Adam Tooze

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018. Winner of the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize 'Majestic, informative and often delightful ... insights on every page' Yanis Varoufakis, Observer The definitive history of the Great Financial Crisis, from the acclaimed author of The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction. In September 2008 the Great Financial Crisis, triggered by the collapse of Lehman brothers, shook the world. A decade later its spectre still haunts us. As the appalling scope and scale of the crash was revealed, the financial institutions that had symbolised the West's triumph since the end of the Cold War, seemed - through greed, malice and incompetence - to be about to bring the entire system to its knees. Crashed is a brilliantly original and assured analysis of what happened and how we were rescued from something even worse - but at a price which continues to undermine democracy across Europe and the United States. Gnawing away at our institutions are the many billions of dollars which were conjured up to prevent complete collapse. Over and over again, the end of the crisis has been announced, but it continues to hound us - whether in Greece or Ukraine, whether through Brexit or Trump. Adam Tooze follows the trail like no previous writer and has written a book compelling as history, as economic analysis and as political horror story.

How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

Crashed

When the news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow in Covid-19's wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked, and even gold was sold. In a matter of weeks, the world's economy was brought to an abrupt halt by governments trying to contain a spiralling public health catastrophe. Flights were grounded; supply chains broken; industries from tourism to oil to hospitality collapsed overnight, leaving hundreds of millions of people unemployed. Central banks responded with unprecedented interventions, just to keep their economies on life-support. For the first time since the second world war, the entire global economic system contracted. This book tells the story of that shutdown. We do not yet know how this story ends, or what new world we will find on the other side. In this fast-paced, compelling and at times shocking analysis, Adam Tooze surveys the wreckage, and looks at where we might be headed next.

How the Coronavirus Made a Financial Revolution

Shutdown

A bold new interpretation of the First World War and the birth of the American Century In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no end to the conflict in sight, societies around the world began to buckle. The strain of total war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, shattering old empires and redrawing maps across Europe and the Middle East. A century after the outbreak of fighting, Yale historian Adam Tooze takes an entirely new perspective on “the war to end all wars,” focusing on the closing years of the conflict and its aftermath up to the Great Depression. This tumultuous period saw hopes for lasting peace and liberal internationalism collide with violent upheavals and the ultimate rise of totalitarian regimes. And it saw the emergence of a new global order in which all the major powers—the war's winners and losers alike—saw their fates bound up with those of the United States, now the world's dominant economic force. All-embracing, powerfully argued, and deeply instructive,The Deluge is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots of America's fraught relationship with the world.

The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

The Deluge

Deluge

"Masterful . . . [A] painstakingly researched, astonishingly erudite study…Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism." —Financial Times An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages of Destruction is a chilling work of originality and tremendous scholarship that set off debate in Germany and will fundamentally change the way in which history views the Second World War.

The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

The Wages of Destruction

Dans ce nouvel opus, Adam Tooze decrit et analyse les changements essentiels survenus pendant et apres la Premiere Guerre mondiale - le plus important, qui constitue le theme principal du livre, etant l'accession des Etats-Unis a une position de suprematie economique, politique et morale sans precedent. Premiere economie mondiale, l'Amerique devient a partir de 1916 le banquier de la guerre, animee, selon l'auteur, par le dessein tres clair d'exercer son hegemonie financiere sur les pays de l'Entente devenus dependants de ses prets. Avec la disparition de ses empires naguere dominants au profit du grand empire americain et de sa preeminence economique et militaire, l'Europe se trouve ravalee au rang de province; en 1918, le President Wilson est en mesure de jouer le role d'arbitre du nouvel ordre mondial auquel il aspirait en imposant la paix au monde entier, avec son projet fetiche et idealiste de Societe des Nations. Pourtant, quand vient le moment d'endosser concretement sa position de leader mondial, l'Amerique recule: le Congres americain ne ratifie pas le traite de paix; Washington n'integre pas la Societe des Nations. Selon l'auteur, les Etats-Unis n'ont pas encore atteint la maturite democratique necessaire pour assumer leurs responsabilites. Il faudra attendre une generation, sous les presidences de Roosevelt et Truman, pour que ce soit le cas. Une fois le traite de Versailles signe par l'Allemagne, une seconde guerre etait-elle inevitable? L'insistance des Allies pour obtenir des reparations (et celle des Etats-Unis pour obtenir le remboursement des dettes de guerre) contribua-t-elle a l'echec de la Republique de Weimar? Deux questions essentielles auxquelles l'auteur repond par la negative. A la fin des annees 20, les Europeens etaient en chemin vers un retour a la normalite, et des hommes d'Etat tels G. Stresemann en Allemagne et A. Briand en France travaillaient patiemment a une consolidation des liens qui deboucherait sur la CEE dans les annees 50. Mais alors qu'en 1928, Hitler et Trotski desesperaient de voir un jour la chute de l'ordre capitaliste, l'annee suivante, la faillite de Wall Street declenchera une nouvelle serie d'evenements qui entraineront la sortie de la Grande-Bretagne de l'etalon-or en 1931 et plongeront l'Allemagne dans le chaos economique et politique. Ceci etant, Adam Tooze recuse la vision, defendue par certains historiens modernes, de l'entre-deux-guerres comme d'une periode ou l'Europe renoua avec ses demons passes et rejeta le liberalisme democratique au profit de l'autocratie et du fascisme. Pour lui, les principales nations d'Europe et d'Asie lutterent alors pour s'adapter a la modernite et a la geopolitique moderne, s'acheminant tant bien que mal vers la creation d'une structure qui garantirait la securite internationale - sans parvenir, au final, a couper sur le plan financier, le cordon avec Washington. De maniere generale, l'auteur n'hesite d'ailleurs pas a s'inscrire en faux par rapport aux recits conventionnels de la periode (il montre aussi que ce n'est pas le traite de Versailles mais celui de Washington, en 1922, qui scella le nouvel ordre mondial regi par la suprematie des Etats-Unis).

Un Nouvel Ordre Mondial

Le Deluge. 1916-1931

Michael Geyer

The conflict that ended in 1945 is often described as a 'total war', unprecedented in both scale and character. Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of the Second World War adopts a transnational approach to offer a comprehensive and global analysis of the war as an economic, social and cultural event. Across twenty-eight chapters and four key parts, the volume addresses complex themes such as the political economy of industrial war, the social practices of war, the moral economy of war and peace and the repercussions of catastrophic destruction. A team of nearly thirty leading historians together show how entire nations mobilized their economies and populations in the face of unimaginable violence, and how they dealt with the subsequent losses that followed. The volume concludes by considering the lasting impact of the conflict and the memory of war across different cultures of commemoration.

The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 3, Total War: Economy, Society and Culture

In this groundbreaking new history, Tooze provides the clearest picture to date of the Nazi war machine and its undoing. 16-page photo insert.

Adam Tooze

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