Niall Ferguson
By Janet Tassel
Harvard Magazine, May-June 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
"I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United
States is the best candidate for the job. All I mean is that whatever they
choose to call their position in the world — hegemony, primacy, predominance
or leadership — Americans should recognize the functional resemblance
between Anglophone power present and past and should try to do a better
rather than worse job of policing an unruly world than their British
predecessors."
Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (2004)
Niall Ferguson is Tisch professor of history and Ziegler professor of
business administration at Harvard University. At the age of 43, Ferguson
has produced eight books, and has another two in progress. And all while
commuting among Harvard, the Hoover Institution at Stanford (where he is a
senior fellow), and the United Kingdom, where his wife Susan, a media
executive, and their three children live. In 2002-3, for Britain’s Channel
4, he wrote and starred in a six-part history of the British empire. In
2004, he followed with American Colossus—both programs based on his books.
And in 2006, Britons watched his six-part The War of the World.
Graduating with first-class honors in 1985, he was a demy (a foundation
scholar) at Magdalen College until 1989. He then spent two years as a
Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, where he learned German, worked on
his dissertation (subsequently his first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg
Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927), and worked
as a journalist for British and German newspapers. In 2004, the year he
arrived at Harvard, Time magazine included him in its list of the 100 most
influential people in the world.
Ferguson is emphatic about the
benefits that accompanied British rule: "Without the spread of British rule
around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal
capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different
economies around the world."
The War of the World takes the reader on
a long and gruesome march through the century-long racial tensions and
economic uncertainties that led to the Second World War and the descent of
the West into unimaginable horror.
"Had Britain stood aside — even
for a matter of weeks — continental Europe could therefore have been
transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know
today — but without the massive contraction in British overseas power
entailed by the fighting of two world wars."
Ferguson, The Pity of War
(1999)
Ferguson must finish his book on Siegmund Warburg: "I was
gripped by the most important and certainly the most perplexing tragedy of
modern history, which was the tragedy of the Jews." Ferguson suggests that
the Scots are in many significant ways similar to the Jews.
Ferguson in front of a Soviet tank
By Andy Ross, December 31, 2006
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred
By Niall
Ferguson
Allen Lane, 2006
Niall Ferguson is a glamorous figure, a relatively young Harvard professor
of history with a string of well regarded books to his credit and with roots
in Britain, first as a Glaswegian Scot and then as a brilliant young Oxford
don. His specialty, if you can call it that, is the history of the last
three centuries on both the global and European levels, with particular
focus on economic and financial history. His first book, based on his
doctoral thesis, was on the house of Rothschild and its massive influence
through its banking activities on wars in Europe in the nineteenth century.
His most famous book, The Pity of War, was about the 1914-1918 war and
speculated on how much better the history of the twentieth century might
have been if Britain had not declared war on Germany but instead let Germany
win, and perhaps establish a German empire stretching from the Atlantic to
the Pacific. His point was that the Germans could conceivably have stamped
out communism before it became a menace and as a result made the whole
fascist movement less murderous.
With that sort of background, a
reader naturally has high hopes for his new book on the Second World War and
its causes and consequences. The story fills the frame set by the twentieth
century, from September 11, 1901, to the rise of militant Islamism a hundred
years later. The motif for the title is the H.G. Wells novel, The War of the
Worlds, about a Martian invasion, which seems nicely to prefigure the
genocidal impact of the war machines that gave the century its unique brand
of horror. The central thread of the narrative is the argument that
multiethnic communities in Europe and elsewhere were driven both by racism
and by economic instability to commit murderous atrocities whose scale and
intensity were unprecedented in human history. There are three caveats to
the argument: (1) mixed communities without racist tension can survive
economic stress without bloodshed, (2) communities that see themselves as
racially mixed can prosper together if their economic circumstances are
stable, and (3) strong empires can contain multiethnicity and economic
turmoil, but weak or decaying regimes cannot. In short, the outcome is that
racism plus hard times equals trouble.
Ferguson's main claim with
regard to Nazi Germany is that economic turmoil generated by (1) the
hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic in 1923 and (2) the depression
following the Wall Street crash in 1929 in combination with (3) ongoing
communist agitation within the industrial workforce inspired by the
emergence of Soviet Russia was a sufficiently large triple whammy to make
Germans susceptible to racist provocation. As to the Germans' understanding
of their own racial identity, a rich tradition of artists like Goethe and
Wagner had romanticized it and philosophers like Nietzsche and Spengler had
thematized it, with the result that agitators like Hitler and Goebbels could
relatively easily grasp and subvert it. As usual in such scurrilous
undertakings, Jews were chosen as the prime scapegoats. Jewish prominence in
the world of finance and in the rise of the Bolsheviks was enough to make
them targets. As for the imperial context, both the Russian and the
Austro-Hungarian empires had gone and the new order in Europe was unstable.
Ferguson dwells long enough on all this to make it clear that Nazi
racism was absurdly irrational and unscientific, whether directed against
Jews or Slavs or any other aliens relative to the Aryan prototype. He also
points out in detail how similar racist sentiment accompanied the Japanese
drive into China from 1931 on. Happily, his history flies high above the
military details that every educated reader can be assumed to know ten times
over from previous histories, so all we have to read in this book are fresh
details about aspects of the whole sordid tale of the genocidal wars of the
mid-century that resonate with the concerns we still have as we confront the
challenge of surviving another century with the same old human atavisms just
below the skin. Happily, too, he continues the story through the more
murderous episodes of later decades, right up to the breakup of Yugoslavia
and the genocide in Rwanda, to establish that 1945 did not end the dynamic
his narrative demonstrates.
All of which seems well and good, in the
sense that a thesis that looks reasonable is sustained through a barrage of
historical facts that together should suffice to convince an unprejudiced
reader. The central claim that the natural racism of any human group can
become transformed when hard times destroy the economic environment within
which the group is accustomed to living, and tranformed moreover into
murderous insanity that available technology can amplify to genocidal
atrocity, is surely plausible. This is not special pleading for murderers.
But it is a warning. Humans cannot help but form groups with their own ideas
about who is in and who is out. We are always the best, and the dummies or
the lefties or the fascists or the unbelievers are always potentially at
risk. Any of us, if pushed hard enough, will push back. On this crowded
planet, where economic and other turmoil can spark conflict instantly and
where local conflicts can instantly become global, we do well to remember
that we can still be as dangerous as space aliens to each other. Ferguson
has done sterling service in marshalling our recent history to remind us of
this fundamental truth.
Some works by and about Niall Ferguson:
Washington Post, 2006
Boston Globe, 2006
Berkeley Globetrotter, 2006
The Guardian, 2006
Berkeley Globetrotter, 2003
National Post, 2001
The greatest extent of the Nazi empire
By Niall Ferguson
Financial Times, September 13, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
By Mark
Mazower
Allen
Lane, 726 pages
Hitler
By Ian Kershaw
Allen Lane, 1030 pages
Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution
By Ian
Kershaw
Yale
University Press, 394 pages
The Nazi empire turned out to be the least successful piece of colonisation
ever seen. Launched in 1938, the campaign to expand beyond Germany's 1871
borders peaked in late 1942, by which time the empire encompassed around
one-third of the European land-mass and 244 million people. Yet by October
1944 it was gone, making it one of the shortest-lived empires in all
history, as well as one of the worst. Why was the Nazi empire such a
horrible failure?
Mark Mazower grasps the fact that the Nazi regime
revealed its true character only in war and conquest. From the outset it was
intent on being an empire. The Nazis always intended to regard the
territories taken from the Soviet Union "from a colonial viewpoint", to be
"exploited economically with colonial methods". The difference that most
struck contemporaries was that, in eastern Europe, the colonised were the
same colour as the colonisers. Yet the Nazis had no difficulty with that,
thanks to the warped ingenuity of their own racial theories.
The
short duration of the Nazi empire was primarily for military reasons. Once
the Third Reich was embroiled in a war with not only the British Empire but
also the Soviet Union and the US, its empire was surely doomed. Yet
Mazower's book offers a secondary, endogenous explanation for the Third
Reich's failure as an empire.
In terms of simple demographics, there
was nothing implausible about putting 80 million Germans in charge of the
European continent. In theory, it should have been easier for Germany to
rule Ukraine than it was for Britain to rule Uttar Pradesh. For one thing,
Kiev was nearer to Berlin than Kanpur was to London. For another, the
Germans were genuinely welcomed as liberators in many parts of Ukraine in
1941.
Yet the Germans failed to exploit these advantages. What went
wrong? The answer can be given in four words: arrogance, callousness,
brutality and ineptitude. All empires are prone to these vices. But the Nazi
empire took them to such an extreme that any possibility of sustainable rule
was destroyed. Later empires worried about winning hearts and minds. The
Nazi empire was both heartless and mindless.
After
Operation
Barbarossa, Red Army prisoners were treated with such vicious indifference
that by February 1942 only 1.1 million were still alive of the 3.9 million
originally captured. Herded together in barbed wire stockades, they were
left to the ravages of malnutrition and disease. Nor were the Nazis content
to starve the conquered. They also relished inflicting violence on them,
ranging from impromptu beatings all the way to
industrialised genocide.
Added to arrogance, callousness and brutality was downright ineptitude.
The SS aspired to establish some kind of centralising grip on the empire.
But Mazower shows in detail how Himmler and his lackeys bungled the
resettlement of 800,000 ethnic Germans. Yet ultimate responsibility for the
dysfunctional character of the Nazi Empire lay with Hitler, whose preferred
method for pacifying occupied territory was "shooting everyone who looked in
any way suspicious".
Hitler was a specialist in destruction, whose
empire could not hope to endure. Sir Ian Kershaw's monumental biography of
Hitler is now republished in a single volume. Kershaw's early work focused
on popular attitudes towards the Third Reich. But as his biography evolved,
the centrality of Hitler became inescapable. As Kershsaw writes in Hitler,
The Germans and the Final Solution: "No Hitler: no SS-police state ... no
Hitler: no general European war by the late 1930s ... No Hitler: no attack
on the Soviet Union ... No Hitler: no Holocaust."
In many ways,
Hitler's empire was the reductio ad absurdum of a concept that by 1945 had
passed its historical sell-by date. In the course of the 20th century, it
gradually became apparent that an industrial economy could operate perfectly
well without colonies.
Germanisation of the east was an
impossibility. Easternisation of Germany was far more likely. By the end of
1944 around five million foreigners had been
conscripted to work in the
factories and mines of the old Reich. By a rich irony, the dream of a
racially pure imperium had turned Germany itself into a multi-ethnic slave
state.
The European Union and Eurozone
AR Abysmal horror. Such humiliating incompetence from a people otherwise so practically talented suggests a hidden agenda. I see the Nazi drama as Wagnerian opera — a recrudescence of classical paganism punching a fist into the face of pious liberalism.
