The War of the World

This is a book and a tv series - Channel 4, 8 pm Mondays - that is based on theories by Niall Ferguson that the 20th century was basically one long war - a century of conflict that started with the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 and didn't stop until the fall of the Milosevich regime in 2000. Subtitled History's age of hatred, it focuses on the wars in the so-called years of peace and shows that the Third World War did happen but in the Third World (that's a nifty line - I didn't write it - it's from the Radio Times interview). I've long had this theory that in the future historians would see both world wars as 2 acts of the same play but this takes the idea further than that. Of course this idea of a century of conflict is nothing new - the age from the 1680s through to 1815 could be best described as an era of non-stop Anglo-French conflict in various guises and theatres, but history these days starts with the invention of the moving image.
Channel 4's blurb writes
Niall Ferguson, described by The Times as the ‘most brilliant British historian of his generation’, presents a major series proposing an explosive challenge to common assumptions about the 20th Century.
Professor Ferguson argues that in the last century there were not in fact two World Wars and a Cold War – but a single Hundred Years’ War.
It was not nationalism that powered the conflicts of the century, but empires. It was not ideologies of class or the advent of socialism that was the big idea of the century, but race. It was ultimately ethnic conflict that underpinned 20th-century violence.
And finally, it was not the West that triumphed as the century progressed; in fact power slowly and steadily migrated towards the new empires of the East.

Guardian book review