Deluge offers a new international history of the years after 1916, the moment at which the international order began to reorient itself around the pivot of American power. To understand what they were up against, we need to examine the preceding period in which the dominance of an American-centered world order first appeared. : The Deluge (9780141032184) by Adam Tooze,Adam Tooze and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at great. A century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace. Yet Tooze’s perspective is anything but narrowly American. As I described in Wages of Destruction, their challenge was of an unprecedented scale and this enormous effort was the backhanded compliment they paid to the order they were challenging. Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction and The Deluge amount together to a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916. This would be the order against which Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Imperial Japan would hurl themselves in the 1930s.

In 1928, analysts as diverse as Winston Churchill, Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler, agreed that what had emerged from the Great War was a new international order framed by the power of the United States and the British Empire, and anchored on the European continent by the military predominance of the French Republic. But this is not how it appeared at the time. Ten years after World War I ended, what kind of international order had been established? With hindsight it must seem as though the postwar settlement was weak and lacked solid foundations.

The deluge by adam tooze