The Deluge review Adam Tooze's bold analysis of the Great War

With ambition and clarity Adam Tooze examines America's role in the global convulsion that was the first world war

It was David Lloyd George who first described the first world war as "the deluge". In a speech to munitions workers on Christmas Day 1915 he acknowledged that the world crisis had become an earthquake, a convulsion of nature, which was unleashing forces that statesmen were powerless to control, much less to stop.

Fourteen months later, his words came true. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 set loose a terrible concatenation of events: the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks; Brest-Litovsk; the collapse of the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman empires; the Treaty of Versailles; the creation of new nation states in Europe and the Middle East; revolution and counter-revolution in central Europe; civil war and famine in Russia; the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923, and the ensuing German hyperinflation. It was not until 1925 that some sort of order was restored only then to be swept aside by the Great Depression and the Nazis.

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