The British Empire was a Good Thing. America’s big mistake in Vietnam was not going for outright victory. England would be better off without Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These are a few choice Niall Ferguson-isms (it’s pronounced “Neil” by the way), or at least the highly simplified versions of the Scottish economic historian’s ideas that have bounced around the media.
The Harvard professor doesn’t want to épater les bourgeois, so much as épater received liberal wisdoms. Inside his handsome, well-groomed exterior, you suspect, lurks a bolshie sixth-former who wants to blow raspberries in chapel. As an Oxford student in the 1980s he described himself as “Punk Tory”, claiming that all the “smarter people” were.
“Niall’s a controversialist,” says Dennis Blakeway, the executive producer behind Ferguson’s three television series. “He’s able to take what we take for granted and turn it upside down — to make us see it in a new way.” Like many controversialists, he can also be surprisingly thin-skinned. He had a well-reported hissy-fit at A. A. Gill over a review of his last TV series, American Colossus, which was waspish at worst.
The series of his book, The War of the World, starts on Channel 4 on Monday, and this highly condensed six-part version of his latest opus will reach an audience in the millions rather than thousands. Those millions may be left feeling surprisingly bleak, though. The easy, conversational, almost confidential flow of Ferguson’s presentation carries messages that are downright chilling. He’s a bit of a Jeremiah on the sly.
As a soggy left-leaning liberal, I ought to hate this unapologetic Thatcherite, but I find I don’t, and I never have. After we had spent several decades acquiring postimperial guilt about Britain’s colonial misdeeds, Ferguson’s revisionism in Empire gave back some space for national self-approval. We could see our ancestors’ effect on the rest of the world as positive as well as harmful, mixing at least some genuine good with the exploitation. Frankly, it was a relief.
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His demolition of the myths of the American Revolution was refreshing, too. When I ask if he has seen Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot, he says: “It’s the only time I’ve wanted to walk out of a plane in mid-air!” We are talking at Penguin Books’ HQ with its panoramic views over the River Thames. After a long day he is about to join his wife, Susan Douglas, former editor of the Sunday Express, for a drink at the Savoy before his book launch. But he is friendly and courteous and the carefully honed answers pour out freely. At times he seems like an earnest tutor, anxious to cover the key points before the end of the session.
He comes back to The War of the World’s core conclusion two or three times, as if worried that I hadn’t quite grasped it. “There are three things necessary for really extreme violence to happen,” he says, “and they have to happen together. One is ethnic disintegration. The second is economic volatility and the third is an empire, or multiple empires, in decline. They are great because they all begin with ‘e’. If you have those three things together it’s probably time to invest in sandbags and hard hats.”
Subtitled History’s Age of Hatred, both the book and TV series cover the entire 20th century. The Second World War forms the core, but there are many detailed diversions, often into areas such as the rape of Nanking, the battle of Kursk or ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Is he worried that the TV series tries to cram in too much? In the past Ferguson has been accused of using soundbites at the expense of subtlety. “If people want subtlety they should read the book,” he says. “If they want more subtlety, there is my academic work. TV gives you a finite number of words and time. If the accusation is that the lines are glib, I defend them tenaciously.”
Nor does he see television history as selling his subject short. “I’m very committed to history as a public discipline,” he says. “It’s more popular with the public than it is with students. It’s a dynamic and growing subject commercially, so there’s hope in that. To feel that people regard this as worth watching for pleasure is really quite remarkable. Broadcasters have realised that the past is sexy, too.”
Four years ago Ferguson left his post at Oxford for New York University, where a poll of students voted him their sexiest lecturer. He has been accused in the past of playing up to a matinee idol image, though he once said filming felt like “walking down the high street naked”. “It’s nerve-wracking to put your work out in front of three million people (in the case of Empire),” he says. “Television makes you public property in a way that teaching and writing don’t. It’s terrifying, especially in competition with people that do it for a living. I’m an amateur.”
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Blakeway doesn’t see it that way. “The great thing about Niall is that he has no airs and graces,” he says. “He’s absolutely not a prima donna. The most common fault is self-consciousness, a lack of ease and a tendency to wave their hands about. Someone like David Starkey goes to the opposite extreme. Though he can carry his mannerisms because he has no sense of embarrassment. He’s an actor. Niall is not an actor; he’s a natural.”
Ferguson himself is more phlegmatic on the subject of breathier, more beady-eyed or gesticulatory rivals: “Anything that holds an audience is good. Better that than having them switch channels.”
Yet the very ease of delivery sometimes disguises the unpleasantness of the message. “Why the century of economic and scientific progress was also the most violent in history is the really big question,” he says. To answer it he revisits some of the bloodiest killing fields: Smyrna in Turkey where Armenian Christians were massacred by allied warships, Manchuria, Nanjing, Belarus, Serbia. Some atrocities were new to me, such as the caves in Okinawa, where 28,000 Japanese civilians and non-combatants were buried alive when US forces blew up the entrances.
Blakeway says it was “a miracle” that they got a professor working in the US and Britain all around the world (business class) on such a tight budget. But it’s not the kind of globe-trotting that presenters such as Dan Cruickshank and Michael Woods get up to, I suggest. “We would have struggled to come up with a more unappetising itinerary!” he grins. “It became almost funny. Belarus is quite the worst place ever to work in. But it’s absolutely fascinating to go to some of the world’s most lethal places, like the battlefield of Kursk, scene of the biggest conventional battle in human history, and see those rolling fields of wheat, this louring grey sky, these enormous monuments — absolutely unforgettable.
“We tracked down an operational Tiger tank in a Moscow museum. When they started the engine it was terrifying. What hundreds of them sounded like beggars belief! Just one of them put the fear of God into me.”
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But it’s the race issue that constantly re-emerges. “What most interests me is what’s best described as ‘ethnic disintegration’,” says Ferguson, “when multicultural societies tear themselves apart, having been relatively stable. That’s a fascinating process to explain. German Jews in the 1920s were really as integrated as an ethnic minority could possibly be and still be recognisable as a minority — one in every two marriages is to a non-Jew — and this falls apart with spectacular violence.”
Such societies, he argues, are in acute danger when the economic or imperial cracks appear. He is particularly concerned about Western Europe, where the decline in the birth-rate is leading to an influx of labour from southern, often Muslim, countries. “It’s not that multi-ethnic societies are a bad thing,” he muses, “in fact they are generally the most interesting societies. But integration needs to be conducted in an atmosphere of economic stability. With the economic volatility in Western European societies as they are today, don’t expect a smooth ride.
“But the real violence will happen in the Middle East itself. The Americans had their chance in Iraq and I think they’ve largely blown it. The Iranians will have a tremendous opportunity to establish themselves as the dominant power in the region — especially when they have nuclear weapons — and this is disturbing. I think military intervention in Iran would be preferable to seeing mushroom-clouds over Israel. The series is designed to point out the possibility that we will have The War of the World: The Sequel.”
The War of the World, Monday,Channel 4, 8pm
THE BATTLE BEGINS