ADAM TOOZE
The American Century 1917-2017
Three years ago the anniversary of 1914 was met with sorrow, puzzlement and nostalgia. Images of that year’s long summer evoke a world we have lost, a belle époque torn to pieces on the battlefields in a bloody autumn. Three years on, there is another centenary, but it comes without sepia tint. Instead, we recall the revolutionary year of 1917 through the grainy black-and-white shots of the bullet-swept streets of revolutionary Petrograd, as the harbinger of a century that was dynamic, violent and unforgiving. If 1914 dug a trench—a divide with an old world to which there’s no going back—1917 was instead a trap door. We dropped through into a brave new world, a world stirred by global ideological conflict and currents of economic and political change on a scale never before seen—a world dominated by new powers, and above all by the United States. One hundred years on, the shock of 1917 still reverberates, even as that “new order” disintegrates before our eyes.