the postwar German belief that a major cause of defeat was the lack of a charismatic leader like the French and British had.
I actually missed this point on the read-through - very interesting. And very strange to British (or French) eyes, the Germans thinking of Hitler as a way to get their own Lloyd George.
I'm pretty sure he specifically contrasts it with what the British and French thought the Germans should think, though I forget now exactly what that was.
Also, on a personal note, I appreciate that the book group is loose enough that no one was bothered I missed my deadline. I don't know what kind of monster rents out a beautiful beach cottage and doesn't provide WiFi, but it was indeed accessible for my 90-year-old grandmother, which was the reason we were there. And my life got extra tough and bumpy when we got home, though not as bad as being in the trenches! Maybe that will be my new mantra. At any rate, thanks, friends.
It really is surprising how much of 20th century history can be explained by Germany being Britain's creepy stalkerish fan.
"Look! I broke into your house and left a load of dead natives in your kitchen!"
not as bad as being in the trenches!
"Just because I can give multiple orgasms to the furniture just by sitting on it, doesn't mean that I'm not sick of this damn war. The blood... the noise... theendless poetry..."
Because I covered a fair bit of this ground in graduate school, most of what I'm learning that was new is about domestic British politics. I hadn't realize Lloyd George was considered especially significant as a political leader.
6: Maybe we can have a special Deluge post to discuss how the last moments of that season's last episode are the most moving bit of tv of all time. (I've said that before, I know, but it can hardly be said enough. I should see if Blackadder's streaming somewhere. Maybe taking up tv would make me more cheerful.)
Lloyd George thought Hitler was Germany's very own Lloyd George.
Nice summary Thorn! Totally comprehensible. And agreed about Blackadder.
A really important thing I learned from this bit of the book was that the US economy during WW1 was completely unlike it was in WW2. Obviously, Allied and Federal spending surged. But GDP didn't grow much - there wasn't the kind of transformative, strong-into-every-finger industrialisation there was in WW2.
With Allied spending pushing demand up, but no big increase in aggregate supply, that meant a lot of inflation, and things like the wannabe superpower/financial fairy godmother shipping hundreds of thousands of GIs over the Atlantic and saying "Lafayette, nous voila. [awkward pause] Got any ammo?"
I am not near the book, but there's a table in it with the data on this point.
Also, I was impressed by Tooze managing to weave the links between India and Ireland, the old world systems school fascination with gold/silver standard interactions, and OMG THEOSOPHIST, just to bring out the sheer wackiness of the early 20th C.
That was a good summary!
Random thoughts: There were definitely Indians who saw a lot of solidarity with the Irish; an early form of the Indian national flag is supposedly based on the Irish tricolor (although oddly an early form of the flag that didn't use such similar colors). And for the inevitable and unnecessary local connection, there's a section of Pittsburgh's streets that was clearly inspired by the Home Rule movement.
I was reminded that Herbert Hoover was, before his presidency, known for his competency and humanity. Weird.
4 makes me think now is the time to bring up Hetalia. I'm sure bob has opinions. Seconding 11.last: the first half of the 20th century was so, so wacky.
I hadn't noticed "Home Rule Street" before. I had always assume that the alley in Squirrel Hill was "Ira Way", but now I assume it's "IRA Way."
I was reminded that Herbert Hoover was, before his presidency, known for his competency and humanity. Weird.
The international relief effort for the 1921 famine in the USSR was led by, among others, Herbert Hoover, Fridtjof Nansen and Vidkun Quisling.
Home Rule isn't well (or possibly at all) signed; I think it's just one of those forested hillside alleys connecting two streets. Gladstone and Parnell exist in a meaningful sense, though.
14: Oh, ha, I forgot that Quisling was involved. Didn't Nansen realize he was a git, or am I projecting?
14: And a lot of those wacky White Russians floating around China eventually floated out on Nansen passports. It was a hell of a time.
16: apparently not: wiki says Nansen thought he was "absolutely indispensable".
Seconding 11.1.
11 last: I admit I didn't fully understand the machinations around currency standards and Liberty Bonds. One really important thing that emerges in these chapters though is the gold standard: with only the US still on gold, and all those war debts denominated in gold dollars, the Europeans were compelled eventually to return to gold, else the debt service would be impossible*; hence (spoilers) the massive postwar deflation, and deflationary problems that continued through into the Depression.
*Interestingly, Japan was not so compelled, but went back on gold anyway, at massive cost, because apparently, they were that committed to the new world order.
Also really important with India: Britain granting them (some) freedom to impose tariffs was a massive deal: India as a captive market for British exports was one of the foundations of British power. Similarly, the upshot of the silver standard business was that the rupee appreciated about 12% against the pound, so Indian exports and labor weren't as cheap to Britain anymore.
Speaking of wackiness, Arctic explorer as world statesman!
Bear Grylls for PM. Make it happen, Knifecrime.
18: Huh. Amazing to see how many respected people from that time turn into utter monsters in WWII. I think it was in an earlier chapter that Tooze mentioned Petain being unnecessarily tough on his troops/brutal to his enemies, but I got the impression that he was still beloved as a hero of the war. Oops.
Also, more asshole Wilson: IIRC he was talking about Ireland as the only remaining hurdle to democratic cooperation, the hundreds of millions of brown people in the British and French empires being self-evidently not an issue.
22: if anything that underestimates Nansen's stature in newly-independent Norway. The guy was closer to being a demigod. They used him as a model for statues of the country's patron saint, St Olaf the Perpetual King of Norway.
Did someone say leniency over missed deadlines? I'll probably finish my reading this weekend, not sure about the summary.
4 makes me think now is the time to bring up Hetalia. I'm sure bob has opinions.
Hetalia avoided like the plague. Not because of ethnic jokes, I am not entirely sure why. Just looks unnecessary.
It has a heavy reputation as yaoi/BL doujinshi fodder, before that crowd was better serviced with sports shows.
27: Let's not make a habit of it now.
26 reminds me of Jan Sibelius, national hero of newly independent Finland.
While I'm chain-posting: I was also struck by the smoothness of the passage of manhood suffrage in Britain: careful slow cross-party work led by the Tories (so they could keep a handle on it). I'd always assumed the British 'reputation for good governance' was (apologies to present company) self-serving bullshit, but the British emerge in this book as being generally canny and competent and occasionally actually noble.
19: I explicitly didn't get any more detailed than I did in my summary because I was afraid of getting things wrong! I'm definitely not sure I follow how it all works, but the general outline in the chapter was helpful.
I found both chapters difficult to mentally hold in much detail because they had a lot going on simultaneously in different places that may or may not be linked, which I like as a way of describing how the world actually is/works but does not make for simple summarizing.
I hadn't noticed "Home Rule Street" before. I had always assume that the alley in Squirrel Hill was "Ira Way", but now I assume it's "IRA Way."
There's a great joke to be made here but it would only be got by listeners to a specific podcast.
(Subset that I'm worried I'm coming across as "I'm just a stupid girl!" here and I don't mean that to be the message. I'm not at my sharpest these days in general and there's a lot of history here that's new to me just because I know this era on sort of a social level but not with deep knowledge, partly because I'm fuzzier on wars than a person should be and partly because it's taught poorly and I haven't done independent work, but this book makes it all as accessible as it can be and is clearly insightful too.)
((I don't know why I said "subset," though. That one I'll chalk up to sleep deprivation/general life mess.))
I haven't contributed to this thread because I don't feel like I have anything particularly intelligent to say about these two chapters. I'll just second 10 and 20. Thanks for the summary Thorn.
21: I don't have the book with me right now, but I seem to recall Tooze mentioning objections from conservatives along exactly those lines: "What's the point in having an empire if we can't treat our colonies as captive markets?"
36: One more parentheses and it's antisemitic.
21, 37.2: Yes, it's in chapter 9 about Indian independence rather than about the economy. That was the point after which everyone had to sort of shrug, unhappily or supportively, that whatever was happening sure wasn't empire like it had been. There were plenty in the former camp.
It's a great summary Thorn.
On 33: World War I is in the near the end of the school year rush; I know that I got it in very broad strokes, at mostly "the Empire" working as a whole, instead of the specific dominions with their own issues. (Of course, that's largely because "Oh, the Europeans were fighting again, but bigger" was the dominant narrative until the US joins the war--the domestic front was engaging in the 1910s, with all of the constitutional amendments, women's suffrage, etc.)
37.2: Yes, he does. Thing is, the British didn't have a choice. I read this, from Tooze's bibliography, and it was also a big eye-opener. The stuff chronicled in this chapter is the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
31. As I'm sure you've noticed, he documents the ugly side of the British political system when he gets to the bit about throwing Montague to the lions.
I wonder if the British could have delayed the break up of the empire by summarily withdrawing from the middle east in 1919 and telling the allies to do what they liked with it. Probably not by more than a few years if that. Also, presupposes hindight, or more insight that could reasonably be expected of those people at that date. Also, delaying the break up of the empire would have been a bad thing.
Let me add myself to everyone congratulating Thorn on making sense of some very dense and confusing material.
I found both chapters difficult to mentally hold in much detail because they had a lot going on simultaneously in different places that may or may not be linked
Yeah, this. I feel like it would have been much easier to read my chapters if I had read the rest of the book, so I would know what the point of various digressions or details were in the wider scheme of things. Not to say that those details were unappreciated, just difficult to compress.
Also, reading Tooze would inevitably lead me to want to play Victoria 2, interrupting my reading. Bad idea.
12. I read somewhere that Hoover described himself as a liberal until some time after WWII; and felt very conflicted about abandoning the label.
"Even the liberal Herbert Hoover..." is a phrase we don't hear often enough.
I think Bill Bryson put it "the only man for whom attaining the White House was a bad career move."
So did anyone at all like Wilson? Obviously this section was mostly about Lloyd George, who clearly didn't, but the Entente was stuck with him because they'd made the decision early to rely on the US economy rather than just fight as well as they could on their own, like Germany was trying to do. Every decision seemed to involve a lot of paranoia about what he would do and then mostly he'd just ignore it all.
48. Peripheral actors, but Czechs and Slovaks did; I would guess Catholic Yugoslavs as well. The main train station in Prague was called Wilsonovo before communism.
Nice summary of dense chapters. I liked the episode where US silver paid UK debts owed to India, which I had not known about at all.
49: Generally, separatist and minority movements liked his rhetoric. Did anyone who actually interacted with him like him?
I think you're right about Yugoslavia, lw. Actually I looked up something I half-remembered about Zagreb having some tribute to him and yeah.
48: Almost all I know about him is from this book, so not sure. In this chapter he's giving the British uphill for not implementing Home Rule in Ireland. Why hadn't they done that? Because it would trigger, oh, an army mutiny and a civil war. Asshole.
19:*Interestingly, Japan was not so compelled, but went back on gold anyway, at massive cost, because apparently, they were that committed to the new world order. Yeah, roughly, in a very conservative administration. The Frederick Dickinson on IR mentioned before devotes a chapter, but it disappointed me on 1920s Japanese economy. And so, just starting
Preface
"In early 1920, during the full rush of the May 4 movement in China, Thomas Lamont of Wall Street's J. P. Morgan and Company traveled to Asia
to promote an American-led international banking consortium that would monopolize foreign loans to China. The greatest obstacle to American
plans was Japan, which had aggressively pushed its own unilateral loans in China during the great European war."
A high bar for anybody, but especially for people who lived most of their adult life in New Jersey.
54: I'm reading the Dickinson now, on that very chapter. Metzler is definitely next on the list.
53: The British weren't choosing civil war vs. no civil war. They were choosing the easier (for them) civil war out of the two possible civil war options.
This Dickinson, if anyone's interested. It's easy reading, with handy chapter summaries if you're lazy have no attention span in a hurry.
57: I agree that they were choosing between civil wars, but I'm not sure if the other possibility would have been easier.
The mutiny thing always surprises me. The British military generally had good discipline about that sort of thing. Why didn't they crack down on those threatening mutiny? Why roll over? Too much support from Ulster MPs? I can only assume that to some degree the powers that be in England, even if they thought Home Rule was necessary or correct in theory, were disturbed by the idea of Catholics ruling over English-speaking Protestants.
Yes. And, as it turns out later, even the idea of Protestant Germans being ruled by Slavic Catholics worried a great many people.
It might have helped if everyone in Poland changed their last name to "Hapsburg".
54: What was the conclusion he drew? I couldn't really tell from the summary.
59: ISTR that Ulstermen and Anglo-Irish were heavily over-represented in the officer corps as well. It surprised me too, though.
Yes. Like Southern planters were over-represented in the U.S. officer corps before the Civil War and for similar reasons.
62: He doesn't say much. I agree with Bob that it's disappointing.
the interwar gold standard was distinct from its predecessor in one important respect: it was fashioned in Washington, not London. As such, it was, in both global perception and reality, an integral component of the new post-1919 multilateral system led by the United States[...]looked to the reestablishment of parity not as an avenue toward Americanization but to follow the trajectory of "civilized" nations.
Maybe we can have a special Deluge post to discuss how the last moments of that season's last episode are the most moving bit of tv of all time.
Or we could use this one! Anyway, I agree.
From the Mark Metzler mentioned above, and why I wanted more economic history
The Russo-Japanese War loans, critical in securing a continental empire for Japan, would continue to shape Japan's financial situation for the next twenty-five years. Two of the 1905 loans, with a combined value of £60 million, were due to mature in 1925. In 1931 the immediate postwar loan of £25 million would mature. It was the need to refinance the former two loans that led the Japanese government to turn to J. P. Morgan and Company in 1924, initiating a new era of Japanese borrowing from New York financial markets. It was the need to refinance the latter loan that helped force the schedule on Japan's return to gold convertibility, at Morgan and Company insistence, in the bitter depression year of 1930
Other interesting notes from the Metzler
Takahashi Korekiyo, finance genius, in 1904 had to go 1st to British having failed to get war loans in America on his route Honolulu-San Francisco-NY-London. A big part of the problem was racism and anti-semitism in the House of Morgan and Teddy R.
Jacob Schiff gets a Wiki paragraph, engineering the loans
[Schiff] subsequently extended loans to the Empire of Japan in the amount of $200 million, through Kuhn, Loeb & Co.[5] These loans were the first major flotation of Japanese bonds on Wall Street, and provided approximately half the funds needed for Japan's war effort.[9] Schiff made this loan partly because he believed that gold was not as important as national effort and desire in winning a war, and due to the apparent underdog status of Japan at the time; no European nation had yet been defeated by a non-European nation in a modern, full-scale war. It is quite likely Schiff also saw this loan as a means of answering, on behalf of the Jewish people, the anti-Semitic actions of the Russian Empire, specifically the then-recent Kishinev pogrom.
Takahashi after the war (1906) then sent his only daughter to live with the Schiffs for three years in America, and corresponded with Jacob through the 1920s.
Update: I'm caught up reading, but I might not get the summary out until Wednesday night.
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