The failure of the democratic powers opened a strategic window of opportunity in the early 1930s. The price that the collapse of this great democratic alliance would exact defies estimation. Layer by layer, piece by piece, issue by issue, that coalition had disintegrated. It was a coalition based on military power, political commitment, and money. “World War I had seen the first effort to construct a coalition of liberal powers to manage the vast unwieldy dynamic of the modern world. Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America’s centrality-including the slide into fascism- The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I. From the day the United States enters the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.Ī century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. The infinite demands for men and matériel reached into countries far from the front. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. A searing and highly original analysis of the First World War and its anguished aftermath.

The deluge by adam tooze