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May-June 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Dare we say the rest is history? Graduating with first-class honors in 1985, he was a demy (a foundation scholar) at Magdalen College until 1989. He then spent two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, where he learned German, worked on his dissertation (subsequently his first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927), and worked as a journalist for British and German newspapers—using a variety of pseudonyms, to avoid academic reproach. At this point, he took up a research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, soon afterwards moving to a lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, and in 2000, he was appointed professor of political and financial history. Two years later he jumped the Atlantic to take the Herzog chair in financial history at the Stern Business School of New York University (where he was voted “Professor of the Year” in 2003). In 2004, the year he arrived at Harvard, Time magazine included him in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Ferguson is a bonnie and beamish lad—genial, open, and charming. His admirers have suggested that in a movie he might be played by Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. In Alan Bennett’s recent play and film, The History Boys, he is the model for the contrarian teacher Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore. But there is no reason he could not play himself. He certainly has the media savvy and experience. In his films he uses to great effect his mellifluous actor’s voice, Oxonian wrapped in unmistakable burr. As he does his good looks: In the film of Empire, he treks all over the former British colonies, looking very cool, from the Caribbean to Africa to India, speaking from dungeons and castles, from churches, gardens, and deserts, from parades, bazaars, and ritual ceremonies, from dugout canoes and rickshaws, and even while clambering up peaks, all the while overflowing with names, dates, customs, exotic anecdotes, and even the occasional familiar chestnut, such as “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” To those inclined to turn up their noses a bit at the concept of a media historian, Simon Schama, University Professor of art history and history at Columbia, and himself a media celebrity in much the same mold as Ferguson, snaps, “Well, let them try it themselves before they sniff. Trying to be a historian and a public intellectual is the most demanding, challenging task one can undertake. My professor, Jack [Sir J.H.] Plumb, and a mentor of Niall’s, taught that reaching a wide public is the most exacting challenge you can have as a scholar, without compromising the truth and the complexities of what you want to say. Niall does that extremely well, both on the printed page and on television. I am his number- one fan!” On the other hand, it will come as no surprise that some of the concepts expounded by Ferguson rub many people the wrong way. Indeed, the very word “empire,” it seems, touches off severe reactions. To take but a couple of examples, the British journalist Johann Hari, under the headline “There can be no excuse for Empire,” writes in the Independent: “For over a decade now, Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right, arguing that the British Empire from the Victorian period on was a good thing with some unfortunate ‘blemishes’ that have been over-rated and over-stated.” In a review in the Guardian, entitled “The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale,” Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge, says that Ferguson, whom she refers to as a “neocon ideologue,” is rewriting history, “driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right….Colonialism—a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement—is rewritten into a benign developmental mission….” Ferguson is used to these imprecations. Although he did write a published letter chiding “Horrible Hari” (the epithet alludes to the Horrible Histories series by British author Terry Deary), Ferguson says this kind of criticism comes with the (imperial) territory. We cannot deal here with all these charges. Anticolonialism, after all, is Gopal’s career. But take, for example, Gopal’s charge of slavery—an integral element, she says, of empire. In Ferguson’s film, one of the most significant points made is that Britain abolished slavery in its empire. Returning to Empire, the book, one reads in the section on the Clapham Sect about this evangelical group’s success in bringing about abolition:
He goes on to discuss the broad and diverse leadership of the campaign for abolition, and its unstoppable resolve, so that the slave trade was abolished in 1807 (and slavery itself in 1833). “From now on,” he continues, “convicted slavers faced, by a nice irony, transportation to Britain’s penal colony in Australia.” (In short, “indentured labour.”) Furthermore, despite the anti-Western imperial scenarios constructed by his critics, Ferguson (without denying the undeniable) is emphatic about the benefits that accompanied British rule, including active efforts to eliminate female infanticide and sati (the self-immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre). “Without the spread of British rule around the world,” he continues, “it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.”
Ferguson is resolute in his defense of the relative stability and calm created by the British empire. In fact, one of the three principal causes of the “extreme violence of the twentieth century,” he writes in The War of the World, was the fracturing of empires—the British, yes, but also the others, the Axis powers, “the worst empires in all history.” (The two other determinants he cites—to simplify the vast tapestry of this book—were the violent coming apart of multiethnic societies and the boom and bust of economic volatility.) If the British empire was far from unblemished—and Ferguson describes the blemishes in great detail—it was also impressively noble in its “finest hour” against the Axis powers; and
The War of the World takes the reader on a long and gruesome march through the century-long racial tensions and economic uncertainties that led to the Second World War and the “descent” of the West: that is, the descent into unimaginable horror, and the concomitant political rise of the East. His conclusion essentially is that the war would have been less costly in every way if the West, instead of fretting and temporizing, had taken pre-emptive action in, say, 1938. Hitler’s goal, he writes,
However, “Hitler wanted not merely a Greater Germany; he wanted the Greatest Possible Germany. Given the very wide geographical distribution of Germans in East Central Europe, that implied a German empire stretching from the Rhine to the Volga. Nor was that the limit of Hitler’s ambitions, for the creation of this maximal Germany was intended to be the basis for a German world empire that would be, at the very least, a match for the British Empire.” But the British and their allies continued to dither. “Thus,” in Ferguson’s view, “the only one of the options that was never seriously contemplated was pre-emption—in other words, an early move to nip in the bud the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany…. [T]he tragedy of the Second World War is that, had this been tried, it would almost certainly have succeeded.”
But war is not always inevitable, as Ferguson stresses in his magisterial earlier book, The Pity of War. The book’s title is taken from Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”:
Ferguson plays on the subtle double meaning of the word: pity as the infinite sadness of war, and perhaps even more heartbreaking—pity as the avoidability of war. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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