Niall Ferguson, Revisited and Revising ...

Six months ago, Tim Burke visited with Simon Schama and NiallFerguson at Cliopatria. The respectful engagement with Schama contrasted with a sharper encounter with Ferguson. Benjamin Wallace-Wells's essay for the Washington Monthly,"Right Man's Burden: Why Empire Enthusiast Niall Ferguson Won't Change His Mind", reminded me of those discussions because Wallace-Wells writes of both Ferguson and Schama as historians crowned as great in their youth and tempted in middle age to rely on the research of others for their productivity.

... England, which anoints its geniuses at age 22 rather than 42, seems to produce this type somewhat more regularly [than the United States]: Along with Ferguson, think of the theater critic Kenneth Tynan or the historian Simon Schama, who was hired as a Cambridge don on the strength of his undergraduate thesis. Like Schama, Ferguson writes what he calls a"young man's history," sweeping in scope, bold in theory, with little archival work but a lot of argumentative force. The similarity of style between these two famed historians is perhaps not entirely coincidental. It is hard to imagine that those tapped as geniuses at a young age, and called brilliant their whole adult lives, don't have a greater tendency to think that they are smarter than the rest of the academic gang, and with only a brief stretch of intensive thinking, can master topics they had not previously paid attention to, and discover profound new truths. This is, at the very least, a sensibility which has recently driven Ferguson's career.

The crux of Burke's initial criticism of Ferguson's work, subsequent to his two volumeson the Rothschilds, was that

Ferguson simply ignores a generation of historians outright, as if they never existed. This is something that really bothers me about the conservative complaint that the academy is"politicized": it seems to permit some scholars to then utterly, cavalierly ignore work that is disciplinarily very solid, careful and balanced, and to avoid the hard work of actually making a reasoned case for one's own point of view in relation to the existing scholarship and the complexities it lays on the table.

Playing provocateur, I sent Ferguson a link to Burke's post. That led to some e-mail exchange between the two of them and Burke's second post in which he acknowledged that Ferguson had certainly been a productive scholar. Yet, if you read Wallace-Wells's essay carefully, you'll find that Ferguson concedes a refinement of Burke's initial point. His more recent work (The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, and Colossus: The Price of America's Empire) is the product of familiarity with the secondary literature to which Burke referred. As Wallace-Wells says, The Pity of War is"a book written entirely from secondary sources." You can do that.

What Burke might have suggested was that Ferguson used the research findings in the secondary literature to create arguments and reach conclusions near diametrically opposed to those of its authors. Odd, isn't it, that the neo-conservatives don't accuse Ferguson of"revisionism"? Or, is it"revisionism" only when it runs counter to your ideology? Beyond his transformative use of secondary sources, the further Ferguson has moved from The Rothschilds, the less rooted even in the secondary literature have his books been. That is, the more recent Ferguson's work, even by his own assessment, the more accurate is Burke's original point. Empire, says Wallace-Wells, is"a breezy, optimistic history of the British empire [that] ... looks and reads like a coffee-table book, with no footnotes." It does offer"great photos, and a lively text which focuses heavily on biographical sketches of key imperial figures." His more recent book, Colossus, is"vulnerable to attack," Ferguson admits, and his books on empire are"edutainment at best." You can publish breezy, lightly researched history.

You can win attention by arguing counter-intuitively. There is, even, a historiographical edge to arguing counter-factually. With such methods, you could use the existing literature on gun-ownership in America to demonstrate that it was rare prior to the Civil War -- not that anyone, much less a bright, aspiring historian like Ferguson, would do such a thing.* He does concede, however, that, in order to do constructive history in the remainder of his career, he must return to original archival research, which has been lacking in his recent work."The House of Rothschild was really my best book," Ferguson told Wallace-Wells,"and it was that because I actually did dusty-fingered research in the archives--that's where the real breakthroughs always happen, anyway." Wallace-Wells concludes:

Since he quit archival work, his histories have suffered; they tend to sprawl out of control, and hunt down evidence to support his guiding theories. If he does return to the stacks, it may eventually give him a way to rebuke those who think that his true talent to date has been for sloganeering and publicity, not legitimate scholarly breakthroughs. But it will not undo the damage his ideas about empire have helped to bring about.

As he returns to archival research, Ferguson ought to read Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and Middle East Terror. It marshals massive evidence that Ferguson's beloved British imperialism was corrupt at its core. It bribed local politicians to drain Iran of its oil resources and encouraged the Eisenhower administration to destroy Mossadegh's regime and replace it with the Shah's modernizing tyranny.

*My colleague at Cliopatria, Tim Burke, has no responsibility for anything said here, except where he is quoted directly, and then only with the understanding that I created the context in which his words are quoted. Thanks to Ed Cohn at Gnostical Turpitude, Rebunk's Derek Catsam, and HNN's Rick Shenkman for suggestions about my reading of Niall Ferguson's work.