Home > Work > The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)
41 " the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. "
― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)
42 " the unexpectedness of war "
43 " recondite. "
44 " confabulations "
45 " spurious "
46 " cognate "
47 " meme "
48 " The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highly optimized system crashed in what was, without doubt, the biggest financial collapse of all time. (Unlike in 1929 or in 2008, the world’s major stock markets were forced to suspend trading for no less than five months.) "
49 " Hohenzollerns, "
50 " Habsburgs, "
51 " People born in other countries accounted for 14.6 per cent of the population in 1910 compared with 12.9 per cent at the 2010 census. "
52 " the German Workers’ Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was ‘the maintenance and increase of [German] living space’ (Lebensraum) against the threat posed by Czech Halbmenschen (‘half-humans’). This was in fact a response to the creation of a Czech National Socialist Party in 1898. "
53 " The Emperor and his ministers might dance Western dances and even, in violation of traditional Japanese propriety, smile Western smiles. But their underlying and deadly earnest aim was always to wipe the smiles off European faces. "
54 " tenuously "
55 " inchoate, "
56 " fin-de-siècle "
57 " by the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working as newspaper editors, journalists, theatre directors and academics. Indeed, they were under-represented in only one of Germany’s elite occupational groups, and that was the officer corps of the army. Anti-Semitism, then, was sometimes nothing more than the envy of under-achievers. "
58 " At Tsushima on May 27–28, 1905, the Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō sent two-thirds of the Russian fleet – 147,000 tons of naval hardware and nearly 50,000 sailors – to the bottom of the Korea Strait. "
59 " the Japanese had won by being more European than the Russians; their ships were more modern, their troops better disciplined, their artillery more effective. To Leo Tolstoy, the titan of Russian letters, Japan’s victory looked like a straightforward triumph of Western materialism. "
60 " knout "