Niall Ferguson

Not to be confused with Niels Ferguson.

Niall Ferguson
Ferguson at the Special World Debate on 2 July 2010.
Born	Niall Campbell Ferguson (1964-04-18) 18 April 1964 Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Fields	International history, Economic and Financial history, American and British imperial history
Institutions	Harvard University Stanford University New York University New College of the Humanities Jesus College, Oxford London School of Economics
Alma mater	Magdalen College, Oxford
Known for	Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
Influences	Thomas Hobbes, Norman Stone, A. J. P. Taylor, Kenneth Clark, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, David Landes
Spouse	Sue Douglas (1987–2011, divorced) Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2011–present)
Website NiallFerguson.com

Niall Campbell Ferguson (/ˈniːl ˈfɜːr.ɡə.sən/; born 18 April 1964) is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His specialities are international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. Ferguson's books include Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and Civilization: The West and the Rest, all of which he has presented as Channel 4 television series.

In 2004, he was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In previous years, he has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. Ferguson was an advisor to John McCain's U.S. presidential campaign in 2008, and announced his support for Mitt Romney in 2012 and has been a vocal critic of Barack Obama.

Early life

Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964. His father was a physician and his mother a physics teacher. He attended The Glasgow Academy. He was brought up as, and remains, an atheist.

Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side. His journalist maternal grandfather encouraged him to write. Unable to decide on studying an English or a history degree at university, Ferguson cites his reading of War and Peace as persuading him towards history.

University of Oxford

Ferguson received a Demyship (scholarship) at Magdalen College, Oxford. While there he wrote the 90-minute student film The Labours of Hercules Sprote and became best friends with Andrew Sullivan, based on a shared affinity for right-wing politics and punk music. He had become a Thatcherite by 1982, identifying the position with "the Sex Pistols' position in 1977: it was a rebellion against the stuffy corporatism of the 70s." While at university "He was very much a Scot on the make … Niall was a witty, belligerent bloke who seemed to have come from an entirely different planet," according to Simon Winder. Ferguson has stated: "I was surrounded by insufferable Etonians with fake Cockney accents who imagined themselves to be working-class heroes in solidarity with the striking miners. It wasn't long before it became clear that the really funny and interesting people on campus were Thatcherites."

He graduated with a first-class honours degree in history in 1985. He received his D.Phil from Magdalen College in 1989, and his dissertation was entitled "Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924".

Career

Academic career

Ferguson is a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and currently a Professor of History at Harvard University.

In May 2010, he announced that the Education Secretary Michael Gove in the UK's Conservative/Lib Dem government had invited him to advise on the development of a new history syllabus—"history as a connected narrative"—for schools in England and Wales. In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Fellow academics such as Benjamin Wallace-Wells, an editor of The Washington Monthly, have commented on Ferguson's early book on the Rothchilds:

"The House of Rothschild remains Ferguson's only major work to have received prizes and wide acclaim from other historians. Research restrains sweeping, absolute claims: Rothschild is the last book Ferguson wrote for which he did original archival work, and his detailed knowledge of his subject meant that his arguments for it couldn't be too grand."

John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War era historian, characterised Ferguson in 2004 as having unrivaled "range, productivity and visibility" at the same time as criticising his work as being "unpersuasive". Gaddis goes on to state that "several of Ferguson's claims, moreover, are contradictory". Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had praised Ferguson as an excellent historian, but criticised him as a "nostalgist for empire".

Ferguson responded to the above criticisms in a Washington Post "Live Discussions" online forum in 2006. A list of his scholarly affiliations includes:

• 1983–1986 M.A. Magdalen College, Oxford
• 1985–1989 DPhil Magdalen College, Oxford
• 1987–88 Hanseatic Scholar, Hamburg and Berlin
• 1989–90 Research Fellow, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
• 1990–92 Official Fellow and Lecturer, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge
• 1992–2000 Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Jesus College, University of Oxford
• 2000–02 Professor of Political and Financial History, University of Oxford
• 2002–04 John Herzog Professor in Financial History at Stern School of Business, New York University
• 2004–present Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School
• 2010–11 Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics, located within LSE IDEAS, beginning in 2010

Business career

In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an investment management consultant by GLG Partners, to advise on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions. GLG is a UK-based hedge fund management firm headed by Noam Gottesman.

Career as commentator

In October 2007, Ferguson left The Sunday Telegraph to join the Financial Times where he was a contributing editor. He also writes for Newsweek.

Ferguson has often described the European Union as a disaster waiting to happen, and has criticised President Vladimir Putin of Russia for authoritarianism. In Ferguson's view, certain of Putin's policies, if they continue, may stand to lead Russia to catastrophes equivalent to those that befell Germany during the Nazi era.

Books

The Cash Nexus

In his 2001 book, The Cash Nexus, which he wrote following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, Ferguson argues that the popular saying, "money makes the world go 'round", is wrong; instead he presented a case for human actions in history motivated by far more than just economic concerns.

Colossus and Empire

In his books Colossus and Empire, Ferguson presents a reinterpretation of the history of the British Empire and in conclusion proposes that the modern policies of the United Kingdom and the United States, in taking a more active role in resolving conflict arising from the failure of states, are analogous to the "Anglicization" policies adopted by the British Empire throughout the 19th century. In Colossus, Ferguson explores the United States' hegemony in foreign affairs and its future role in the world. The American writer Michael Lind accused Ferguson of engaging in apocalyptic alarmism about the possibility of a world without the United States as the dominant power and of a causal disregard for the value of human life. Lind was referring to part of Colossus where Ferguson advocated creating a bigger American military by conscripting the unemployed, prisoners and illegal immigrants, which Lind strongly disapproved of.

War of the World

The War of the World, published in 2006, had been ten years in the making and is a comprehensive analysis of the savagery of the 20th century. Ferguson shows how a combination of economic volatility, decaying empires, psychopathic dictators, and racially/ethnically motivated (and institutionalised) violence resulted in the wars and the genocides of what he calls "History's Age of Hatred". The New York Times Book Review named War of the World one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2006, while the International Herald Tribune called it "one of the most intriguing attempts by an historian to explain man's inhumanity to man". Ferguson addresses the paradox that, though the 20th century was "so bloody", it was also "a time of unparalleled [economic] progress". As with his earlier work Empire, War of the World was accompanied by a Channel 4 television series presented by Ferguson.

The Ascent of Money

Published in 2008, The Ascent of Money examines the long history of money, credit, and banking. In it he predicts a financial crisis as a result of the world economy and in particular the United States using too much credit. Specifically he cites the China–America dynamic which he refers to as Chimerica where an Asian "savings glut" helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money. While researching this book, in early 2007, he attended a conference in Las Vegas where a hedge fund manager stated there would never be another recession, Ferguson stood up and challenged him on it. Later the 2 agreed a 7 to 1 bet, that there would be another recession. Ferguson would pay $14,000 if he lost while his winnings would be $98,000. "I said, 'Never is a very bad timeframe,'" Ferguson said. "'Let's say five years.'" Ferguson collected his winnings; having researched the book and written several academic papers on economics in history, he was confident that another recession would occur before 2012.

Civilization

Published in 2011, Civilization: The West and the Rest examines what Ferguson calls the most "interesting question" of our day: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?" The Economist in a review wrote:

"Mr Ferguson starts with the overwhelming success of European civilisation. In 1500 Europe's future imperial powers controlled 10% of the world's territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which together generated almost 80% of the wealth. This stunning fact is lost, he regrets, on a generation that has supplanted history's sweep with a feeble-minded relativism that holds “all civilisations as somehow equal”.

Ferguson attributes this divergence to the West's development of six "killer apps" largely missing elsewhere in the world – "competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic". Ferguson compared and contrasted how the West's "killer apps" allowed the West to triumph over the "the Rest". Thus, Ferguson argued the rowdy and savage competition between European merchants created far more wealth than did the static and ordered society of Qing China; that the tolerance extended to thinkers like Sir Isaac Newton in Stuart England had no counterpart in the Ottoman Empire where Takiyuddin's “blasphemous” observatory was demolished for contradicting the teachings of Islam which ensured that Western civilization was capable of making scientific advances that Islamic civilization never could; and because respect for private property was far stronger in British America than it ever was in Spanish America, which led to the United States and Canada becoming prosperous societies while Latin America was and remains mired in poverty. However, Ferguson also argued that the modern West had lost its edge and the future belongs to the nations of Asia, especially China, which has adopted the West's "killer apps". Ferguson argues that in the coming years will see a steady decline of the West and China and the rest of the Asian nations will be the rising powers. A related documentary Civilization: Is the West History? was broadcast as a six-part series on Channel 4 in March and April 2011.

Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist

Kissinger The Idealist, Volume I, published in September 2015, is a definitive biography of Henry Kissinger based on unprecedented access to his private papers. The book starts with a quote from a letter which Kissinger wrote in 1972. The book examines Kissinger's life from being a refugee and fleeing Germany in 1938, to serving in the US army as a "free man" in World War II, to studying at Harvard and writing the longest senior thesis in the history of the university. The book also explores the history of Kissinger joining the Kennedy administration and later becoming critical of its foreign policy, to supporting Nelson Rockefeller on three failed presidential bids, to finally joining the Nixon administration. The book also includes Kissinger's early evaluation of the Vietnam war and his efforts to negotiate with the North Vietnamese in Paris. The Economist wrote in a review about The Idealist: "Mr Ferguson, a British historian also at Harvard, has in the past sometimes produced work that is rushed and uneven. Not here. Like Mr Kissinger or loathe him, this is a work of engrossing scholarship." In a negative review of The Idealist, the American journalist Michael O'Donnell wrote :

"Ferguson also writes, “If Henry Kissinger really was so keen for a government job after the 1968 election, was leaking sensitive information about the Vietnam negotiations to Richard Nixon—who was by no means guaranteed to win—the obvious way to get it?” The first response to this strange rhetorical question is to point out that no presidential candidate is guaranteed to win an election. The second is to note that Kissinger hedged his bets, simultaneously approaching the campaign of the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey and dangling files of opposition research on Nixon, whom he claimed to loathe. (One of Humphrey’s staffers called this double dealing “grotesque.”) And the third response to Ferguson’s question is to emphasize the opportunistic nature of Kissinger’s movements. He had picked another candidate in Rockefeller, but Rockefeller lost his party’s nomination. So Kissinger set about wooing the Republican and Democratic candidates in any way he could. Ingratiating oneself to both presidential campaigns at the eleventh hour seems like exactly the way to get a government job."

Opinions and research

World War I

In 1998, Ferguson published The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months. This is an analytic account of what Ferguson considered to be the ten great myths of the Great War. The book generated much controversy, particularly Ferguson's suggestion that it might have proved more beneficial for Europe if Britain had stayed out of the First World War in 1914, thereby allowing Germany to win. Ferguson has argued that the British decision to intervene was what stopped a German victory in 1914–15. Furthermore, Ferguson expressed disagreement with the Sonderweg interpretation of German history championed by some German historians such as Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, who argued that the German Empire deliberately started an aggressive war in 1914. Likewise, Ferguson has often attacked the work of the German historian Michael Stürmer, who argued that it was Germany's geographical situation in Central Europe that determined the course of German history.

On the contrary, Ferguson maintained that Germany waged a preventive war in 1914, a war largely forced on the Germans by reckless and irresponsible British diplomacy. In particular, Ferguson accused the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey of maintaining an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the war or not, and thus confusing Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the war. Ferguson accused London of unnecessarily allowing a regional war in Europe to escalate into a world war. Moreover, Ferguson denied that the origins of National Socialism could be traced back to Imperial Germany; instead Ferguson asserted the origins of Nazism could only be traced back to the First World War and its aftermath.

Ferguson attacked a number of ideas that he called "myths" in the book. They are listed here (with his counter-arguments in parentheses):

• That Germany was a highly militarist country before 1914 (Ferguson claims Germany was Europe's most anti-militarist country).
• That naval challenges mounted by Germany drove Britain into informal alliances with France and Russia before 1914 (Ferguson claims the British chose alliances with France and Russia as a form of appeasement due to the strength of those nations, and an Anglo-German alliance failed to materialize due to German weakness).
• That British foreign policy was driven by legitimate fears of Germany (Ferguson claims Germany posed no threat to Britain before 1914, and that all British fears of Germany were due to irrational anti-German prejudices).
• That the pre-1914 arms race was consuming ever larger portions of national budgets at an unsustainable rate (Ferguson claims that the only limitations on more military spending before 1914 were political, not economic).
• That World War I was, as Fritz Fischer claimed, a war of aggression on the part of Germany that necessitated British involvement to stop Germany from conquering Europe (Ferguson claims that if Germany had been victorious, something like the European Union would have been created in 1914, and that it would have been for the best if Britain had chosen to opt out of war in 1914).
• That most people were happy with the outbreak of war in 1914 (Ferguson claims that most Europeans were saddened by the coming of war).
• That propaganda was successful in making men wish to fight (Ferguson argues the opposite).
• That the Allies made the best use of their economic resources (Ferguson argues that the Allies “squandered” their economic resources).
• That the British and the French had the better armies (Ferguson claims the German Army was superior).
• That the Allies were more efficient at killing Germans (Ferguson argues that the Germans were more efficient at killing the Allies).
• That most soldiers hated fighting in the war (Ferguson argues most soldiers fought more or less willingly).
• That the British treated German prisoners of war well (Ferguson argues the British routinely killed German POWs).
• That Germany was faced with reparations after 1921 that could not be paid except at ruinous economic cost (Ferguson argues that Germany could easily have paid reparations had there been the political will).

Another controversial aspect of The Pity of War is Ferguson's use of counterfactual history also known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history. In the book, Ferguson presents a hypothetical version of Europe being, under Imperial German domination, a peaceful, prosperous, democratic continent, without ideologies like communism or fascism. In Ferguson's view, had Germany won World War I, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire as well as the world's dominant financial power.

The French historians Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker were dubious about much of Ferguson's methodology and conclusions in The Pity of War, but praised him for the chapter dealing with the executions of POWs, arguing that Ferguson had exposed a dark side of the war that until then had been ignored. The American writer Michael Lind wrote about The Pity of War:

"Like the historian John Charmley, who expressed the same wish in the case of World War II, Ferguson belongs to the fringe element of British conservatism that regrets the absence of a German-British deal in the first half of the 20th century that would have marginalized the United States and might have allowed the British Empire to survive to this day. According to Ferguson, Britain should have stayed out of World War I and allowed Imperial Germany to smash France and Russia and create a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Middle East. The joke is on Ferguson’s American conservative admirers, inasmuch as he laments the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany because it accelerated the replacement of the British Empire by the United States of America and the eclipse of the City of London by Wall Street."

The American historian Gerhard Weinberg in a review of The Pity of War strongly criticized Ferguson for advancing the thesis that it was idiotic for Britain to have fought a Germany that posted no danger. Weinberg accused Ferguson of completely ignoring the chief foreign policy aim of Wilhelm II from 1897 onwards, namely Weltpolitik (World Politics") and argued that was absurd for Ferguson to claim that allowing Germany to defeat France and Russia would had posed no danger to Britain. Weinberg wrote that Ferguson was wrong to claim that Germany's interests were limited only to Europe, and maintained that if the Reich did defeat France in 1914, then Germany would had taken over the French colonies in Asia and Africa which would had definitely affected the balance of power all over the world, not just in Europe. Finally, Weinberg attacked Ferguson for claiming that the Tirpitz Plan was not a danger to Britain and that Britain had no reason to fear Germany's naval ambitions, sarcastically asking if that was really the case, then why did the British redeployed so much of their fleet from around the world to the North Sea and spend so much money building warships in the Anglo-German naval arms race? Weinberg accused Ferguson of distorting both German and British history and ignoring any evidence that did not fit with his thesis that Britain should had never had fought Germany, stating that The Pity of War was interesting as a historical provocation, but was not persuasive as history.

Rothschilds

Ferguson wrote two volumes about the prominent Rothschild family:

• The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money's Prophets: 1798–1848
• The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849–1999

The books won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and were also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.

Counterfactual history

Ferguson sometimes champions counterfactual history, also known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history, and edited a collection of essays, titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), exploring the subject. Ferguson likes to imagine alternative outcomes as a way of stressing the contingent aspects of history. For Ferguson, great forces don't make history; individuals do, and nothing is predetermined. Thus, for Ferguson, there are no paths in history that will determine how things will work out. The world is neither progressing nor regressing; only the actions of individuals determine whether we will live in a better or worse world. His championing of the method has been controversial within the field. In a 2011 review of Ferguson's book Civilization: The West and the Rest, Noel Malcolm (Senior Research Fellow in History at All Souls College at Oxford University) stated that: "Students may find this an intriguing introduction to a wide range of human history; but they will get an odd idea of how historical argument is to be conducted, if they learn it from this book."

Henry Kissinger

In 2003, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries, letters, and archives for what Ferguson calls a "warts-and-all biography" of Kissinger. In 2015, he published the first volume in a two-part biography titled Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist from Penguin Press.

The thesis of this first volume was that Kissinger was very much influenced in his academic and political development by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and especially by an interpretation of Kant that he learned from a mentor at Harvard University, William Yandell Elliott.

The British Empire

Ferguson is critical of what he calls the "self-flagellation" that he says characterises modern European thought.

"The moral simplification urge is an extraordinarily powerful one, especially in this country, where imperial guilt can lead to self-flagellation," he told a reporter. "And it leads to very simplistic judgments. The rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources. Did Senegal ultimately benefit from French rule? Yes, it's clear. And the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all."

In the related TV documentary of 2003, Empire Ferguson argued that the mantle of the British Empire as the world's foremost power was passed on to the United States during the Second World War, which led to Ferguson favorably reciting Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden"-written in 1898 to praise the United States for becoming an imperial power by conquering the Philippines from Spain-as just as relevant today as it was in 1898. Ferguson argues that the United States should being an imperial power like Britain was, conquering other people's countries for what Ferguson insists is their own good, and complains that far too often Americans refuse to accept that nation has an imperialist role to play in the modern world.

Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at the University of London, has stated that it is correct to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to 'rehabilitate empire' in the service of contemporary great power interests".

Bernard Porter attacked Empire in The London Review of Books as a "panegyric to British colonialism". Ferguson in response to this drew Porter's attention to the conclusion of the book, where he writes: "No one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the 'ethnic cleansing' of indigenous peoples." Ferguson argues however that the British Empire was preferable to the alternatives:

"The 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century too the empire more than justified its own existence. For the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly – and they admitted it themselves – far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them."

In November 2011 Pankaj Mishra reviewed Civilisation: The West and the Rest unfavourably in the London Review of Books. Ferguson demanded an apology and threatened to sue Mishra on charges of libel due to allegations of racism.

The British historian Jon Wilson challenged Ferguson's claim that people today only remember the evil done by the British Empire while ignoring the good. Wilson used as examples the fact that public opinion in modern Britain still remembers the murders of white settlers in Kenya by the Mau Mau while the far greater violence inflicted by British forces on the Kikuyu people has almost no place in British memory of the 1950s; that the 13, 000 Europeans who died building the "Burma Death Railroad" in 1942-44 for the Japanese are still remembered in Britain, but the suffering of the 80, 000 Asian slaves who also died during the construction of the "Burma Death Railroad" is ignored by almost all British historians; that the heroism of the Anzac corps at the Battle of Gallipoli is still celebrated as an example of how the Empire came together in World War I while the heroism of the Indian troops in various battles in the same war is mentioned only in passing; and the suffering of the British civilians who died in the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta" is remembered far better in modern Britain than the deaths of millions of Indians in various famines in the 19th and 20th centuries. Wilson used all these examples to argue that Ferguson's claim that the memory of the British Empire is unjustly maligned in modern Britain is simply wrong, and on the contrary that even today most people in modern Britain only remember the the story of the British Empire in a way that portrays whites as victims and assigns lesser value to the lives of non-white people. Wilson was particularly critical of the way in which Ferguson in the TV series Empire when speaking of the "Burma Death Railroad" talked only of the suffering of British, Australian, Dutch and New Zealand POWs and civilians at the hands of the Japanese while having nothing to say about the suffering of the far greater number of Chinese, Indians, Burmese, Thais, Malayans, and Indonesians whom the Japanese also enslaved and who were treated with equal cruelty.. Ferguson presented the "Burma Death Railroad" in Empire in quasi-religious terms as part of the "crucifixion" of the British, Australians and New Zealanders taken prisoner by the Japanese at Singapore, a time of terrible suffering at the hands of the vicious Japanese that proved the essential goodness of the empire. Wilson wrote this one segment of Empire revealed much about Ferguson's thinking and views about the British empire.

Along the same lines, Wilson came very close to accusing Ferguson of racism. Wilson argued that in the series Empire, the viewer is presented with a rapid juxtaposition of images of various places in India, the Caribbean and Africa that emphasises how "exotic" and "strange" these places are. Wilson argued that the effect of this rapid-fire parade of "exotic" images without any effort at historical explanation is to suggest to the viewer that places like the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and Africa had a geography, but no history before the British. Likewise, Wilson argued that Ferguson had no interest in examining the British Empire from the perspective of the colonised and in Empire presented the entire imperial project largely through British eyes. In support of this accusation, Wilson noted that in Empire Ferguson had actors read out the writings of various people to give the viewer a sense of how the Empire worked in practice, and that almost of the people Ferguson chose were white. Wilson noted in the six hours that make up Empire, hundreds of people are mentioned, but only six were non-white. Wilson maintained to truly understand the British Empire, the historian needed to give equal weight to both the British who ruled the empire and the millions of people whom they ruled, and that Ferguson by only focusing on the former at the expense of the latter gave a very distorted picture of the empire. Wilson argued that Ferguson presented the places conquered by the British as "the Other"; timeless places where nothing ever changed or happened until the British arrived that were inhabited by people who were incorrigibly alien and strange, and thus in need of British rule. Citing the Palestinian-American literacy critic Edward Said, Wilson accused Ferguson of engaging in Orientalism.

About Ferguson's claim that Britain "made the modern world" by spreading democracy, free trade, capitalism, the rule of law, Protestantism and the English language, Wilson charged that Ferguson never explained just precisely how this was done. Wilson argued that was because Ferguson had utterly no interest in the history of the people ruled by the British, and therefore could not perceive that the interaction between the colonisers and the colonised; namely that in places like India, the Indians embraced aspects of British culture and rule that were appealing to them while rejecting others that were unappealing. Wilson argued this interaction between the rulers and the ruled is a more complex and correct way of understanding the empire that contradicts Ferguson's one-sided picture of the British "transforming" India that portrays the British as active and the Indians as passive. Wilson charged that Ferguson failed to look at the empire via non-white eyes because to do so would be to challenge his claim that Britain "made the modern world" by imposing its values on "the Other", and that the history of the empire was far more complicated than the simplistic version that Ferguson presented of the British "transforming" the world. Finally Wilson argued that Ferguson was completely wrong that the British rule was good for India. Wilson argued India was fairly prosperous under the Mughal Empire, and that "British rule pauperised India" as he maintained under the British Empire millions of Indians were impoverished in order to make Britain rich, an aspect of the history of the Raj that he accused Ferguson of intentionally ignoring.

Islam and "Eurabia"

Matthew Carr wrote in Race & Class that

"Niall Ferguson, the conservative English [sic] historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled 'Eurabia?',"

in which he laments the 'de-Christianization of Europe' and the secularism of the continent that leaves it 'weak in the face of fanaticism'." Carr adds that

"Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his Oxford college as another symptom of 'the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom",

and that in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled 'The End of Europe?',

"Ferguson struck a similarly Spenglerian note, conjuring the term 'impire' to depict a process in which a 'political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes – when the energies come from outside into that entity'. In Ferguson's opinion, this process was already under way in a decadent 'post-Christian' Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam."

In 2015, Ferguson deplored the Paris attacks committed by Islamic State terrorists, but stated he was not going to "stand" with the French as he argued that France was a lost cause, a declining state faced with an unstoppable Islamic wave that would sweep away everything that tried to oppose it. Ferguson compared the modern European Union to the Western Roman Empire, describing modern Europe as not that different from the world depicted by Edward Gibbon in his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ferguson wrote that:

"Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today...Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith."

Ferguson wrote the mass influx of refugees into Europe from Syria was a modern version of the Völkerwanderung when the Huns burst out of Asia and invaded Europe, causing millions of the Germanic peoples to flee into the presumed safety of the Roman Empire, smashing their way in as the Romans attempted unsuccessfully to stop the Germans from entering the empire. Ferguson wrote the only difference between modern Europe and the Roman Empire was that Gibbon was wrong to claim the Roman Empire collapsed slowly as maintained the collapse of the Roman empire was swift and violent just as the collapse of modern European civilization would likewise be, ushering in a new dark age.

Iraq War

Ferguson supported the 2003 Iraq War, and he is on record as not necessarily opposed to future western incursions around the world.

"It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out".

Economic policy

In its 15 August 2005 edition, The New Republic published "The New New Deal", an essay by Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government's fiscal and income security policies:

• Replacing the personal income tax, corporate income tax, Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA), estate tax, and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, amounting to the amount of FRST that a household with similar demographics would pay if its income were at the poverty line. See also: FairTax
• Replacing the old age benefits paid under Social Security with a Personal Security System, consisting of private retirement accounts for all citizens, plus a government benefit payable to those whose savings were insufficient to afford a minimum retirement income
• Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a Medical Security System that would provide health insurance vouchers to all citizens, the value of which would be determined by one's health
• Cutting federal discretionary spending by 20%

In November 2012, Ferguson stated in a video with CNN that the U.S. has enough energy resources to move towards energy independence and could possibly enter a new economic golden age due to the related socio-economic growth—coming out of the post-world economic recession doldrums.

Ferguson was an attendee of the 2012 Bilderberg Group meeting, where he was a speaker on economic policy.

Exchanges with Paul Krugman

In May 2009, Ferguson became involved in a high-profile exchange of views with economist Paul Krugman (2008 Nobel Laureate in Economics) arising out of a panel discussion hosted by PEN/New York Review on 30 April 2009, regarding the U.S. economy. Ferguson contended that the Obama administration's policies are simultaneously Keynesian and monetarist, in an "incoherent" mix, and specifically claimed that the government's issuance of a multitude of new bonds would cause an increase in interest rates.

Krugman argued that Ferguson's view is "resurrecting 75-year old fallacies" and full of "basic errors". He also stated that Ferguson is a "poseur" who "hasn't bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It's all style, no comprehension of substance."

In 2012, Jonathan Portes, the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said that subsequent events had shown Ferguson to be wrong: "As we all know, since then both the US and UK have had deficits running at historically extremely high levels, and long-term interest rates at historic lows: as Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, the (IS-LM) textbook has been spot on."

Later in 2012, after Ferguson wrote a cover story for Newsweek arguing that Mitt Romney should be elected in the upcoming US presidential election, Krugman wrote that there were multiple errors and misrepresentations in the story, concluding "We're not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here – just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?" Ferguson denied that he had misrepresented the facts in an online rebuttal. Matthew O'Brien countered that Ferguson was still distorting the meaning of the CBO report being discussed, and that the entire piece could be read as an effort to deceive.

In 2013, Ferguson, naming Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O'Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias and Justin Wolfers, attacked "Krugman and his acolytes," in his three-part essay on why he hates Paul Krugman, whose title is originally made by Noah Smith.

Remarks on Keynes' sexual orientation

At a May 2013 investment conference in Carlsbad, California, Ferguson was asked about his views on economist John Maynard Keynes's quotation that "in the long run we are all dead." Ferguson stated that Keynes was indifferent to the future because he was gay and did not have children. The remarks were widely criticised for being offensive, factually inaccurate, and a distortion of Keynes' ideas.

Ferguson posted an apology for these statements shortly after reports of his words were widely disseminated, saying his comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive". In the apology, Ferguson stated: "My disagreements with Keynes's economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life."

Personal life

Ferguson married journalist Susan Douglas, whom he met in 1987 when she was his editor at the Daily Mail. They have three children Felix, Freya, and Lachlan.

In February 2010, news media reported that Ferguson had separated from Douglas and started dating former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ferguson and Douglas divorced in 2011. Ferguson married Hirsi Ali in September 2011 and Hirsi Ali gave birth to their son Thomas in December 2011. In an interview in April 2011, Ferguson complained about the media coverage of his relationship with Ali, stating: "No, I never read their shitty coverage of people's private lives. I don't care about the sex lives of celebrities, so I was a little unprepared for having my private life all over the country. So yeah, I was naive, yeah. Because you have to stoop to conquer," – but will never write for it again. "That's because I'm a vendetta person. Yes, absolutely. Implacable."

Ferguson dedicated his book Civilization to "Ayaan". In an interview with The Guardian, Ferguson spoke about his love for Ali, who, he writes in the preface, "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world". Ali, he continued,

...grew up in the Muslim world, was born in Somalia, spent time in Saudi Arabia, was a fundamentalist as a teenager. Her journey from the world of her childhood and family to where she is today is an odyssey that's extremely hard for you or I [sic] to imagine. To see and hear how she understands western philosophy, how she understands the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, of the 19th-century liberal era, is a great privilege, because she sees it with a clarity and freshness of perspective that's really hard for us to match. So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

Ferguson's self confessed workaholism has placed strains on his personal relations in the past. Ferguson has commented that:

...from 2002, the combination of making TV programmes and teaching at Harvard took me away from my children too much. You don't get those years back. You have to ask yourself: "Was it a smart decision to do those things?" I think the success I have enjoyed since then has been bought at a significant price. In hindsight, there would have been a bunch of things that I would have said no to.

In an interview, Ferguson described his relationship with the left: "No, they love being provoked by me! Honestly, it makes them feel so much better about their lives to think that I'm a reactionary; it's a substitute for thought. 'Imperialist scumbag' and all that. Oh dear, we're back in a 1980s student union debate."

Ferguson was the inspiration for Alan Bennett's play The History Boys (2004), particularly the character of Irwin, a history teacher who urges his pupils to find a counterintuitive angle, and goes on to become a television historian. Bennett's character "Irwin" gives the impression that "an entire career can be built on the trick of contrariness."

Bibliography

Publications

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Ferguson, Niall (2015). Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1-59420-653-5. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2013). The Great Degeneration. Penguin Books. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2011). Civilization: The West and the Rest. The Penguin Press HC. ISBN 978-1-59420-305-3. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2010). High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-246-9. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2008). The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1-84614-106-5. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2006). The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9708-7.  American ed. has the title: The war of the World: Twentieth-century Conflict and the Descent of the West OCLC 70839824 (also a Channel 4 series)
• Ferguson, Niall (2005). 1914. Pocket Penguins 70s S. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 0-14-102220-5. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2004). Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-7139-9770-2. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2003). Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9615-3. 
  • Ferguson, Niall (2003). Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02328-2.  American edition.
• Ferguson, Niall (2001). The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9465-7. OCLC 46459770. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999) [1997]. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02322-3. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999) [1998]. The Pity of War. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-05711-X. OCLC 41124439. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999). The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1849–1999. New York, N.Y.: Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-88794-3. 
  • Ferguson, Niall (1998). The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81539-3. 
  • Ferguson, Niall (1998). The House of Rothschild. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-85768-8. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1995). Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47016-1. 

As contributor

• "Let Germany Keep Its Nerve", The Spectator, 22 April 1995, pages 21–23
• “Europa nervosa”, in Nader Mousavizadeh (ed.), The Black Book of Bosnia (New Republic/Basic Books, 1996), pp. 127–32
• “The German inter-war economy: Political choice versus economic determinism” in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German History since 1800 (Arnold, 1997), pp. 258–278
• “The balance of payments question: Versailles and after” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 401–440
• “‘The Caucasian Royal Family’: The Rothschilds in national contexts” in R. Liedtke (ed.), ‘Two Nations’: The Historical Experience of British and German Jews in Comparison (J.C.B. Mohr, 1999)
• “Academics and the Press”, in Stephen Glover (ed.), Secrets of the Press: Journalists on Journalism (Penguin, 1999), pp. 206–220
• “Metternich and the Rothschilds: A reappraisal” in Andrea Hamel and Edward Timms (eds.), Progress and Emancipation in the Age of Metternich: Jews and Modernisation in Austria and Germany, 1815–1848 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 295–325
• “The European economy, 1815–1914” in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Europe: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 78–125
• “How (not) to pay for the war: Traditional finance and total war” in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 409–34
• “Introduction” in Frederic Manning, Middle Parts of Fortune (Penguin, 2000), pp. vii–xviii
• “Clashing civilizations or mad mullahs: The United States between informal and formal empire” in Strobe Talbott (ed.), The Age of Terror (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 113–41
• “Public debt as a post-war problem: The German experience after 1918 in comparative perspective” in Mark Roseman (ed.), Three Post-War Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918-1945-1989 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), pp. 99–119
• “Das Haus Sachsen-Coburg und die europäische Politik des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in Rainer von Hessen (ed.), Victoria Kaiserin Friedrich (1840–1901): Mission und Schicksal einer englischen Prinzessin in Deutschland (Campus Verlag, 2002), pp. 27–39
• “Max Warburg and German politics: The limits of financial power in Wilhelmine Germany”, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds.), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism and the Meaning of Reform, 1890–1930 (Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 185–201
• “Introduction”, The Death of the Past by J. H. Plumb (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. xxi–xlii
• “Globalization in historical perspective: The political dimension”, in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalisation in Historical Perspective (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
• “Introduction to Tzvetan Todorov” in Nicholas Owen (ed.), Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Oxford Amnesty Lectures (Amnesty International, 2003)
• “The City of London and British imperialism: New light on an old question”, in Youssef Cassis and Eric Bussière (eds.), London and Paris as International Financial Centres in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 57–77
• “A bolt from the blue? The City of London and the outbreak of the First World War”, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Yet More Adventures with Britainnia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 133–145
• “The first ‘Eurobonds’: The Rothschilds and the financing of the Holy Alliance, 1818–1822”, in William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 311–323
• “Prisoner taking and prisoner killing in the age of total war”, in George Kassemiris (ed.), The Barbarization of Warfare (New York University Press, 2006), pp. 126–158
• “The Second World War as an economic disaster”, in Michael Oliver (ed.), Economic Disasters of the Twentieth Century (Edward Elgar, 2007), pp. 83–132
• “The Problem of Conjecture: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine”, in Melvyn Leffler and Jeff Legro (eds.), To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Television documentaries

• Empire (2003)
• American Colossus (2004)
• The War of the World (2006)
• The Ascent of Money (2008)
• Civilization: Is the West History? (2011)
• China: Triumph and Turmoil (2012)

BBC Reith Lectures

Niall Ferguson recording the third of his 2012 BBC Reith Lecture at Gresham College

In May 2012 the BBC announced Niall Ferguson was to present its annual Reith Lectures – a prestigious series of radio lectures which were first broadcast in 1948. These four lectures, titled The Rule of Law and its Enemies, examine the role man-made institutions have played in the economic and political spheres.

In the first lecture, held at the London School of Economics, titled The Human Hive, Ferguson argues for greater openness from governments, saying they should publish accounts which clearly state all assets and liabilities. Governments, he said, should also follow the lead of business and adopt the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and, above all, generational accounts should be prepared on a regular basis to make absolutely clear the inter-generational implications of current fiscal policy. In the lecture, Ferguson says young voters should be more supportive of government austerity measures if they do not wish to pay further down the line for the profligacy of the baby boomer generation.

In the second lecture, The Darwinian Economy, Ferguson reflects on the causes of the global financial crisis, and erroneous conclusions that many people have drawn from it about the role of regulation, such as whether it is in fact “the disease of which it purports to be the cure".

The Landscape of Law was the third lecture, delivered at Gresham College. It examines the rule of law in comparative terms, asking how far the common law's claims to superiority over other systems are credible, and whether we are living through a time of 'creeping legal degeneration' in the English-speaking world.

The fourth and final lecture, Civil and Uncivil Societies, focuses on institutions (outside the political, economic and legal realms) designed to preserve and transmit particular knowledge and values. It asks whether the modern state is quietly killing civil society in the Western world, and what non-Western societies can do to build a vibrant civil society.

The first lecture was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service on Tuesday, 19 June 2012. The series is available as a BBC podcast.

See also

• Anglosphere
• Chimerica
• Global saving glut

References

General references

• Snowman, Daniel (October 2004). "Niall Ferguson". History Today 54 (10): 37–39. Retrieved 14 July 2008. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999). The Pity of War. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-14-027523-0. 
• "The Ascent of Money", Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
• "Audio: Niall Ferguson in conversation", The Forum, BBC World Service
• Hans Koning, "Still Not Over Over There?", The Nation, August 1999 – Review of The Pity of War
• Martin Rubin, "A Banker to the Rescue", WSJ.com, 26 June 2010
• Liaquat Ahamed, "Yesterday's Banker", NYTimes.com, 30 July 2010
• "The Sun Sets in the West", Oxonian Review, 4 April 2011 – Review of Civilization
• "An Interview with Niall Ferguson", Oxonian Review, 9 April 2011
• "Niall Ferguson and the brain-dead American right", 24 May 2011

External links

• Official website
• Niall Ferguson on Twitter
• Niall Ferguson on Facebook
• Niall Ferguson at TED
• Niall Ferguson at the Internet Movie Database
• Appearances on C-SPAN