He's engaging, highly intelligent, urbane, humorous and to top that all off - good looking. Is he a politician or a movie star? No. Niall (pronounced 'Neal') Ferguson is a historian - and probably the most well-known historian in the world..
Only forty-six years of age, Ferguson has already authored ten books, edited two others, written dozens of scholarly articles and developed and hosted three (or more) multi-episode television documentaries for the BBC (Does this man ever sleep?). After completing a massive tome examining the history of the Rothschild banking dynasty, he published a near masterpiece in The Pity of War: Explaining World War I in 1998. Over several highly readable chapters, Ferguson challenged nearly every major assumption held by historians on one of history's great world-altering (and tragic) periods. Whether or not one agreed with Ferguson's conclusions, he was able to successfully reintroduce 'The Great War' as a core, transformative event with profound political, economic and social implications on the remainder of the twentieth century.
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After monographs on the British Empire and the American Empire respectively in succession, he came out with a massive study - synthesizing an almost incomprehensible number of secondary sources - of World War II entitled The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and The Descent of the West (2006). Rather than beginning with Hitler's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Ferguson rightly started with Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 as the first spark of depression-era, world-political crisis. No part of the globe is left out in his coverage or analysis, and similar to The Pity of War - it enlivens an 'old' subject by posing new questions and framing history in an original context.
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In his third book since 2006 Civilization: The West and The Rest (already published in the UK and forthcoming in the US in November), Ferguson explains why and how the West came to dominate the world over the last five hundred years. In his view, the West had six 'killer apps' (a term used to get through to the iPhone generation) to lift itself over its competitors on the world stage: democracy, medicine, work-ethic, consumerism, science and competition. Already in the UK, the book is selling quickly and fueling a nationwide debate over what constitutes 'civilization' and whether or not the West has lost its formula for success in the face of an emerging China and India.
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Is Ferguson left of center in the tradition of most history departments? Not at all. In fact, he is an unapologetic Thatcher-Reagan foreign policy conservative and a supply-sider to boot. His training in economics has also led to a rigorous debate with Paul Krugman - the Nobel Prize-winning Keynesian economist.
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In all, Ferguson is a breath of fresh air to the study of history and to public debates on economics and politics alike. Beyond scholarship, his contribution to society is generating a civil discourse on issues that concern people worldwide, and for this - he deserves to be commended.
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For more information on Mr. Ferguson, the first stop is to take a look at his personal website - complete with a link to his Twitter account. Can you imagine any of your old history professors on Twitter?! See link: http://www.niallferguson.com/site/FERG/Templates/Home.aspx?pageid=1http://www.niallferguson.com/site/FERG/Templates/Home.aspx?pageid=1
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Photo: Niall Ferguson
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J Roquen