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“The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred” by Niall Ferguson
Penguin | Paperback | 816 pages | 0141013826
THIS WAS a book dense with ideas, packed with analysis and rich in research. It tells the story of the 20th century from the 1904 Sino-Japanese war through to the century’s denouement with the genocide in Bosnia and the economic ascendancy of Communist China. In between it gives unstinting descriptions of the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution, the genocide in Armenia and the horrors of the Third Reich’s ‘Final Solution’.
Ferguson argues that the wars of the twentieth century were characterised by ethnic hatred, rather than class-struggle, going right back to the Tsarist pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement from 1875 onwards. He argues that conflict was stimulated by the decline of Empires (e.g. the implosion of the Hapsburg empire which precipitated the 1st World War), that economic instability provided the source of friction between the rival ethnicities, and that the battleground was what he calls the ‘fault-lines’ between the dying empires. Thus we have major great power conflict in Central Europe, which started the century split between three empires and populations of chaotically mixed races and ethnicities; and by the end of the century was largely homogenised into nation states by the vicissitudes of German ethnic cleansing and Soviet forced resettlement in the years after the War. Likewise China saw great power rivalry in the East, both before the 2nd World War with the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, and afterwards with the inconclusive Korean conflict between the west and China.
It says in the acknowledgements at the end that the book was ten years in
the making. It certainly shows. The depth and breadth of research is
astonishing, and the book is a trial to read as a result. But the thesis is
compelling, and we should take Ferguson’s warnings about population
decline in Western Europe and the rise of Muslim immigration seriously.
Likewise the rise of China raises strategic challenges in Asia, with Taiwan a
likely flash-point if there is an economic downturn in China and the
Communist regime is tempted to play the nationalist card. 
THE BIG theme of the January 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was “Convergence”. Convergence refers to the dream of computer and consumer electronics manufacturers to provide home entertainment over a network seamlessly from any device to any device. It has become the holy-grail of the home-entertainment industry and is likely to a hotly contested battleground over the next few years.
I think that the cornerstone of this technology is plug-and-play wireless technology. We cannot expect consumers to do their own wiring and the configuration of network applications is notoriously fickle. An alternative is creating a wired network through the power cables in the wall.
There are a few models of how this would work.
Round the TV—music and video is streamed from any computer on the network to the TV in any room in the house.
Round the hi-fi—music is available on demand from any location in the house to any music player in the house.
Peer-to-peer—music is streamed from any computer to any computer.
A central server under the stairs—music and video is stored in a central location and streamed to any TVs and sound-systems in the house
Nobody currently seems to have all the pieces of the puzzle. Apple are far advanced with their Apple TV product and Airport Extreme wireless solution. Microsoft have XBox 360 and the mooted Home Server solution. There are numerous third-party components available, but interoperability is a huge bug-bear.
On top of that, nobody has addressed the central question which is what is the value proposition for the consumer? Certainly it is convenient to download movies over the Internet and play them in the living room, but is it any less expensive than renting a DVD and playing it on a low-cost DVD player? Not at the moment.
Also there are bandwidth issues with 802.11g wireless and it seems that high-quality streaming video will need the nascent 802.11n-standard router and network cards to be functional. But this is a reflection of the immaturity of the technology rather than a serious objection.
In the end it will come down to cost and convenience. There is work to do
on both fronts.
ITHINK when we look back on this period in say 50 years’ time we will look at early 21st Century climate change politics and reflect how utterly naïve we all were.
To give an example, on 12th January, 2006, it was reported that some German scientists have published a paper in which they claim that many common species of tree exhale methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a potent green-house gas and climate change scientists are urging us to control its emission. It appears that they are almost shooting in the breeze. We know that cattle emit enormous quantities of methane, now trees exhale it naturally, how can we possibly hope to control it?
This is purely a personal hunch, but I would say that the impact of industrialisation on global warming has been wildly overestimated. I would say that the earth’s geosphere is such a large and complex system that it is likely that we are just going through a perfectly natural period of warming. The sun could even have got hotter while we weren’t looking. If we want to get pious and start condemning industrial pollution that is fine. But blaming economic development for the ills of the planet to me misses the point. The point is that humans have always had to adapt to their environment, and we should be spending our resources on dreaming up clever ways to solve more pressing problems. How are we going to feed the estimated 10 billion people we expect to have by 2050? How are we going to conserve supplies of fresh water to water the crops we will need to cultivate and provide drinking water to our livestock and ourselves? How are we going to supply the energy that a planet of 10 billion souls will inevitably consume?
It is estimated that the Kyoto protocol and its successors will cost 30
billion dollars in foregone GDP over the next five years, for no economic
benefit. The only solution to our future resource crisis will be better
served by investing those lost billions in research and development. It is
likely that we will need more intelligent GM crops. It is likely that we will
need new sources of energy. It is likely that we will need new techniques to
safeguard water supplies. If the history of technological development is
anything to go by, the pollution problems we have will be solved as a direct
side-effect of new technologies. Robbing Peter to pay Paul must not be the
answer.
Content Feed
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October 2007—Health-care and life
expectancy...more
September 2007—The music industry is in
decline...more
August 2007—“Our Biotech Future” from
New York Review of Books...more
June 2007—Isaiah Berlin and “positive”
liberties...more
May 2007—Ten years is a long
time in politics...more
April 2007—Précis of “War of the
World”...more
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