrate in the dust, and has set up on an empty altar the idol “utility,” ’ Mazzini argued. ‘Despots and the Princes of this world have become his High Priests; and from them has come the revolting formulary: “Each for his own alone; each for himself alone.” ’⁴⁵

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who quoted the preceding passage from Mazzini in his own work, argued that his compatriots should fight Western liberalism and re-establish their own, more spiritual traditions. ‘Forgetting their relation to the Infinite,’ he wrote following the Russian Revolution of 1905, ‘the majority of men have descended, in spite of all the subtlety of their mental achievements, to the lowest grade of consciousness, where they are guided only by animal passions and by the hypnotism of the herd. That is the cause of all their calamities.’46

‘Until we have created a romance of peace that would equal that of war, violence will not disappear from people’s lives,’ wrote the urbane and aristocratic German diplomat Harry Kessler.⁴⁷ His diaries, which he kept from 1880 to 1937, convey a gradual personal metamorphosis which mirrored that of the entire continent. Kessler’s early years were a kaleidoscope of internationalism and high culture as he rediscovered the ancient world of the Mediterranean, dined with luminaries such as Nietzsche, and organized art exhibitions. When the drums of war started to roar, patriotism quickly took over. ‘The whole population is as transformed and cast into a new form,’ he wrote in 1914. ‘This already is the priceless gain of this war; and to have witnessed it will certainly be the greatest experience of our lives.’⁴⁸

The failure of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century and the consequent outbreak of the First World War had several causes. The Congress System had been devised by Metternich in 1815 to protect the power of Europe’s main dynasties; but the most urgent threat they increasingly faced was not foreign armies but domestic unrest inspired by the examples of the American and French Revolutions, which had demonstrated the power of popular uprising, had enflamed nationalism, and propagated liberalism. Rapid urbanization and industrialization also created a new, far larger, and more self-confident bourgeoisie.

Another explanation for the system’s breakdown was that the balance of power proved to be an illusion. The major powers harboured deep and enduring feelings of resentment and suspicion towards each other. They never found lasting solutions to the most serious territorial bones of contention: the repercussions of Italian and German unification; and the weakening of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, so that nationalist unrest in their Balkan peripheries became an opportunity for others to interfere. The numerous lesser states of Europe, meanwhile, sought to enhance their own position by pitting the major powers against one another. Significantly, too, Great Britain failed to fulfil its self-appointed role as arbiter and enforcer of the balance. Although it held absolute authority at sea and had the strongest economy in the world, it generally lacked the interest or the military resources to check continental power politics. By the end of the nineteenth century, relations between European states were complicated even further by trade wars and imperial ambitions as the industrial revolution drove the quest for more export markets and for raw materials.

Japan and the United States of America

By the late nineteenth century, while the Mughal and Safavid Empires had long vanished, and the Ottomans and the Qing were severely weakened, two powers had managed to turn Europe’s relentless rivalry and quest for foreign markets into an opportunity for their own advancement: Japan and the United States of America.

At first, the outlook for Japan had appeared far from promising. Much like China, it was forced to open itself up to trade with Western powers. In 1844, the Dutch king Willem II wrote to the Japanese emperor to warn him of the consequences if the country did not allow his merchants access. Then came the ‘black ships’ of Commodore Matthew Perry, which forced representatives of the shogun, the de facto ruler of Japan, to sign the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, granting the United States trading rights. The British, Russians, and French promptly demanded – and received – similar benefits. High unemployment followed, along with epidemics of new diseases like cholera, rising tensions between the shogunate and the emperor, and widespread popular resentment against the ruling elite who were held responsible for agreeing such unequal treaties with foreigners.

In 1863, the emperor overrode the authority of the shogunate and ordered the expulsion of the foreign barbarians – but the barbarians fought back. Their punitive measures sparked a civil war which overthrew the shogun and, in an episode known as the Meiji Restoration (1868), returned the levers of day-to-day rule to the emperor, on condition that he modernized the country and ‘sought knowledge throughout the world’. In 1871, the so-called Iwakura Mission was dispatched to the United States and Europe to try and renegotiate the treaties on more equal terms and to gather information on Western science and society. It returned to Japan in 1873 with blueprints for modernization and industrialization, and new ambitions which were soon realized. Supported by Germany, France, and Britain, the Japanese built their manufacturing base at a tremendous speed. Now it too needed foreign raw materials and export markets. In a few years, it had converted its newly gained industrial prowess into military might and built a formidable navy. In 1874, it attacked the island of Taiwan, still part of the Qing Empire. In 1876, it used gunboats to gain commercial access to the Korean kingdom of Joseon and to impose its first unequal treaty. In 1894, it attacked China, overwhelmed its army and navy, and forced the Chinese to cede Taiwan, pay a large indemnity, and grant it the same trading privileges as the Western powers. All this was stipulated in another unequal treaty, the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895.

Following this victory, the up-and-coming Japanese diplomat Hayashi Gonsuke cautioned against excessive belligerence, echoing Bismarck’s warning to his fellow German politicians from around the same time. ‘At present Japan must keep calm and sit tight, so as to lull suspicions nurtured against her; during this time the foundations of national power must be consolidated; and we must watch and wait for the opportunity that will surely come one day.’49 That chance came in 1904–5, when Russia and Japan went to war over their rival claims to Manchuria. The Japanese victory, destroying most of Russia’s navy, sent shockwaves round the world: it was the first time a European state had been defeated by a modern Asian power. In 1907, Japan issued its ‘First Imperial National Defence Policy’. Russia was no longer regarded as a significant threat to Japanese interests. Instead, it stated, the most important and immediate hypothetical adversary facing Japan was the United States of America.50

The rise of the United States was spectacular by any standard. A tiny nation of rags and ramshackle towns at its creation in 1776, by the dawn of the twentieth century it was the world’s largest economy, and its third most populous state. Its astonishing growth was not free from power politics and war. Already, in 1801–5, the young republic had deployed a small fleet in the Mediterranean to punish North African pirates for seizing American merchant ships. In 1812–15, it had fought a war with Britain that resulted in the burning down of the White House. In 1846–48, it had clashed violently with Spain over Texas and Mexico. Close to 1 million Americans died in the Civil War (1861–5) between the slave-holding agricultural states of the Confederacy in the south and the more industrialized Union in the north. Only in 1890 had the frontier in the American West been closed, following the decades-long subjugation of Native American tribes from the Appalachian Mountains, across the Great Plains, to the Pacific coast.

The United States’ rise, therefore, was by no means peaceful. Yet, throughout their nation’s history, American leaders have always sought to keep the United States apart from the political turmoil of the Eastern Hemisphere. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson summarized America’s foreign policy as ‘peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none’.⁵¹ This was reaffirmed in the famous Monroe Doctrine of 1823. ‘It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced,’ President James Monroe explained, ‘that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense.’52 The United States would refrain from allying with any European power and at the same time it would shield both North and South America from European interference. Fortifications were built along the coast to keep its enemies – with Great Britain to the fore – at a distance.

Mirroring this early strategic restraint and defensive posture, the United States also adopted a policy of economic protectionism. Inspired by Prussia, the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, advocated the support of the nation’s infant industries by means of import tariffs. Some two decades later, Jefferson realized that ‘Experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort’, and urged that nothing should be purchased from abroad.⁵³ In 1832, the trade secretary, Henry Clay, defended the ‘American system’. Free trade, he argued, ‘never has existed, it never will exist … if we throw our ports wide open to the admission of foreign productions, free of all duty, what ports of any other foreign nation shall we find open to the free admission of our surplus produce?’⁵⁴

But while it maintained its own protectionist trade restrictions, the United States increasingly demanded that others open up their markets. In 1844, Washington wrested trading concessions for American exporters of cotton from the Qing emperor. In 1854, as we have seen, Commodore Perry forced Japan to grant access to American merchants and goods. In the 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant used the principle of reciprocal trade tariffs to boost American exports to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. This meant that those countries could only export their goods freely to the United States if they allowed American imports similar access to their domestic markets. The more advanced and far larger US economy won the greater benefits. America’s open-door trade policy was now fully under way.

With growing economic interests came greater political aspirations. Gunboats were dispatched to look after American interests in Fiji, Panama, Paraguay, Egypt, Haiti, Samoa, and Hawaii. Washington arbitrated in a conflict between Argentina and Paraguay, supported rebels against Spanish rule in Cuba, and aspired to naval supremacy in the Caribbean. In his seminal essay of 1890, Alfred Mahan advised how sea power could support American imperialism, recommending the construction of naval bases across the Pacific and the conquest of Hawaii. Theodore Roosevelt was a fervent believer in Mahan, and during his presidency (1901–9) he ordered military outposts to be built in Cuba, Panama, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. While continuing to pay lip service to the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt now added a proviso: it might be necessary to intervene in a foreign power if domestic turmoil within it posed a significant enough threat to the interests and security of the United States.

Despite such expressions of realpolitik, and despite the vast social inequalities caused by the nation’s economic boom – a handful of families, such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers, revelled in the so-called Gilded Age as tens of millions of their fellow citizens struggled in the direst poverty – the United States continued to preach its message of liberty, democracy, and American exceptionalism to the world. Washington, after all, had been reconstructed on a grandiose scale and in a neoclassical style that simultaneously recalled the austere morality of the Roman Republic and the might and majesty of imperial Rome. By the eve of the First World War, one thing was very clear: the old empires of the Eastern Hemisphere were now challenged by the new power in the West.

From War to War

In 1916, as the young men of Europe fought and died in the morass of trenches that have come to epitomize the suffering of the First World War, the American president Woodrow Wilson was re-elected to the White House under the slogans ‘He Has Kept Us Out of War’ and ‘America First’. The United States had remained neutral when the conflict erupted in August 1914. It was only in April 1917, after Germany’s adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare led to the sinking of American shipping, and the disclosure of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram – a secret German offer to support Mexico in regaining territory it had lost to the US in the nineteenth century – that America finally entered the war on the side of Britain, France, and, until the revolution in November, Russia. The prospect of America’s reserves of manpower and full economic might being brought to bear against Germany forced it to overreach itself and led to the end of hostilities in November 1918.

With the European powers exhausted, and either dependent on American loans or, in the case of Russia and Germany, riven by revolution, the end of the war provided another opportunity for the United States to augment its standing and realign the shifting global dynamics more firmly in its favour. In January 1919, slightly more than a hundred years after the Congress of Vienna, the powers gathered in Paris for yet another major peace conference. When Woodrow Wilson arrived in France, well aware of his clout, he brought with him a programme of fourteen points ostensibly designed to remodel the world order on principles of national self-determination, free trade, non-aggression, and liberalism. Although, in 1917, the president had publicly assured the world that the United States ‘had no selfish ends to serve’, privately he had confessed to his advisor: ‘When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.’55 It was clear that his manifesto would pose a fundamental challenge to the traditional great powers.

The Paris Peace Conference attracted over a thousand delegates. It was organized into sixty specialized committees, a plenary conference, and five commissions. In practice, however, everything was decided by the chief victorious Allies: the United States, France, Britain, and Italy. The journalist Ray Stannard Baker, who served as Wilson’s press secretary, enthusiastically hailed the conference as a new way of conducting diplomacy:

The old way was for a group of diplomats, each representing a set of selfish national interests, to hold secret meetings, and by jockeying, trading, forming private rings and combinations with one another, come at last to a settlement …

The new way so boldly launched at Paris was, first, to start with certain general principles of justice, such as those laid down by President Wilson and accepted by all the world; and, second, to have those principles applied, not by diplomats and politicians each eager to serve his own interests, but by dispassionate scientists – geographers, ethnologists, economists – who had made studies of the problems involved.56

The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, was rather more cynical. ‘I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon,’ he later said, referring to the American president and the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau. The latter in turn joked that ‘Wilson had 14 points, while Moses had only 10.’⁵⁷ Another attendee, the cabinet minister Winston Churchill, was similarly sceptical: he thought the conference little different from pre-war diplomatic endeavours and just as ineffective. In many ways Churchill was right. Even though, at Wilson’s behest, the conference led to the establishment of a League of Nations to provide collective security for members and arbitrate between them in case of conflict, the US Senate never ratified America’s accession to this forerunner of the United Nations lest it constrain the country’s autonomy.

There were no European victors in Paris. The resulting Treaty of Versailles (1919) dismantled the German Empire, with Japan promptly snapping up many of its Asian possessions. Germany was also forced to surrender most of the Rhineland to France, burdened with massive war reparations, and had its military capability severely constrained. The parallel Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919) carved the Austrian Empire up into several new states – the republic of Austria; Czechoslovakia; Poland; the kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, soon renamed Yugoslavia – and prohibited from forming new alliances with Germany. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) dismembered the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with Germany and Austria during the war. The remnants of its historical possessions in Mesopotamia and the Levant were divided between Britain and France – ostensibly as mandates under the aegis of the League of Nations – and its last sultan was deposed in a civil war that ended with the founding of the Turkish Republic under Kemal Ataturk.

Despite their territorial gains, the victors of the war did not have everything their own way. France remained dissatisfied about the amount of economic compensation it received for the destruction wrought by German occupation of its land. Britain, meanwhile, had to accept that the United States was now a leading oceanic power. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–2, the two countries formally agreed on naval parity. Japan had to be satisfied with a fleet two thirds the size. Although this meant Japan was the third greatest naval power, it inflamed Japanese nationalism. ‘War is not out of the question,’ warned one not-untypical Japanese naval officer, ‘especially as a large part of the American Fleet has come through the Panama Canal into the Pacific.’58 If there was a winner of the Paris and Washington conferences, however, then it was the United States.

Even in 1919, the English economist John Maynard Keynes was warning of the devastating consequences of the treaties that ended the First World War. ‘Paris was a nightmare,’ he wrote. ‘A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene.’⁵⁹ Keynes resigned his position as the British treasury’s official representative to the Paris Peace Conference in protest at the proposed treaty terms, arguing that Europe would slip back into turmoil without a far-reaching economic recovery plan and that the size of Germany’s reparations and its war debt would lead to revanchism. What disturbed him the most, however, was the way that the cosmopolitan elite of Europe and the United States, just as they had before the outbreak of the First World War, remained blind to the malign forces that still lurked beneath the spirit of internationalism:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth … he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits … The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper.60

It did not take long for Keynes’s fears to be confirmed. The destruction of Europe’s factories during the First World War had led the United States to expand its industrial capacity even faster than before. As the European nations recovered in the twenties, overcapacity caused prices to collapse and protectionism to spread. ‘Our investments and trade relations are such,’ warned President Calvin Coolidge in 1928, ‘that it is almost impossible to conceive of any conflict anywhere on earth which would not affect us injuriously.’61 Influential American financiers like John Pierpont Morgan Jr proposed that German reparations should be reduced, and that the US should lend money to Berlin so that it could pay its debts to other European nations, and in this way prop up demand for American exports. In 1924, the American banker and politician Charles Dawes oversaw the negotiation of an agreement in which the French and Belgian occupation of the German industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley was ended, in the hopes this would make it more likely that Germany would be able to pay its war reparations.

Both the Dawes Plan and its successor, the American-sponsored Young Plan of 1929, failed to ease the strain on the European economy caused by the scale of Germany’s reparations. As a result of the difficulties in Europe, American exports to the region dropped by around a fifth between 1921 and 1928.⁶² The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was followed by a great economic depression. The hardship was felt by ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘It was a time of terrible suffering,’ one American citizen recalled. ‘Have you ever seen a child with rickets? Shaking as with palsy. No proteins, no milk … People who were independent, who thought they were masters and mistresses of their lives, were all of a sudden dependent on others.’⁶³ American financiers withdrew their loans from Europe as Austria, Germany, and other countries defaulted on their national debts. The world economy fractured as protectionist barriers were raised ever higher: the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act increased import duties in the United States to 59 per cent; in Europe, they climbed to 43 per cent.

In 1928, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and most of the other countries of Europe signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact, committing them not to use violence to resolve international disputes. But the Great Depression merely intensified tensions between states, the suffering it inflicted on their populations fuelling a sudden upsurge in violent nationalism – nowhere more so than in Germany. In 1933, the new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, withdrew his country from the League of Nations, claiming that it was no more than a tool to keep Germany down and that international organizations were unfit to preserve order. ‘If it is the task of the League of Nations only to guarantee the existing state of the world and to safeguard it for all time, then we might just as well entrust it with the task of regulating the ebb and flow of the tides,’ he fulminated.64

Hitler came to power promising to undo the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, to defend Germany against the alleged bullying of France and Britain, and to provide the economic resources and ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for the nation to fulfil its destiny and flourish. Peace conferences continued to be staged, but Hitler was unstoppable in his remilitarization. First, in 1936, he sent German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, openly violating the Treaty of Versailles; then, in 1938, he began to push into resource-rich eastern neighbours, occupying the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Once again, the rectification of perceived wrongs and the desire for security had become ruthless aggression and imperialist expansionism.

The Nations United

In August 1939, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union met in Moscow to agree a treaty of mutual non-aggression and to establish spheres of influence that implied the two states would divide Europe between them. Nine days after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, German tanks advanced into Poland. The Second World War (1939–45) had begun. The brutality of its horrific battles and ruthless campaigns of extermination were magnified by the industrial might and technological innovation brought to bear on the conflict. In just six years, 60 million people lost their lives. The Holocaust alone was responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews: a massacre of civilians planned and implemented with the callous efficiency of a factory production line.

The reasons for Germany’s eventual defeat were partly strategic and partly economic. Hitler’s prime advantage was the speed with which his troops were able to conquer large parts of Europe. But holding on to this territory proved much more difficult. The tide turned in 1942, following the entry of the Soviet Union and the United States into the war following surprise attacks by Germany on the former and Germany’s ally Japan on the latter. The combination of the Soviet Union’s far greater reserves of manpower and the United States’ overwhelming economic superiority – by 1945, its economy was five times larger than Germany’s – proved decisive.

The picture was similar in the war against Japan in Asia and the Pacific, which accounted for at least a third of all casualties during the Second World War. Like Germany, Japan’s aggression was motivated by a toxic mixture of revenge for perceived slights at the hands of other powers, a belief in racial and cultural superiority, and the need for raw materials – oil, rubber, and metals – to feed its industries. Like Germany, Japan found it far harder to hold on to the vast swathes of territory it had captured than to conquer it in the first place. And, like Germany, Japan was unable to contend with the financial firepower of the United States: its economy was ten times larger than Japan’s by 1945, its ammunition production thirty times greater. Even Japan’s advantage in military manpower – despite the United States deploying more troops in the Pacific than in Europe – was outweighed by America’s technological superiority. Within days of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in August 1945, Japan surrendered.

Three and a half months earlier, as the war in Europe entered its final days, more than 800 official delegates and 2,000 other attendees gathered in San Francisco to embark on the negotiations that would culminate, in October 1945, with the establishment of the most ambitious project of multilateralism the world had ever seen: the United Nations. The opening words of its charter proclaimed: ‘We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.’65 The UN system was to be built on the principles of national sovereignty and self-determination, military restraint and peaceful arbitration, and collective security should any member be at risk. Its General Assembly would include all signatories. ‘A perfect plan for perpetual peace and one world,’ an American congressman hailed it.66 Yet effective power continued to be held by a small group: the five main victors of the war against Germany and Japan, who formed the permanent members of the Security Council – the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China.

The new spirit of idealism and internationalism that gave rise to the United Nations proved unable to suppress the old ethos of suspicion, national competition, and great power rivalry. Even as the first tentative steps were being taken in the formulation of the United Nations, the major powers had been discussing once again how to divide up Europe between them. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin scribbled on a small piece of paper – which the former later dubbed the ‘naughty document’ – how influence in the Balkans would be split. But the prime minister was already well aware that Britain itself now had to tread carefully around its much more powerful allies. ‘What a small nation we are,’ he recalled, describing the Tehran Conference in October 1943. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two the poor little English donkey who was the only one who knew the right way home.’⁶⁷ During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin reiterated his demand for a Soviet sphere of influence encompassing Central and Eastern Europe. The United States countered by insisting on the need for democratic elections in the newly liberated countries of Europe, hoping these would check the Soviets. By the time the last of the major conferences between the Allies took place at Potsdam in July–August 1945, Soviet control over Eastern Europe was a fait accompli. Germany itself was divided into four occupation zones. Although Britain and France shared in this partition – and despite their status at the United Nations – the Europeans were finished as great powers. In their place, not only in Europe but across the globe, stood the United States and the Soviet Union.

The conclusion of the Second World War heralded the end of the old European empires in Asia and Africa. In Southeast Asia, the retreat of Japanese forces left a power vacuum in former colonies such as Dutch Indonesia and French Indochina which new independence movements sprang up to try and fill. In South Asia, Britain realized it no longer had the resources to maintain its empire in the Indian subcontinent against growing opposition. In August 1947, the British Raj was replaced by the independent republics of India and Pakistan. By 1950, eleven countries had gained independence from their former colonial masters; a decade later, there were twenty-eight more. In China, meanwhile, the appalling state of anarchy and civil war that had endured since the fall of the Qing Dynasty was finally ended in 1949 by the victory of the communists under Mao Zedong and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China.

However, independence did not automatically bring peace: in the absence of the old imperial powers, ancient enmities resurfaced in contemporary rivalries that broke out in a rash of conflicts. In 1947, Pakistan and India clashed over Kashmir. In 1948, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria declared war on the newly established state of Israel. In 1950, the People’s Republic of China invaded the Korean Peninsula. In an attempt to end such conflicts, and also to resist being absorbed into the rival global hegemonies of the United States and the Soviet Union, many of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa joined with countries in South America and Europe in 1961 to form a Non-Aligned Movement. But despite committing their nations to peaceful coexistence based on the core values already promulgated by the United Nations, the premiers of the non-aligned countries soon quarrelled over which of them should be the group’s leader.

In the years immediately following the Second World War, it was the United States that ultimately held the best cards. Its economy was now bigger than that of all the Western European nations combined. To serve its economic interests, security objectives, and desire for status, the United States sought to reshape the international order around it in a manner that resembled so many empires in the past.

Foremost were the measures it took to open up the global economy to American businesses and investment. The conference held at Bretton Woods in 1944 led to the establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, along with other measures that cemented the position of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. In 1947, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was negotiated in order to liberate American firms from the import taxes that reduced their competitiveness abroad. The Marshall Plan, which offered US aid to rebuild Western Europe so that it could form a bulwark against communism, was rolled out in 1948 on condition that the recipients adopted open markets.

A new world order was being created. In April 1950, the US president Harry Truman was briefed by his staff: ‘In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership.’68

The Cold War

One power, however, was determined to prevent an American takeover. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been established in 1922 and formed the successor state to the old tsarist Russian Empire, which had been toppled five years earlier in the two revolutions of 1917. Ever since the Western powers had supported the tsarists in the Russian Civil War (1917–22), the Soviet state had felt itself under existential threat from abroad. Its first leader, Vladimir Lenin, spoke repeatedly of ‘capitalist encirclement’; his successor, Joseph Stalin, of a ‘socialist island’ surrounded by enemies.⁶⁹ Soviet fears were worsened by the German invasion in 1941, and the apparent unwillingness of the United States to open a second front in Western Europe to relieve the pressure in the east. By the end of the Second World War, although Soviet troops occupied Berlin, at least 20 million of their fellow citizens had died and a quarter of their country’s economic capacity had been destroyed.

Suspicions on the Western side grew as well, fuelled not least by Soviet attitudes at the Potsdam Conference and the USSR’s behaviour subsequently. In February 1946, the American diplomat George Kennan described in his famous ‘long telegram’ the Soviet regime as neurotic, driven by an instinctive sense of insecurity, and incompatible with an open, capitalist world.70 Less than a fortnight later, Winston Churchill – who had been an outspoken supporter of the Western intervention in the Russian Civil War – warned that Soviet actions to strengthen their influence in Eastern and Central Europe by establishing communist regimes there meant that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.⁷¹ Churchill’s speech outlining the nature of this new world order presaged the onset of the Cold War.

The Cold War was unique, not so much for the fact that the main adversaries never fought each other directly in open conflict, but for the fact that their main centres of power were concentrated in different hemispheres and separated by wide oceans. As such, the rivalry focused on the states on the peripheries of the two superpowers. Just as the Soviet Union feared encirclement of its heartland by US-aligned states in what the influential political theorist Nicholas Spykman dubbed the ‘rimland’ of Eurasia, so the United States feared the presence of communist regimes on its geopolitical doorstep in Central and South America.⁷²

As the Soviet Union tried to spread communism from the heart of Eurasia, the United States advanced its own values and interests through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe (NATO), the Central Treaty Organization in the Middle East (CENTO), the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), and a pact with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS). The two superpowers engaged in numerous proxy wars, like the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Korean War (1950–53), the Vietnam War (1955–75), and the Angolan Civil War (1975–91). Meanwhile troops massed on both sides of the Iron Curtain in Europe, and a furious arms race was conducted in an effort to establish air, sea, and most lethally nuclear supremacy. Only once did the United States and the Soviet Union reach the brink of full-scale nuclear war: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Kremlin attempted to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba, some 300 kilometres away from the continental United States.

The main struggle, however, was economic. Throughout the Cold War, the American economy remained twice as large as the Soviet Union’s. The Soviets spent 17 per cent of their wealth on defence; the United States only 7 per cent. The average Soviet citizen never earned more than one third the salary of an American. In most areas of advanced technology – computers, communications, life sciences, materials science, robotics, propulsion – the United States held the leading edge.

America was ruthless in defence of its economic advantage, even turning on their closest allies to maintain it. In 1967, for example, West Germany – by now the economic powerhouse of Western Europe – was faced with the stark choice of propping up the dollar or facing a reduction in the American forces protecting it from the Soviets. In 1985, the Plaza Agreement saw Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan the leading Asian economy, forced to implement a major devaluation of the dollar in order to render American exports more competitive.

Cracks in the Soviet regime started to appear in the 1970s, when the USSR was forced to buy grain from the United States and faced technological shortcomings that prevented it from developing new oil wells. As Soviet production per capita stagnated, poverty and food rationing became prevalent. It was in this context that the American president Ronald Reagan decided to boost defence spending in the early 1980s and unleash a financial battle of attrition. The Soviet economy could not cope. ‘There was a visible decline in the rate of growth, then its complete stagnation,’ a senior intelligence officer recalled. Opposition to the communist regime grew within the Soviet Union. ‘Our society, our people, the most educated, the most intellectual, had become tired of the model that oppressed them spiritually and politically,’ wrote the Russian essayist Mikhail Antonov in 1987.

Although a new premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, attempted to liberalize the political and economic systems with his far-ranging policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), his reforms proved too little, too late. His refusal to crack down on increasingly widespread protests against Soviet rule in the Baltic states during the late 1980s emboldened dissidents elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The genie was out of the bottle, and the reformist leadership was unwilling and unable to put it back. In elections held in 1990, the communist party was defeated in six of the USSR’s fifteen constituent republics by nationalist movements determined on independence. The short-lived coup the following year, mounted by communist hardliners trying to prevent Gorbachev from turning the centralized Soviet Union into a looser federation of states, merely hastened the denouement. By the end of 1991, Gorbachev had left power and the Soviet Union had been dissolved. The Cold War was over: the United States was now the world’s sole superpower.

America’s Unipolar Moment

Writing in 1989, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe marked ‘the triumph of the West’, the unabashed victory of liberalism, and the end of history as we had known it.73 The unipolar moment of the United States, however, was as much the result of the weakness of the rest of the world as of America’s own military strength. Nevertheless, with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the stage was left clear for two decades of unrestrained American foreign policy.

In 1991, President George Bush put it thus: ‘American leadership is indispensable. We must not only protect our citizens and our interests, but help create a new world in which our fundamental values not only survive but flourish. We must work with others, but we must also be a leader.’⁷⁴ Being ‘a leader’ meant that America was ready to use military force to uphold its liberal order. To that end, the United States now accounted for 40 per cent of the world’s total defence spending. At the same time as maintaining its immense strategic nuclear capability, its sustained investment in overseas military bases, eleven aircraft carrier battle groups – more than the rest of the world combined – a vast arsenal of cruise missiles, and advanced stealth bombers gave it an unrivalled capacity to project power around the globe.

Under America’s military umbrella, NATO expanded right up to Russia’s doorstep by granting membership to the Baltic states and many of the Soviet Union’s former satellites in Eastern Europe. In Asia, the United States bolstered its alliances with South Korea, Japan, and Australia, and deployed its navy in the Strait of Taiwan, in order to deter Chinese expansionism. In the Middle East, it built up its presence in the Persian Gulf in order to check the regional ambitions of Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government. Regimes that refused to comply with the American vision for world order had to risk the consequences. The US-led retaliation against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991 left the world awestruck as it watched waves of smart bombs and cruise missiles rain down on Baghdad. US air power was demonstrated again during the Yugoslav Wars (1991–9), when NATO intervened militarily to end Serbian attacks on Kosovo in 1999. Less high-profile operations were mounted all over the world, some to defend clearly defined American interests, others to uphold national prestige – most lay somewhere between the two. The US secretary of state Madeleine Albright justified such actions in 1998: ‘If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.’75

The United States also continued to dominate the key international organizations that regulated the economic order, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, established in 1995 to replace GATT. As the world’s most innovative economy, it took measures to reinforce protections for intellectual property rights, for example the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1994, as well as for the independence of the Internet with the establishment of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1998. The American political scientist Richard Rosecrance described such developments in terms of the rise of the US as a ‘virtual state’, one reliant less on trade in tangible goods and more on transnational companies that take the lead with technology and absorb the industries of other countries in vertically integrated production chains.76 His influential fellow scholar Joseph Nye stressed the importance of America’s soft power: the ability to lead through the example of its efficient and liberal governance.⁷⁷

Increasingly, critics of US-led globalization saw it as simply the latest incarnation of American imperial hegemony. As other Western states – perhaps most obviously France and Germany – became more wary of American unilateralism, resistance to the United States coalesced in the sphere of economics. In Western Europe, the first steps in economic and political integration may have originated in the conditions set by the United States for rolling out the Marshall Plan in 1948, but gradually one of the drivers for closer cooperation became frustration with American influence. One French finance minister, for instance, referred to the dominant position of the US dollar as the global reserve currency as an ‘exorbitant privilege’, because it allowed Washington to borrow cheaply abroad.

In 1973, the nine member states – including France, West Germany, and Britain – of the European Economic Community agreed to coordinate their foreign policies more closely, declaring: ‘The growing concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of a very small number of great powers mean that Europe must unite and speak increasingly with one voice if it wants to make itself heard and play its proper role in the world.’⁷⁸ Yet although the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 transformed the community, now comprising twelve states, into the European Union, the full political integration foreseen by the founding fathers of the European project remained incomplete. And the European monetary union, which instituted a single European currency the euro as an alternative to the US dollar, was shaky from its outset in 1990.

Meanwhile, the world’s second largest economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union was Japan. It tried to compete with America’s economic power by means of a robust, export-led industrial policy, but faced demographic stagnation. In China, however, the communist party retained its hold on power by embarking on a programme of industrialization and economic liberalization that saw the living standards of its population rise significantly – although its economy remained several times smaller than the United States, and depended heavily on American investors. These reforms, which were started in the late seventies by China’s de facto leader Deng Xiaoping, were accompanied by a newfound spirit of nationalism that saw the People’s Republic deliberately position itself as an alternative to the American-led global order.

At the same time as these developments in Eurasia, the domestic engine of American progress started to splutter. The United States had a balanced current account in 1990, but by 2000 it had incurred a vast deficit, to the tune of 4 per cent of its domestic production. The Americans were spending beyond their means and this was only possible because other countries financed the difference by buying US government bonds. By 1998, over 50 per cent of American treasury bonds were in foreign hands.79 This reflected the position of the dollar as the primary global reserve currency, raising concerns about the durability of that position. In terms of innovation, the American economy continued to be world leading, but it relied increasingly heavily on imported oil, Asian consumer goods, and European high-end products. Furthermore, investment was excessively concentrated in high-tech sectors, causing stock market bubbles and crashes. When the American sociologist Robert Putnam published his book Bowling Alone in 2000, he found that his compatriots were increasingly isolated and less empathetic towards one another. For many, as the gap between rich and poor widened, the American dream became unreachable.

In 1999, the American politician and publicist Pat Buchanan sounded a note of warning: ‘America’s leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers to ruin – from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new “crusades,” to handing out war guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before.’80 Two years later, Islamic terrorists struck at New York and the Pentagon – the symbolic hearts of American capitalism and militarism – killing almost 3,000 people. The most conspicuous attack on the American global order since the end of the Cold War had been mounted not by a powerful rival nation, but by a small group of religious fundamentalists.

An Age of Extremes

In the period between 1750 and 2000, a true global arena was shaped. Never before had the world’s continents been so connected – not just by ships, railways, and aeroplanes, but by trade, capital exchanges, personal travel, cultural interaction, and diplomacy. The fundamental cause of this transformation was the industrial revolution. The production of men and women was no longer dependent on their own hands or on animals. Horsepower per capita surged from below 0.4 in 1750, to 3 in 1900, and 120 in 2000.81 As a result, world economic production grew, in constant dollars, from about $130 billion in 1750 to $1,100 billion in 1900, and $41,000 billion in 2000.⁸² Average life expectancy increased from below thirty years in 1750, and thirty-three years in 1900, to sixty-nine years in 2000.⁸³ The world’s population expanded from around 600 million in 1750 to 1.5 billion in 1900, and then to 6 billion in 2000.⁸⁴ Transportation and communication became much faster. If it took over forty days on average to cross the Atlantic in 1750, this decreased to twenty days by 1800, five days in 1900, and less than five hours by 2000.⁸⁵ The industrial revolution was followed in the late twentieth century by the start of a digital revolution. In the context of such extraordinary developments, the assumption more than ever was that progress was based on rational behaviour – and therefore progress would prevail over darkness and bring peace.

These changes were accompanied by more intense diplomatic interaction. The number of international governmental organizations, for instance, grew from only a handful in the nineteenth century to around thirty-seven in 1900, and then to 6,556 in 2000.⁸⁶ Major peace conferences were held, as we have seen – in Vienna, in Paris, in San Francisco – which had lasting consequences. The principles of national sovereignty and self-determination were globally enshrined in law. The United Nations Charter of 1945 remains the most ambitious attempt to preserve peace by means of universal principles. But the world did not become more peaceful. The twentieth century was extremely bloody, not just in absolute terms but also if one measures the number of deaths as a proportion of the total world population. On the one hand, there was this steep acceleration in economic production, communication, and international organization. On the other hand, there was little if any change in the frequency of wars. Throughout the era, periods of about twenty years of relative stability continued to be followed by periods of about twenty years of significant conflict.

One of the reasons why the unprecedented progress did not seem to lead to durable peace was that it was not spread evenly over the globe. Growth in one place was often at the expense of another, or it elicited intense envy and distrust that found expression in conflict. Moreover, periods of economic growth and political confidence were inseparable from periods of recession, inflation, growing inequality, social unrest – which, in turn, impelled self-defeating policies of economic protectionism and ugly nationalism. ‘La terre est un vaste théâtre où la même tragédie se joue sous des noms différents,’ wrote Voltaire in 1756.87 The centuries following the industrial revolution witnessed no change in the nature of power politics or lessening of their effects; they merely became more extreme.