Starting Week 11

Dear Jeffrey Epstein,

Many of you are still working through Week 10 and earlier, but for those who are ready we offer Week 11, covering the period between 1940 and 1950.

No week in the course covers less time than this one. No week in the course has more material for you to cover. But I think all of you will understand why.

From a world historical point of view, the week begins with extension of the regional wars into a total, global war and then continues with the aftermath of that war. I spend two long presentations on the vital questions of why the war became global, and the strategies chosen by the principal warring powers. I do not spend much time recounting the individual campaigns or battles, although I have done that in other courses. Here the emphasis, as usual, is on the biggest 'why' questions. I do allude, though not in much detail, to the significance of unglamorous but vital choices and institutions about technology, production, and management. For those interested in learning more about the dry essence of "history from the middle," it is hard to better the recent synthesis by the historian Paul Kennedy on "Engineers of Victory."

The week extends to early 1950 as I tend to see the division of Europe immediately after the war, and the continued civil warfare in much of Asia, as substantially inevitable byproducts of this global war — part of its aftermath. Although with hindsight we see the emergence of the so-called "cold war" after World War II (George Orwell may have been the first to circulate the expression, in his 1945 essay on "You and the Atom Bomb"), this was the renewal under new circumstances of a familiar conflict, one that had already been dividing world opinion since 1919.

Although I regard a division of Europe and continued conflict in Asia as inevitable products of the global war, I do not regard the postwar choices as also being inevitable. Among the more consequential of those, surprising to many at the time, may have been the choices made by the United States of America in its intense engagement with the fate of Western Europe and comparative disengagement with the fate of China and much of East Asia, except for Japan. The future of Western Europe was very much uncertain to those experiencing it at the time. And as you will see, following the views of historians of this war like Odd Arne Westad, I also do not regard the outcome of the Chinese civil war as inevitable. The American government's judgments, for example, were highly attuned to its assessments of available leadership and opportunities in Western Europe and in places like China.

This course emphasizes the year 1950 as a breakpoint because of the way the Korean War would change the character of the 'cold war' into intense, mobilized preparations for World War III, with spillover effects of every kind in every part of the world. We stop this week before coming to that new precipice.

For this week, Week 11 of the course, the focus is on global war and its aftermath. Although the presentations spend little time in the mud and terrors of combat and massacres, they do reflect on the extent to which Henry Adams' earlier nightmarish visions, mentioned in Week 7, were becoming real. They notice how recently devised powers of destruction reached and exceeded the known limits of whatever qualities we associate with the term "humanity."

Best wishes,

Philip Zelikow

EFTA01144229

The Modem World: Global History since 1760 Course Team

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