Volume 54, Number 20 · December 20, 2007
Immoral Rearmament
By Richard J. Evans
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
by Adam Tooze
Viking, 802 pp., $32.95
Almost two decades have passed since the end of the cold war, and living in a unipolar world dominated by the US has begun to change the way scholars view the history of twentieth-century Europe. For someone in his mid-thirties, like the British historian Adam Tooze, the rise of America to the superpower status it has enjoyed for most of his adult life is the fundamental fact of the last century as well as the present one. Already in the decade from 1924 to 1935, the total national income of the US averaged three times more than that of Great Britain, nearly four times more than that of Germany, and around five times more than that of France or the Soviet Union. Disparities in living standards were less marked, but still striking. Over the same period, British per capita Gross Domestic Product was running at 89 percent of the comparable US figure, French at 72 percent, German at 63 percent, and Soviet at 25 percent.
Review, 4020 words
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