Niall's saga.

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin, 880 pp., $35)

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NIALL FERGUSON's ponderous volume accompanies a TV series and is heavily punctuated by maps and statistical tables. Covering the 20th century, it starts in 1904 when, for the first time, an Asian power (Japan) defeated a European (really Eurasian) one (Russia); and it concludes by arguing that the real loser in the century was the West, and the real winner Asia, or more specifically the two population giants, India and China. The book also seeks to analyze the horrific record of violence during the century and tries to explain it by a complex psychosexual theory which I found difficult to follow.

Ferguson is good at writing big books, organizing a mass of historical detail and telling figures in a readable way. The War of the World certainly ought to be widely circulated, though it reminds me of the notorious exchange between the clever advocate, F. E. Smith, and the stupid judge. Judge: "I have listened carefully to your case, Mr. Smith, and I am none the wiser." Smith: "Possibly not, my Lord, but certainly better informed." One emerges from the book much better informed about the details but no clearer about the underlying causes of the cosmic disaster.

Ferguson will not be surprised that readers want to argue with him. Indeed he invites disagreement by his provocative assertions (he belongs to the school of A. J. P. Taylor, the notoriously provocative radical historian). In the first place, he exaggerates the strength of the West at the beginning of the century, if by the West he means its European core. In the years up to 1914 the three powers with the highest growth rates were Japan, Russia (especially non-European Russia, including the Caucasus), and America. Europe looked stronger than it was because of the vast territories of its (chiefly African) empires, but these were often a source of weakness, as was unforgettably demonstrated by Britain's misadventure of the Boer War. The empires were more important than any other factor in preventing European powers from acting in concert, and it was not until they were liquidated that the European Union could be founded.

As for Ferguson's contention that Asia has emerged the real victor of the 20th century, that is an easy guess to make at this stage, when both India and China are achieving spectacular growth rates. But it is the next quarter century that will provide the test. Long-term sustained growth, with all that flows from it in power and prosperity, depends on a tradition of freedom and individualism that produces entrepreneurial innovation. The lack of this tradition in Japan meant that she was unable, in the last quarter of the 20th century, to sustain the high growth achieved in the third quarter: The Japanese "miracle" underwent a diminuendo into near stagnation.

China, with a Communist regime that punishes individualism beyond a certain point, may go the same way as Japan, especially as she has chosen to achieve high growth mainly through old-style smokestack industries and low-cost manufacture of basic consumer goods. High-tech experimentation remains exclusively in the hands of the state, and what good did that do the old Soviet Union in terms of prosperity? India is likely to do better because it inherited the English tradition of personal freedom and is concentrating on the advanced industries and processes radiating from the revolution in communications. That seems to be a much better bet than China's sledgehammer strategy. And India does not suffer from the stultifying conformism of the Japanese elites who are terrified of getting out of step. On the other hand it has the burden of a bureaucratic tradition that has spawned anything up to 30 million desk-wallahs and generates more paperwork than the rest of the free world in its entirety.

My guess, unlike Ferguson's, is that by mid-21st century, the U.S.A. will still be the world's strongest and richest power, and have a population of 420 million--not too far behind India and China, whose population growth is decelerating very fast. In the 140 years between the end of the Civil War and the present, America's record of growth is impressive and the central factor in sustaining it is the high degree of freedom and individuality in society, politics, the media, the universities, and commercial competition. So long as America retains these assets, her performance is likely to remain formidable, and the degree to which India and China follow American patterns of freedom will determine their dynamism. Indeed, one point that strikes me, reading Ferguson's book, is the element of continuity despite all the tremendous shocks of the 20th century. At its beginning the City of London was the financial center of the world. In 2006 it is still remarkable how much of the world's money is processed in London; indeed, finance is now by far Britain's largest and most successful industry.

What about the violence and moral ignominy on which Ferguson rightly places so much stress? Though some of his analysis is plausible, I think he fails to identify the role of secularization. The three big killer regimes of the 20th century--Hitler's Reich, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's Red China, which slaughtered (at least) 120 million between them--were all stridently secular and anti-religious. So were most of the minor killer-regimes, like Pol Pot's Cambodia.

It is also significant that the origins of modern genocide are secular. Holy Russia had always permitted a degree of violent anti-Semitism but it was the increasingly secularized czarist state of the 1880s that systematized the pogroms. This was echoed, from about 1909, by the secular Young Turks regime in Turkey, which introduced genocide against the Armenians then and, on a much larger scale, in 1915; this was followed by similar genocide against the Greek minority under the secular dictator Kamal Ataturk. There was a re-echo in Soviet Russia, where Stalin employed race-removal and genocidal policies from the late 1920s.

Hitler's brand of Viennese anti-Semitism, with its stress on ridding Germany of the "bacillus" of Jewish moral disease, had its roots in the 19th-century public-health movement and the fanatical interest in eugenics that sprang from the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" preached by the Social Darwinians. Modern genocide, though sometimes colored with old-fashioned religious prejudice, was (and is) essentially secular. The kind of eugenics preached by Shaw and Wells long before the rise of Hitler did not exclude the elimination of the unfit. Even the kind of anti-Semitic and anti-white genocide advocated by the present Iranian regime is only superficially Islamic: Its fundamental drive is secular power-politics.

The lesson of the 20th century, in my view, is that humanity, even with religious restraints, is a force for horror as well as progress. Without them, its turpitude knows no bounds. I recall the somber words of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner: "If ever belief in God disappears, and the image of God is eradicated from human minds, we will become nothing more than incredibly clever apes--and the ultimate fate of humanity will be too horrible to contemplate."

Mr. Johnson is the author most recently of Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney.