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segunda-feira, 13 de dezembro de 2021

Adam Tooze strikes again: many, many books on the first globalization and the ascent of Germany

Chartbook #58: More reading on WWI

some great suggestions

Adam Tooze

Dec 13

Yesterday’s post about World War I has triggered a remarkable crop of suggestions from readers. They are so good I thought I would pass them on.

It is holiday season after all. Perhaps there are one or two things here that folks might consider for xmas stockings etc.

From Michael Pettis (with many thanks):

“I just read your excellent Urkatastrophe piece, Adam, and it occurred to me that you ought to read, if you haven’t, Charles Arthur Conant’s “The United States in the Orient: the nature of the economic problem” (1900). Conant was a well-known and highly influential (at the time) American economist, and along with Kemerrer the most famous of the “money doctors” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I often include him with JA Hobson as the leading proponent of the “excess savings”/imperialism thesis, except that while Hobson opposed imperialism, Conant embraced it. I mention his book because he discusses Russia and the Russian economy a great deal in the book, and his Russia isn’t a decrepit Russian on the edge of revolution but rather one of the most dynamic economies in the world and the only serious rival to US/UK dominance. There is a lot of other very interesting stuff in his book, but as I read your piece it was the comments on Russia that most made me think of Conant.”

You can read it here, for free.

From Policy Tensor a typical hard-hitting riposte, which I in fact largely agree with. With more head space I would have expanded this point.

Policy Tensor @policytensor

@M_C_Klein @adam_tooze Wonder why @adam_tooze ignores high racialism as a structuring force in 1890-1914, which was on par with Liberal ideology, if indeed not even more important. World history by conceived by contemporaries as racial history, world politics as the struggle between the races. 1/

The book this immediately brings to mind is this wonderful analysis of the global color line by Lake and Reynolds.

A lovely reading list of World War I classic by J. Van Wyck

J. Van Wyck @TheRealJVanWyck

Worth reading @adam_tooze's latest post on WWI below. The WWI scholarship is vast but I do think the best path is still: Hobson -> Lenin -> Albertini -> Fischer -> Joll -> Clarke. Gives you contours of debate. 'The Deluge' is also vital & provocative.

Adam Tooze @adam_tooze

Far from 1914 neatly aligning democracies v. Autocracies, advanced v. backward combatants, an essential driver of mobilization was fact that smart progressive people could make arguments for/against both sides. Sign up for Chartbook #57 here: https://t.co/IfVuX7TplI https://t.co/ugzqJEpQO9

I agree with Erik Grimmer-Solem that I should have included his brilliant new book amongst the references of the blogpost. It really is highly recommended.

Erik Grimmer-Solem @grimmer_solem

@adam_tooze Imperial mindscapes—imagined geographies of upward mobility, prosperity, and security—are crucial for understanding globalization in the age of empire and its breakdown in 1914, esp. for Germany. Have a look at my Learning Empire (CUP 2019)

It is part of a crop of relatively recent books about Germany and globalization that have finally shown the way out of the dead end that was the Sonderweg (special path) debate.

Top of the list would be Dirk Bonker’s Militarism in a Global Age, a brilliant and eye-opening comparison of German and American navalism in the moment of high imperialism.

From the economic side, Cornelius Torp’s work is crucial:

From the side of cultural and political history, Sebastian Conrad blazed a trail.

Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South saw connections where no one had seen them.