Hello historians!
I just finished my first reading of the new academic year. I am taking a course called "Institutions in Time" in the economics department of my university. It focusses on how institutions change in time. As the time aspect of the course title implies, (economic) history is part of the focus.
Anyway, the point is, my first reading ended by the writer noting that "rigorous, analytical historical work" is needed within the field of economics, something that despite the rise of the idea that "history matters" has not happened and that a lot of history done by economics is pretty terrible. So far I'm on board.
However, for next tuesday we need to read parts of Ferguson's Empire, which I was extremely surprised to see. Especially after the first class focussing on the importance of good history. I am familiar with some of Ferguson's later popular work which I've found entertaining but not too convincing (and especially far from anything coming close to rigorous or academic), although I know that his early stuff of the Rothchild's and money is well regarded.
How sceptical should I go into reading Empire? Is is as much pop-history as "The West and the Rest", or is it held in higher regard? I am not as much asking whether the general thesis is controversial or not (I realise it is), but whether it can be viewed as "rigorous", "historical" etc.
As a Danish historian with a specialty in political ideologies and conceptual history, this of course is not my field of expertise, but I did take a course on the British Empire a couple years ago, where Ferguson's Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World was required reading.
From what I remember the book was very well written, and Ferguson is no doubt a skilled rhetorician. But Ferguson also has a beef I think, with the turn much of historical writing and research has taken since the 60's and Edward Said's Orientalism. That is, a large point he makes in Empire is that the British Empire wasn't all bad and doesn't deserve much of the bad rep it gets in e.g. the "post-colonial" circles in the field of history. On the contrary, says Ferguson, the British Empire with it's superior culture created the modern world, and laid the foundation upon which the Americans could later take over, and without the British Empire says Ferguson, a large part of the world would still live a barbarous lifestyle in lawless countries. (See for instance pp. 141, 370, 381).
Therefore Ferguson has also received a lot of criticism from the aforementioned circles, as his book can be seen as a very political book. Ferguson could be described as member of the right wing, conservative part of historical writing, and more left-oriented writers criticize him for being a sort of very paternalistic eurocentric (if not anglo-centric) writer because of his views on the British Empire being a "force for good" in world history.
My version of the book: Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, Penguin Books, 2004.
For a critical view on Ferguson's and other "eurocentric" writing, see Hobson, John M.,The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Edit: Added references.
Edit 2: I should try and answer your questions as well shouldn't I? In my view and from what I remember my professor saying, is that it is definitely a "true" rigorous piece of scientific historical writing. It does provide a good summary of the history of the British Empire, and you can read it, disagree with his positive bias towards the Br. Emp. and still find much of his other points interesting.
Tl;dr. Yes, Ferguson's book is a serious piece of historical writing, but gets a lot of bad rep for being eurocentric and condescending towards the people that the British Empire colonized.
As others have suggested, that particular book is probably best understood as a political intervention via history (it doesn't follow that it's all wrong, simply that it should be read in that light). I'll only add that, as an economist, you might be most interested in the ways in which the argument that Europe was a "force for good" have been countered by long term analyses of wealth in the non-European world before, during, and after the growth of European empire. Bairoch's (1981) “The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities Since the Industrial Revolution” in he and Leboyer's Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution caused a stir by arguing (with convincing economic data) that there was no support for claims of the economic backwardness of Asian and African states pre-empire when compared to European states of the same era. An overview of the debate surrounding this issue, and a meta-analysis of the evidence since then which generally supports Bairoch's findings, can be found in Alam (2006) Global Disparities Since 1800: Trends and Regional Patterns (PDF here).
If you're still interested in the British Empire in general and would like alternate sources, the single volume that I have found most useful is John Darwin's The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970. Full disclosure: Like you I'm not a historian proper, but an IR scholar working within a history-focused area of the field. The value I give Darwin's book, then, has everything to do with its ability to express the variances of actual ruling and organizing strategies that fell under the heading of "Empire", as well as their huge variations across time. He very deliberately treats it not as a monolith but a system (and never an entirely complete one), and in doing so analyses the many intersecting flows of power, capital, and ideas that make it up. Additionally, although this is very much still a "view from the centre", Darwin treats colonized peoples as having their own agency and interests, and responding to colonization in active ways. From what I can tell, he also has a reputation as an excellent historian.
Bernard Porter, one of the most important historians of the British Empire wrote a very useful review here http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/325. It is well worth reading but he found Ferguson's approach a step back in historiography. A far more radical critique appeared in the Guardian by John E. Wilson http://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/feb/08/highereducation.britishidentity