Niall Ferguson

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Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson (b. April 18, 1964 in Glasgow, Scotland) is a widely published and controversial British historian of modern imperialism. After attending the Glasgow Academy, he was educated as a Demy at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a specialist in financial and economic history.

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[edit] Historian

Niall Ferguson is Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches in both the History Department and the Harvard Business School. He also holds fellowships at Jesus College, University of Oxford, and at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Ferguson was formerly the John Herzog Chair of Financial History at New York University (NYU), and Professor of Modern History at University of Oxford. He is a specialist in financial and economic history, and the Philosophy of History. Ferguson has earned a reputation as a revisionist who challenges many of the long-standing orthodoxies in history. While he is lauded by some on the right and has even been urged by Condoleezza Rice to run for Senate, critics mostly on the left have called him "startlingly obscene" and accused him of being "an apologist for mass murder".[1]

Ferguson's wide profile in journalism and his revisionist reputation has led him to be compared to A. J. P. Taylor. Although Ferguson does list Taylor as a second-favorite historian and credits seeing Taylor on the television in the 1960s and 1970s as an inspiration to becoming an historian, his favorite historian is Fritz Stern whom Ferguson has praised as one of the few historians who are just as well-versed in economic matters as in historical questions.

[edit] The Cash Nexus

In his 2001 book The Cash Nexus , Ferguson argued 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. In the same book, Ferguson made a case against historians such as Paul Kennedy who argue that the United States is a politically and economically over-stretched power on the verge of collapse. If anything, Ferguson argues that United States is not sufficiently involved in the affairs of the world. In his books Colossus and Empire, Ferguson presented the British Empire as an essentially benevolent institution and expressed regret that the modern U.S could not be like the 19th century British Empire.

[edit] On World War I

He is best known for his 1998 revisionist book The Pity of War, which 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 would have been for the best for everyone 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 over France and Russia in 1914-1915. 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 and that the Second Reich was little more than a dress rehearsal for the Third Reich. 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 maintains 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 Edward Grey of maintaining an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the war or not, and thus confused Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the war. Moreover, Ferguson denied that the origins of National Socialism can be traced back to Imperial Germany; instead Ferguson asserted the origins of Nazism can only be traced back to the First World War and its aftermath. Another controversial aspect of the Pity of War was Ferguson's use of counter-factual history. Ferguson presented a counter-factual version of Europe under Imperial German domination that was peaceful, prosperous, democratic and without ideologies like Communism and fascism. In Ferguson's view, had Germany won World War One, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something looking much like the present-day European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire and the world's dominant financial power.

[edit] Rothschilds

Another area of interest for Ferguson is Jewish history, especially the Rothschild family. Ferguson credits the Rothschilds with helping to develop a stable international banking system in the 19th century that allowed tremendous economic growth all over the world.

[edit] Counterfactual history

Ferguson is the leading academic champion of counterfactual history, and edited a collection of essays exploring the subject titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997). 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 pre-determined. 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 will determine whether we live in a better or worse world.

[edit] The War of the World

Ferguson's most recent publication, The War of the World was published in 2006 by Penguin Press.

[edit] Criticisms

[edit] Defender of colonialism

Ferguson has been widely criticised as an apologist for an imperialism that killed millions. On the BBC's Start the Week he was challenged by a panel of historians from post-colonial countries to name a historian from those colonies he claims have benefitted from empire who agrees with him. He was unable to. [2]

Ferguson grew up in Kenya, and writes in his book 'Empire',

Thanks to the British Empire, my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa. Scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief… It was a magical time.

Columnist Johann Hari has noted of this passage,

Ferguson does not mention that during this “magical” childhood he was surrounded by the very recent survivors of Gulags and torture centres built by his beloved Empire. Less than a decade before, the mass British theft of Kenyan land has prompted a backlash. Thousands of destitute Kenyans began to fight against them. They responded by herding more than 300,000 Kenyans into gulags to be whipped, castrated and raped. Many had their eardrums burst with knives, others were doused in paraffin and burned alive. The soldiers were told they could kill anyone they wanted “so long as he is black” – and they slew more than 50,000. Ah, such mischief.

Hari offered a wider critique of Ferguson, writing,

For over a decade now, Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right... His calculations consistently underestimate or ignore the massive crimes of Empire, and grossly overstate the benefits.[3]

In his response, Ferguson called Hari "Horrible Hari", a play on the title of a series of children's books, and accused Hari of relying on books such as Caroline Elkins' Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya which explicitly compared British Imperial Rule with 20th century totalitarian governments, evidence, Ferguson said, of their sensationalism (in response Hari queried why[4], if this was the case, Ferguson endorsed Elkins' book for "the most painstaking research"[5]). Ferguson himself cited David Anderson's book on the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, to argue that the scale of the violence in Kenya was "exceptional" rather than typical of British rule, and cited Anderson's lower figures of 1,090 Kikuyu hanged, 150,000 "detained at one time or another", and 20,000 rebels killed in combat (he also noted that 'this was a civil war in which the rebels killed at least 1,800 African civilians, 200 British soldiers and policemen, and 32 European settlers'). Ferguson argued the decline of the British Empire was itself one of the causes of violence such as that seen in Kenya, saying

It is an empirically verifiable fact that violence tends to increase as empires unravel, as indigenous ethnic groups compete, often violently, for future shares of power. [6]

Priyamvadha Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge, has reiterated the critique of Ferguson's claims, arguing that

Ferguson's 'history' is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. 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 marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.

Gopal also said that the "racism institutionalised by empire also seems to be back in fashion", and pointed to quotes from The War of the World such as Ferguson's statement that people "seem predisposed" to "trust members of their own race", and that "those who are drawn to 'the Other' may ... be atypical in their sexual predilections".[7]

Ferguson said that he was "appalled" by the charges of racism, and argued that the idea of biologically distinct races is "a lot of 19th-century pseudo science". At the same time, he said it was important to "understand better why the biologically nebulous concept of racial difference has proved so resilient", using arguments from evolutionary psychology to suggest that the tendency to stigmatize "the Other" and treat them as a different species might be rooted in ancient human instincts favored by natural selection.[8]

[edit] As scholar

A few fellow academics have questioned Ferguson's commitment to scholarship. For example, in the article quoted above Priyamvadha Gopal characterizes Ferguson's popular work as "half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such as footnotes". Benjamin Wallace-Wells, an editor of The Washington Monthly, comments that

"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."

Wallace-Wells goes on to accuse Ferguson of making overly sweeping claims in his later works without sufficient support or any original research to back them up, and of contradicting the academic consensus for the sake of being contrarian.[9] However, many of his peers praise his work, such as John Lewis Gaddis, a renowned Cold War era historian, who characterized Ferguson as having unrivaled "range, productivity and visibility."[10]

[edit] History boy?

The character of 'Irwin', in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, is allegedly based on Niall Ferguson.[1] Irwin is an inspiring but amoral history teacher, who tells his pupils that it is better to say something controversial than to say something true.

[edit] Commentator

As a commentator on events, Ferguson supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, though he has criticized many of its subsequent implementation and organizational problems. Ferguson has often disparaged the European Union as a disaster waiting to happen and President Vladimir Putin of Russia for authoritarianism. In Ferguson's view, Putin's policies stand to lead Russia to a catastrophes equivalent to those that befell Germany during the Nazi era. Ferguson has occasionally supported the policies of George W. Bush, especially his foreign policy, but sees the economic and financial policies of the Bush administration as potentially putting the economic health of the United States at serious risk and he opposed Bush's reelection in 2004 ([11]). Ferguson believes that if the United States does not sharply cut social spending in the next decade or so, then the drain on the Treasury by retiring Baby-boomers stands to create a serious financial crisis. In Ferguson's view, Bush has not done enough to cut what Ferguson calls "entitlements" in the area of social spending.

Peter Wilby described him as "almost the only right-wing columnist now worth reading", but has compared his imperialist views to those who support Stalin's Terror.[12]

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

  • Replacing the personal income tax, corporate income tax, payroll tax, estate tax and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, paid to all households, equal to the amount of FRST paid by households with similar demographics living at the poverty line
  • Replacing the retirement benefits portion of Social Security with a Personal Security System (PSS), consisting of private retirement accounts for all citizens plus extra benefits to those who could not afford to save enough for a decent retirement
  • Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a Medical Security System (MSS) 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%

A recent New Republic piece with Samuel J Abrams (Harvard) laid the groundwork for understanding attitudes toward immigration in Europe and the United States.

[edit] References

[edit] Academic career

Previous academic positions Ferguson has held are:

1989-1990 Research Fellow, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
1990-1992 Official Fellow and Lecturer, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge
1992-2000 Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Jesus College, University of Oxford
2000-2002 Professor of Political and Financial History, University of Oxford
2002-2004 Herzog Professor in Financial History at Stern School of Business, New York University
2004-present Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University

[edit] Bibliography

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

[edit] External links

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