For those who don't know, Niall Ferguson is a contraversial British historian and occasional TV personality who is a Professor at Harvard and a senior research fellow at Oxford.
Now, in Britain, he is generally feted in right-wing circles and blasted in left-wing circles. The Conservative party considered involving him in writing history textbooks for schools, though as far as I know this never happened.
A while ago, I read his book "Empire: How Britain made the modern world," as my mother recommended it to me. I basically considered it an interesting pop history, but ultimately an apologist work for imperialism.
So, I would like to know what other historians of the British Empire think of this book, and of his work generally. As I said, he's a very politically contraversial figure, but I don't know he's generally viewed by historians.
You may be interested in Jeanne Morefield's Empires Without Imperialism. Morefield is interested in 'liberal imperialism', that is how supposedly benign and emancipatory Western liberalism could be positively used to promote the expansion of empire. She does this by comparing, and finding similarities between, the narratives of liberal empire promoted today (in the US) and the early 20th C (in Britain).
Ferguson gets a chapter of his own in this. And no punches are pulled. In Morefield's view Ferguson is a successor to the Round Table group in playing apologist for empire. Considering him less of an historian than a public intellectual, Morefield notes that:
Over the years Ferguson's work has evolved from academic analyses based on original research that focused on particular historical moments, to sweeping metanarratives that make huge claims about historical phenomena over time and which are based almost entirely on secondary sources.
Ferguson, the 'Empire Whisperer', can therefore considered to be less interested in history than mining the example of Britain past for lessons to be sold to Americans today. In the process he's been accused of misdirection, factual inaccuracies and counterfactual slight-of-hand, which Morefield catalogues.
I won't go into detail on these criticisms as I'm largely familiar with them second-hand and, well, an entire chapter was spent elaborating them in the book. An exception should perhaps be made for Pankaj Mishra's cutting review of Civilisation: The West and the Rest, which Morefield makes much of and I'm more familiar with. This is an even stronger condemnation, from an intellectual I greatly respect, which paints Ferguson as an apologist for empire, panicked over the West's perceived decline. The review itself is online (although perhaps behind a paywall) but the below passage serves as an example of the misdirection and politicking of which Ferguson has been accused:
Ferguson remains defiantly loyal to his neoimperialist vision, scoffing at those who can still ‘work themselves up into a state of high moral indignation over the misdeeds of the European empires’. ‘Misdeeds there certainly were,’ he admits and, as in Empire, he provides a very selective list that excludes the famines in Bengal, and the extermination of ten million people in the Congo. Frequently accused since Empire of underplaying the dark side of imperialism, Ferguson seems to have come up with a rhetorical strategy: to describe vividly one spectacular instance of brutality – he expends some moral indignation of his own on the slave trade – and then to use this exception to the general rule of imperial benevolence to absolve himself from admitting to the role of imperialism’s structural violence in the making of the modern world.
The Conservative party considered involving him in writing history textbooks for schools
Do you have a source for that? Cause if that's true then that's fucking terrifying.