Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His specialities are international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. Ferguson's books include Empire: How...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth18 April 1964
I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.
My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.
I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.
Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.
When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.
The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.
The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.
The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.
Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.
American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.
The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.