re: WW1 history buffs: Good book for the library

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No other event since perhaps the discovery of the New World has done more to mold the world in which we live today than WWI

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British historian Niall Ferguson makes a compelling argument in The Pity of War: Explaining World War One about how the world would be a better place today if Imperial Germany had won the war.

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In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson makes a simple and provocative argument: that the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England’s fault. Britain, according to Ferguson, entered into war based on naïve assumptions of German aims—and England’s entry into the war transformed a Continental conflict into a world war, which they then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement.

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He argues that Germany had no global war aims, that she would have certainly won the war without first British, then American intervention, but would have done little more than establish the same type of European trade union that modern Germany is rapidly creating. And given what Britain gave up, in terms of Empire, lives, and economic retardation, the war must therefore be seen as a complete waste in British terms.