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Niall Ferguson
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Niall Ferguson (born April 18, 1964, in Glasgow) is a British historian. He specialises in financial and economic history as well as the history of empire. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
He is best known outside academia for his revisionist views rehabilitating imperialism and colonialism; within academia, his championing of counterfactual history is a subject of some considerable controversy.
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Encyclopedia
Niall Ferguson (born April 18, 1964, in Glasgow) is a British historian. He specialises in financial and economic history as well as the history of empire. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
He is best known outside academia for his revisionist views rehabilitating imperialism and colonialism; within academia, his championing of counterfactual history is a subject of some considerable controversy. In 2008, Allen Lane published his most recent book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World which he also presented as a Channel 4 television series.
Career
Academic career
Ferguson is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
Business career
In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an Investment Management Consultant by GLG Partners, focusing 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, Niall Ferguson left The Sunday Telegraph to join the Financial Times, where he is now a contributing editor.
Ferguson has often disparaged the European Union as a disaster waiting to happen, and has criticised President Vladimir Putin of Russia for authoritarianism. In Ferguson's view, Putin's policies stand to lead Russia to catastrophes equivalent to those that befell Germany during the Nazi era.
Subject matter
World War I
In 1998 Ferguson published the critically acclaimed The Pity of War: Explaining World War One. 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 may 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 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 Sir 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. Instead, Ferguson has 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 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 counterfactual 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 like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire and the world's dominant financial power.
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 was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.
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 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 will determine whether we live in a better or worse world. His championing of the method — he edited a volume of counterfactual essays — was controversial within the field.
Henry Kissinger
In 2003, former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provided Ferguson with access to Kissinger's White House diaries, letters, and archives for what Ferguson calls a "warts-and-all biography" of the man.
Economic policy
In its August 15, 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, FICA payroll tax, estate tax, and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, amounting to the FRST 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%.
A recent New Republic piece with Harvard's Samuel J. Abrams explored attitudes towards immigration in Europe and the United States
Bibliography
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 where an Asian "savings glut" helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money.
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 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.
Colossus and Empire
In his books Colossus and Empire, Ferguson presents a nuanced and partially apologetic view 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 that of the 'Anglicization' policies adopted by the British Empire throughout the 19th century. With regard to Colossus, Ferguson has pointed out that he has come to regard his advocacy of American hegemony in foreign affairs, his view in The Cash Nexus, as unrealistic. This is due, he claims, to his coming to the conclusion that the Iraq War was due largely to domestic politics, including interdepartmental rivalries within the U.S. government.
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 institutionalized) 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 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.
Publications
(also a Channel 4 series)
Television documentaries
Criticisms
Defender of colonialism
Several of Ferguson's critics have argued that his writings favor imperialism. These critics include left-wing journalist Johann Hari who has argued that 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.
In his response, Ferguson 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. This was evidence, Ferguson said, of their sensationalism. (In response Hari queried why, if this was the case, Ferguson endorsed Elkins' book for "the most painstaking research".) 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, sayingIt 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.
Priyamvadha Gopal, who teaches english at Cambridge, has reiterated similar critiques of Ferguson's claims. Gopal has also 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".
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.
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". However, his best-selling "The Pity of War" contains hundreds of footnotes, stretching from page 463 to page 516, and an extensive bibliography. 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. 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."
Ferguson has also been criticized by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on the BBC Radio Program "Start the Week".
Ferguson responded to the above criticisms in a Washington Post "Live Discussions" online forum in 2006.
Personal life
After attending The Glasgow Academy, he received a Demyship (half-fellowship) at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree in 1985. He is married to journalist Susan Douglas whom he met in 1987 when she was his editor at the UK Daily Mail. They have three children, Felix, Freya and Lachlan.
General references:
External links
- , Ferguson's official website
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