書單: 尼爾·弗格森的全球帝國

新於 2016年12月22日

尼爾·弗格森的全球帝國

創造歷史

2007年5月至6月

The Global Empire of Niall Ferguson

Doing history on a sweeping scale

May-June 2007

湯姆·莫瑟（Tom Mosser）的插圖

這張圖注定會激怒所有熱血的美國人：

信用消費、不願奔赴前線、容易對長期事業失去興趣：如果所有這一切讓人聯想到美國是一個久坐不動的巨人——坦率地說，是一種戰略上的沙發土豆——那麼這個形象可能值得我們深思。

哈佛大學（相對較新）的蒂施歷史學教授和齊格勒工商管理學教授、年輕有為的蘇格蘭歷史學家尼爾·弗格森 (Niall Ferguson) 向我們提出了這一不適合擔任職務的指控。他還遠遠沒有結束我們的討論：「考慮一下……維和問題。顯而易見的是，美國沒有能力有效地維和——也就是說，沒有能力履行警察職責。」他澄清了自己的立場：

與大多數歐洲批評美國的人不同……我相信世界需要一個有效的自由帝國，而美國是這一職位的最佳候選人……美國有充分的理由扮演自由帝國的角色，無論是從自身安全的角度，還是出於直接的利他主義。從很多方面來看，它也具備獨特的優勢。然而，儘管美國擁有巨大的經濟、軍事和文化實力，但如果其經濟結構、社會組成和政治文化沒有深刻變化，它似乎仍然不太可能成為一個有效的自由帝國。

弗格森在其頗具爭議的著作《巨人：美國帝國的代價》（2004 年）中繼續說道：「我的意思是，無論美國人如何稱呼自己在世界上的地位——霸權、首要地位、優勢或領導地位——他們都應該認識到現在和過去英語國家在功能上的相似性，並且應該努力在這個難以駕馭這個難以駕馭的世界方面做得比他們的前輩更好。

儘管他在另一本備受爭議的著作《帝國：英國世界秩序的興起和衰落以及對全球權力的教訓》（2002 年）中指出，大英帝國總體上是一個成功的事業，值得效仿，但他表示，我們美國人只是沒有勇氣去做這件事。他說，我們面臨三大根本缺陷，阻礙我們發揮力量，讓世界變得更美好：經濟缺陷、人力缺陷，以及「三者中最嚴重的」——巨大的注意力缺陷。經濟赤字是可以彌補的，儘管未來並非完全沒有風險：“（美國人）可以繼續從國外借款，因為外國投資者對美元計價證券的興趣似乎永不滿足，無論其回報率有多低。”

人力短缺是一個問題，因為正如他所指出的，美國人不想在國外服役多年或管理某個殖民地。他提出了一個調皮的建議：“如果把非法移民、失業者和罪犯加在一起，肯定有足夠的原材料來組建一支更龐大的美國軍隊。”更嚴肅地說：“羅馬帝國擴張的關鍵之一畢竟是為非羅馬人提供通過服兵役獲得公民身份的機會。”

但我們的注意力缺陷很可能導致我們的毀滅：我們是一個陷入不體面的否認中的民族。弗格森引用了一位沮喪的美國將軍的話：“我們宣揚價值觀、民主、人權，但我們還沒有說服美國人民付出代價…”

弗格森基本上同意這一點：不管喜歡與否，我們美國人不僅能夠“發揮更積極的全球作用”，而且不能不這樣做。

如果弗格森有一個標誌性的主題，那就是：一個充滿活力的自由帝國的重要性，以及如何最好地實現它，就像英國人和羅馬人在很大程度上所做的那樣。儘管他接下來的幾年將致力於他的其他主要興趣，即金錢、德國猶太歷史和權力，但正是他關於帝國的多部著作為他帶來了名聲。

43 歲時，天才的弗格森已經出版了八本內容豐富、分量十足的書，還有兩本正在創作中；他在編輯《當代史雜誌》。（他曾在一次採訪中說道：「我很困惑那些花了 10 年時間卻沒有寫出一本書的人。他們在做什麼？」）他一直往返於哈佛大學、史丹佛大學胡佛研究所（他是該研究所的高級研究員）和英國之間，他的妻子蘇珊（一位媒體主管）和他們的三個孩子住在英國。

而且，在英國，他也是頗具媒體知名度的名人。 2002 年至 2003 年，他為英國第四頻道編寫並主演了一部六集的大英帝國歷史劇。 2004 年，他又推出了《美國巨人》——這兩個節目都是根據他的書改編的。 2006 年，英國人觀看了他根據其最新鉅作《二十世紀衝突與西方的衰落》改編的六集電影《世界大戰》。

在拜訪弗格森位於歐洲研究中心的辦公室時，我問起他與家鄉和家人分離的壓力，他稱之為跨大西洋的「三難困境」。「我可以證明這非常困難，」他說。「這對他們家不公平，我真希望他們留在這裡。但隨著孩子們一年年長大，搬家也變得越來越困難。所以我覺得我在這個論點上輸了。」不過，停頓了一下，他又補充道：「換個角度來看，從歷史上看，丈夫和父親長時間遠離家人並不是什麼不正常的事情——無論是海員、軍官還是殖民地官員。

2004 年 6 月，弗格森在哈佛大學美國大學優等生榮譽學會文學練習的演講中指出：“在我的大部分人生中，美國似乎都在拍著我的肩膀，催促我離開舊世界，走向新世界。”

尼爾（發音為“ NEEL ”）坎貝爾道格拉斯弗格森 1964 年出生於格拉斯哥，父親是一名醫生，母親是一名物理老師，他在蘇格蘭西部長大，除了在肯尼亞內羅畢待過兩年，他的父親在那裡從事教學工作。（他的妹妹現在是賓州大學的物理學教授。）他在格拉斯哥學院做了準備，他將其描述為「19世紀蘇格蘭資產階級為培養子弟從事商業而創辦的學校。

於是他去了牛津，在那裡他很快就陷入了困境。「秉承加爾文教徒叛教青年的真正傳統，」他說，「我花了兩年時間什麼都做，除了工作。我在爵士五重奏中演奏低音提琴，在牛津辯論社辯論得相當糟糕，編輯過一本學生雜誌，甚至在《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》中扮演過毛毛蟲，還抽過水煙什麼的。」他說，甚至在《愛麗絲夢遊仙境》中扮演過毛毛蟲，還抽過水煙什麼的。」他說，就這樣一刻「牛津大學不像哈佛大學那樣實行持續評估。如果你能做好期末考的準備，在那個年代，這意味著七天內要完成十場三小時的考試，那麼你之前的成績有多差就無關緊要了。”

我們敢說剩下的都是歷史嗎？他於 1985 年以一等榮譽畢業，並在莫德林學院擔任預科學者，直至 1989 年。之後，他作為漢薩學者在漢堡和柏林待了兩年，學習德語，撰寫論文（後來成為他的第一本書《紙和鐵：通貨膨脹時代的漢堡商業和德國政治，1897-1927》），並擔任英國和德國報紙的記者——使用各種假名，以避免學術上的非議。此時，他在劍橋大學基督學院擔任研究員，不久後又轉到彼得學院擔任講師。 1992 年，他回到牛津大學，成為耶穌學院的現代史研究員和導師，並於 2000 年被任命為政治和金融史教授。兩年後，他跨越大西洋，擔任紐約大學斯特恩商學院金融史赫爾佐格講席教授（2003年，他被評為該校「年度教授」）。 2004年，也就是他進入哈佛大學的那一年，《時代》雜誌將他列入了全球100位最具影響力的人物名單。

弗格森是個漂亮、笑容可掬的小伙子──和藹可親、開朗、迷人。他的崇拜者曾表示，在電影中他可能會由科林·費爾斯或休·格蘭特飾演。在艾倫貝內特 (Alan Bennett) 的最新戲劇和電影《歷史男孩》中，他是反傳統教師歐文 (由史蒂芬坎貝爾摩爾 (Stephen Campbell Moore) 飾演) 的原型。但沒有理由說他不能親自上場。他確實具有媒體方面的頭腦和經驗。在他的電影中，他完美地運用了他那甜美的演員嗓音，那種牛津口音中帶著明顯的嘶啞。正如他英俊的外表一樣：在《嘻哈帝國》這部電影中，他走遍了前英國殖民地，看起來非常酷，從加勒比海到非洲再到印度，在地下城和城堡，在教堂、花園和沙漠，在遊行、集市和儀式上，在獨木舟和人力車上，甚至在攀登高峰時，他都在講話，同時充滿了名字、日期、日期、日期、情趣

對於那些對媒體史學家這個概念嗤之以鼻的人，哥倫比亞大學藝術史和歷史學教授西蒙·沙瑪（Simon Schama）反駁道，他本人也是與弗格森類似的媒體名人。「好吧，讓他們先試試再說。試圖成為歷史學家和公共知識分子是一個人所能承擔的最艱鉅、最具挑戰性的任務。我的教授傑克·普拉姆爵士（JH Plumb）也是尼爾的導師，他教導說，接觸廣大公眾是你作為一名學者所能面臨的最嚴峻的挑戰，同時又不能損害真相和你想表達的複雜性。

另一方面，弗格森闡述的一些概念讓很多人感到不快，這並不奇怪。事實上，「帝國」這個詞似乎引發了強烈的反應。舉幾個例子，英國記者約翰·哈里在《獨立報》上以「帝國沒有任何藉口」為題寫道：「十多年來，弗格森已經成為美國極右翼帝國主義的宮廷歷史學家，他認為維多利亞時代以來的大英帝國是好東西，但也有一些不幸的‘瑕疵’，這些瑕疵被高估和誇大了。」在《衛報》劍橋大學後達戈普里亞大學後殖民研究教授達瓦姆·達瓦姆爾表示，弗格森——她稱之為「新保守主義理論家」——正在改寫歷史，「受到美國右翼救世主幻想的驅使……殖民主義——一個充斥著奴役、掠奪、戰爭、腐敗、土地掠奪、飢荒、剝削、契約勞工、貧困、屠殺、種族滅絕和強制遷移的故事——被改寫成一個良性的發展使命已經……」弗格森對這些咒罵了。儘管他確實發表了一封公開信，斥責「可怕的哈里」（這個綽號指的是英國作家特里·迪爾裡的《可怕的歷史》系列），但弗格森表示，這種批評是帝國領土的一部分。

我們無法在此處理所有這些指控。畢竟，反殖民主義是戈帕爾的事業。但以戈帕爾對奴隸制的指控為例——她說，奴隸制是帝國不可或缺的一部分。在佛格森的電影中，最重要的一點就是英國在其帝國時期廢除了奴隸制。回到《帝國》這本書，在有關克拉珀姆教派的部分，我們讀到了這個福音派團體在廢除奴隸制方面取得的成功：

要解釋一個民族的道德觀念發生如此深刻的變化並不容易。過去人們認為，廢除奴隸制只是因為它不再有利可圖，但所有證據都指向了相反的方向：事實上，儘管奴隸制仍然有利可圖，但它還是被廢除了。那麼，我們需要理解的是集體心態的改變。

他繼續討論了廢奴運動的廣泛而多樣的領導層及其不可阻擋的決心，因此奴隸貿易於 1807 年被廢除（奴隸製本身於 1833 年被廢除）。「從現在起，」他繼續說道，「諷刺的是，被定罪的奴隸販子將被流放到澳洲的英國流放地。」（簡稱「契約勞工」。）

此外，儘管批評者建構了反西方帝國主義的場景，但弗格森（沒有否認不可否認的事實）仍然強調英國統治帶來的好處，包括積極努力消除殺害女嬰和殉夫（印度教寡婦在其丈夫的火葬柴堆上自焚）。

他繼續說道：“如果沒有英國統治在世界各地的擴張，很難相信自由資本主義結構能夠在世界各地如此不同的經濟體中如此成功地建立起來。”

那些採用替代模式的帝國——俄羅斯帝國和中國帝國——給其臣民帶來了無法估量的苦難。如果沒有英國帝國統治的影響，很難相信議會民主制度會被當今世界上大多數國家所採用。印度是世界上最大的民主國家，但它對英國統治的貢獻遠超過人們所承認的程度。它的精英學校、大學、公務員制度、軍隊、新聞界和議會制度都仍然具有明顯的英國模式。

佛格森堅決捍衛大英帝國所創造的相對穩定與平靜。事實上，他在《世界大戰》中寫道，造成「二十世紀極端暴力」的三大主要原因之一就是帝國的分裂——沒錯，包括英國，還有其他國家，即軸心國，「歷史上最糟糕的帝國」。（為了簡化本書的浩瀚篇幅，他引用了另外兩個決定因素，即多民族社會的劇烈分崩離析和經濟波動的興衰。）如果說大英帝國遠非完美無瑕——弗格森非常詳細地描述了這些瑕疵——那麼它在對抗軸心國的“最輝煌的時刻”也表現得令人印象深刻。和

使這場勝利如此美好、如此真正高貴的原因是，帝國的勝利只能是慘勝。最終，英國犧牲了自己的帝國來阻止德國人、日本人和義大利人保住他們的帝國。難道單憑那次犧牲，還不能洗清帝國的所有其他罪孽嗎？

《世界大戰》帶領讀者經歷了長達一個世紀的種族緊張局勢和經濟不確定性，經歷了漫長而殘酷的歷程，最終導致了第二次世界大戰和西方的「衰落」：即陷入難以想像的恐怖，以及隨之而來的東方政治崛起。他的結論本質上是，如果西方國家不焦躁不安、拖延時間，而是在 1938 年採取先發制人的行動，那麼戰爭的代價在各方面都會更小。他寫道，希特勒的目標是：

就是擴大德意志帝國，以便盡可能地包容整個德國人民，並在此過程中消滅他所認為的對其生存的主要威脅，即猶太人和蘇聯共產主義（對希特勒來說，它們是一回事）。就像日本領土擴張的支持者一樣，他尋求生存空間，因為他相信德國需要更多的領土，因為德國人口太多，而戰略原料不足。

然而，「希特勒想要的不僅僅是一個『大德意志』；他想要一個『盡可能最強的德意志』。鑑於德意志人在東中歐的地理分佈非常廣泛，這意味著德意志帝國的疆域從萊茵河一直延伸到伏爾加河。但這並非至少希特勒野心的極限，因為建立這個『最大德意志帝國』的帝國，旨在為伏爾加河。但這並非至少希特勒野心的極限，因為建立這個『最大德意志帝國』的帝國，旨在為德意志世界帝國基礎，使其匹敵能和大英帝國。

但英國及其盟友仍猶豫不決。「因此，」在弗格森看來，「唯一從未認真考慮過的選項就是先發製人——換句話說，儘早採取行動，將希特勒德國構成的威脅扼殺在萌芽狀態……第二次世界大戰的悲劇在於，如果嘗試過這種方法，幾乎肯定會成功。”

但戰爭並不總是不可避免的，正如弗格森在他早期的權威著作《戰爭的憐憫》中所強調的那樣。這本書的書名取自威爾弗雷德‧歐文的《奇怪的會面》：

許多人可能會因為我的歡欣而大笑，

而我的哭泣卻留下了一些東西，

現在必須消亡，我的意思是未說出的真相，

戰爭的憐憫，戰爭昇華的憐憫。

弗格森巧妙地運用了這個詞的雙重意義：憐憫是戰爭帶來的無限悲傷，或許更令人心碎的是憐憫是戰爭的可避免性。

在書的一開始，他就向我們講述了他的祖父約翰·吉爾摩·弗格森 (John Gilmour Ferguson) 的故事。約翰·吉爾摩·弗格森 17 歲入伍，作為西福斯高地兵團（即“穿裙子的魔鬼”）的一名列兵被派往戰壕。他受了傷，還被毒氣熏倒，這讓我們想起了歐文更為著名的詩歌《Dulce et decorum est》，其中生動地寫道“毒氣！毒氣！快，夥計們！……”但與他的許多戰友不同，約翰·弗格森幸運地回到了蘇格蘭，並最終成為了一名祖父。

這本書充滿了出人意料的結局，尤其是戰爭的爆發本身幾乎讓所有人都措手不及。儘管幾十年來一直有預測、條約、違反條約和預防措施；儘管事實上歐洲各地的皇室成員都有親戚關係並且經常保持聯繫；儘管有那麼多間諜、雙重間諜和暢銷書；儘管弗朗西斯·斐迪南大公爵和他的妻子在薩拉熱窩被暗殺，「這是歷史上最著名的錯誤爆發」——但事實是，1914 年 8 月 4 日，似乎對全世界戰爭的爆發似乎感到震驚。

但這是可以避免的嗎？用弗格森的話來說：

如果英國袖手旁觀——即使只有幾週——歐洲大陸也可能轉變為與我們今天所知的歐盟大致相同的狀態——但不會出現兩次世界大戰所導致的英國海外勢力的大幅萎縮。或許，俄羅斯徹底陷入內戰和布爾什維克主義的恐怖之中也是可以避免的……而且，美國的金融和軍事力量也不會大舉入侵歐洲事務，實際上標誌著英國在世界金融霸權地位的終結。誠然，20 世紀 20 年代的歐洲可能仍然存在法西斯主義；但激進民族主義者的聲音最有說服力的地方應該是法國，而不是德國…

此外，或許「（接下來幾十年的）通貨膨脹和通貨緊縮不會那麼嚴重」。但當然，德國會是勝利者。在 1918 年，這並不是一個可怕的前景。事實上：

隨著德皇的勝利，阿道夫·希特勒本可以作為一名平庸的明信片畫家和一名在德國控制的中歐過著充實的老兵的生活，對此他沒有什麼可抱怨的。而列寧本來可以在蘇黎世繼續他那充滿怨恨的寫作，永遠等待資本主義的崩潰──並且永遠失望。

「是德國迫使不情願的法國（以及並非不情願的俄羅斯）捲入了1914年的大陸戰爭，但最終決定將大陸戰爭演變成世界大戰的卻是英國政府，這場戰爭比德國第一次『加入歐盟』的時間長了一倍，造成的人員傷亡也多得多……他總結道，「這簡直就是現代史上最大的錯誤。」

沙瑪說這本書可能是他最喜歡的——「我只是喜歡它的敘述、激情和寫作方式」——但他不確定自己是否同意弗格森的結論。 “雖然我不是一個完全的決定論者，”他說，“但我內心裡有一點宿命論者的感覺。”

同樣對弗格森的立場提出質疑的還有索爾頓斯托爾歷史學教授查爾斯·S·邁爾 (Charles S. Maier)。邁爾與弗格森共同教授會議課程「1965 年歷史」（“國際歷史：國家、市場和全球經濟”）。「他的論點充滿熱情、精闢和學識，」邁爾說，「但我並不認為英國最好不要參與這場戰爭。我不同意他的觀點，因為我認為，如果當時德國獲勝，那將不會是今天的德國——沒有人能夠預見到第三帝國的出現。」正如邁爾在書評中所寫，「弗格森的思想實驗是為了反思後果的我們相信 1491914919149194919491949 149194919491949194919491 可能不能被說服。年的政治家應該默許德國的要求… 」不，他繼續說道，「第一次世界大戰是在人們普遍意識到鋼鐵是不可避免的情況下進行的。

邁爾所說的“思想實驗”，正是弗格森在《戰爭的憐憫》中得出痛苦結論的“反事實”。這是虛擬式過去完成式的歷史，也是他在整個工作和教學過程中以極其嚴肅的態度運用的一種智慧。弗格森認為英國參戰確實是“現代史上最大的錯誤”，任何人如需更多背景信息，請參閱他的詳細論文《德皇的歐洲聯盟：如果英國在 1914 年 8 月‘袖手旁觀’會怎樣？》。這是《虛擬歷史》九章之一，由弗格森編輯，他與其他八位歷史學家一起玩「如果…會怎樣？」的遊戲——玩弄諸如「如果德國在 1940 年 5 月入侵英國會怎樣？」之類的概念。 “如果查理一世避免了內戰會怎樣？” “如果約翰·F·肯尼迪還活著會怎樣？”

弗格森承認，這本書包含「一系列進入『想像時間』的獨立旅程」。讓讀者透過一系列蟲洞一睹八個平行宇宙的景象，這可能帶有科幻色彩。」但他非但沒有道歉，反而辯稱：「世界不是神所安排的，也不受理性、階級鬥爭或任何其他確定性『法則』的支配。」

儘管一些歷史學家認為反事實歷史只是客廳遊戲、轉移注意力的幌子，甚至是“對歷史的徹底否定”，但弗格森卻不這麼認為。他在辦公室說：「虛擬歷史是我思想發展中非常重要的一個時刻。之所以產生這個想法，是因為我的博士論文最終提出了一個反事實的問題：如果德國人在1920年穩定了貨幣，而不是實施瘋狂的惡性通貨膨脹政策，會怎麼樣？儘管我當時並不清楚自己在做什麼，但我還是試圖仔細思考這個問題，並認為通貨膨脹確實存在其他選擇，這只是一個糟糕的選擇。

「我寄出了一篇文章來闡述這一觀點，結果卻收到了一位德國經濟史泰博的審稿報告，該報告對歷史學家可以提出假設性問題的想法進行了譴責。

我仔細思考了這份譴責性的報告，最後認定他錯了，某種程度上，「虛擬歷史」就是在那一刻誕生的。我當時的感覺是，而且我仍然堅信這一點，我們需要提出這些問題。我們不能迴避這些問題。主流歷史學家不願探討在我看來在哲學上無可辯駁的觀點：如果我們要提出任何具有因果關係的論斷，就必須明確該論斷所隱含的反事實。我認為，不明確你的反事實幾乎是一種詐欺。你是在欺騙你的讀者和學生。如果你真的認為，比如說，聯準會應該為大蕭條負責，那麼你必須說明，如果採用不同的貨幣政策，如何避免它。

「我深信的另一件事，」他繼續說道，「是它能幫助你重拾過去的不確定性。我們正致力於重拾過去的思想，重新捕捉並重建它們，就像1914年8月的那一刻，當時完全沒有人知道會發生什麼。歷史學家多年來一直認為第一次世界大戰的起源可以追溯到19世紀90年代。然而，當時的感覺並非如此。」當時的感覺並非如此。」

然後是《巨人》，他說這本書「幾乎惹惱了所有人」。「在柯林頓政府執政的最後幾天，」他說，「我曾有些激動地得出結論：『二十一世紀世界面臨的最大失望是，這個擁有足夠經濟資源讓世界變得更美好的國家的領導人卻缺乏這樣做的勇氣。』我萬萬沒想到，僅僅九個月之後，一位新總統就面對著「9·11」的災難，竟然推行了與我所倡導的政策如此相似的政策。

不難看出為什麼這本書「幾乎惹惱了所有人」。這也更容易理解為什麼他的自由派批評者稱他為美國極右翼的新保守主義傀儡。（尤其是當人們都知道，用他的話來說，他是一個“堅定的撒切爾主義者”時。他在牛津大學時就結識了撒切爾主義者——“顯然是那裡最有趣的人”，但他太“年輕，太無足輕重”，除了寫了很多“支持她和里根”的文章外，什麼也做不了。正如他曾在一次採訪中所說的那樣，“英國正走在成為阿根廷的道路上”，幸運的是，撒切爾夫人伸出了援手。）

但他聲稱自己從未與布希政府有過任何接觸，並表示「新保守主義」的指控「絕對是惡意的」。他指出：「我一直堅持認為，美國不太可能成功入侵伊拉克，因為與英國不同，美國存在我文中提到的三大缺陷：人力、資金，以及最重要的持久力。我也反對英國參與這場戰爭。我在《金融時報》上撰文稱，這可能符合美國的利益，但不符合英國的利益。但我的觀點在倫敦和華盛頓都沒有得到重視。」

「在那些遙遠的日子裡，我的哀嘆和反覆是：『為什麼美國忽視英國的歷史？為什麼這裡沒有人談論1920年以及英國在巴格達的經歷？』記住邱吉爾說過的話：「目前，我們每年要花費八百萬美元，才能享受坐在一座不知感恩的火山上的特權，而無論怎樣，我們都不會從中獲得任何有價值的東西。「美國人竟然如此狹隘，這對我來說真是個啟示。我必須說，我來這裡時無疑抱有各種各樣的幻想，但我仍然感到驚訝。我想當時人們會說：「好吧，這傢伙支持帝國（他們沒說是哪個帝國），所以他肯定支持戰爭。「我確實說過，美國應該更積極地使用其力量來擺脫流氓政權和失敗國家，但認為這在 2003 年發揮了任何作用的想法是荒謬的。

我還說過，『增兵』的時機是2004年——我的意思是，如果你要做這件事，就必須做得正確。當時我為《紐約時報》撰寫的那篇文章，讓我陷入了很大的麻煩，說的就是那個時候應該採取冷酷無情的手段。你必須在當時就地制止叛亂；你必須打擊費盧傑，你必須打擊薩德爾。但軍隊退縮了，這是一個災難性的錯誤。美軍地面部隊的信譽和合法性只會變得更加動搖。

「我們現在需要另一個想法。我建議派遣聯合國部隊。」（這篇專欄文章也遭到了嚴厲的嘲諷——尤其是在那些將聯合國與無能和腐敗聯繫起來的媒體中，而他本人也持有同樣的觀點。）但他堅持說：「我想到的是，比如說，那些戴著藍盔的盟友。美國究竟能指望在世界上哪裡找到一個願意展現真正興趣和支持印度的印度人？

擺脫這種讓批評者非常反感的在伊拉克建立帝國的表象的方法之一，簡而言之就是：虛偽。他在《新共和》中寫道：

就像在波斯尼亞一樣，美國應該交出一些髒活……但這只有當歐洲人得到他們想要的東西時才有可能：美國似乎即將移交伊拉克權力。請注意“相似”這個詞。正如英國人在埃及所表現的那樣，在真正恢復自治之前，你可以維持這種虛偽很長一段時間。

「我認為逃跑不是一個選擇，」他解釋道。我認為，無論誰當總統，到2012年我們都會在伊拉克駐軍。這不像越戰；你不能袖手旁觀，任由它自生自滅。儘管越戰很糟糕，但對美國人來說，這根本沒有地緣政治成本；失敗的代價是零。而從這裡逃走的地緣政治成本幾乎是難以想像的。一場全面的區域內戰不僅會為伊朗創造各種機會，還會為伊朗支持的什葉派和基地組織背後的最瘋狂的遜尼派激進分子創造各種機會。這會使你們在該地區最重要的盟友以色列變得極其脆弱。

這些陰暗而沉重的話題——越南、以色列，事實上是過去半個世紀的大多數生死攸關的問題——將在弗格森即將出版的著作《亨利·基辛格的傳記》中進行探討。他說，這將是一部“全球性”的傳記，因為“沒有一個政府不知道這個人。本書講述的這個人在20世紀70年代幾乎每一次國際危機中都扮演了重要角色。”

基辛格親自邀請弗格森撰寫傳記，並允許他查閱自己的文件，目前這項工作已經開始。但首先，弗格森必須完成他關於西格蒙德·沃伯格 (Siegmund Warburg) 的書，儘管沃伯格在美國鮮為人知，但他在 20 世紀 50 年代至 80 年代期間在歐洲金融界極具影響力。沃伯格著作的創作始於弗格森在漢堡的時期，當時他遇到了沃伯格的一位親戚，這位親戚邀請這位年輕的蘇格蘭人（一位歷史學家，現已轉型為經濟史學家）查閱家族文件。

「所以我就在那裡，」弗格森回憶道，「坐在漢堡的MM Warburg銀行辦公室裡，正是在那裡，我第一次真正接觸到了嚴肅的歷史研究。讀完Warburg的論文，我意識到我需要了解一個經濟故事。德國人為何失去了對貨幣的控制？究竟出了什麼問題？”

但還有一個故事對我來說並不陌生。我一直都明白它的重要性。那就是德國猶太人及其困境的故事。我被近代史上最重要、當然也是最令人費解的悲劇——猶太人的悲劇——深深吸引。猶太人——不僅在經濟生活，而且在文化生活方面都取得了巨大的成功，他們是現代藝術和政治創新的旗手，當然，他們也是20世紀30年代和40年代反對這種文化的浪潮的最終受害者。

「這真正激發了我對德國猶太歷史的興趣，」他繼續說道。在我寫完以華伯格家族為核心人物的《紙與鐵》一書後不久，我就被邀請查閱羅斯柴爾德家族的檔案，準備撰寫一部關於羅斯柴爾德家族歷史的巨著。我緊緊抓住了這個機會，幾乎在倫敦的羅斯柴爾德檔案館生活了五年，也參觀了俄羅斯和法蘭克福的重要收藏。等到我完成這項工作時，我想我對德國猶太歷史的了解已經達到了非猶太人所能達到的程度；畢竟，像我這樣背景的人竟然被邀請寫這本書，真是諷刺。

《羅斯柴爾德家族》被稱為有史以來有關這個王朝的最好的書，歷史學家弗里茨·斯特恩稱，這部作品「再次堅定了人們對偉大歷史著作可能性的信心」。這本書充滿了家庭細節，揭示了一系列令人生畏的交易、合約、法規和規章，這些都使這個家族從法蘭克福的貧民窟一躍成為世界上——也許是歷史上——最富有的家族，在最醜陋的反猶太主義的殘酷背景下，上演了一出巧妙的戲劇。

但為什麼弗格森注定會「深深陷入德國猶太歷史」？難道他對於帝國的論點還沒有足夠的辯護和延續嗎？一位好辯的蘇格蘭人竟然被選中來撰寫三位主宰歷史的德裔猶太世界人物的故事，這實在是“諷刺”，但目前還沒有答案。或許，弗格森本人也暗示蘇格蘭人在許多重要方面與猶太人相似，這或許能從中找到一些線索：「蘇格蘭加爾文主義激發了我們與現代猶太人相似的衝動。高度重視讀寫能力。強調教育作為社會流動的途徑。對金融和科學的天賦。」無論原因是什麼，他笑著說，「透過這一切，我已經成為一個徹底的親猶太主義者。」

欲了解更多這一諷刺現象，還需等待後續的書籍報導。同時，我們或許會考慮一個可能的反事實：如果我們證明弗格森錯了，穿上紫色，並成為下一個帝國，會怎麼樣？

珍妮特‧塔塞爾 (Janet Tassel) 是本雜誌的特約編輯。

點此看 2007年5-6月刊目錄

沒有付費區。只是教育和想法。請捐款。

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傑西卡·尚德 (Jessica Shand) 坐在音樂實驗室裡，手裡拿著一支長笛。

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The Global Empire of Niall Ferguson

Doing history on a sweeping scale

May-June 2007

Illustration by Tom Mosser

Here is an image calculated to ruffle the feathers of all red-blooded Americans:

Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary Colossus—to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato—then the image may be worth pondering.

This charge of unfitness for duty has been laid at our doorstep by the lively young Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, Harvard’s (relatively) new Tisch professor of history and Ziegler professor of business administration. And he is far from done with us: “Consider…the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping—that is to say, constabulary duties.” He clarifies his position:

Unlike most European critics of the United States…I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job.…The United States has good reasons to play the role of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture.

“All I mean,” continues Ferguson in his controversial book Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (2004), “is that whatever they choose to call their position in the world—hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership—Americans should recognize the functional resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and should try to do a better rather than worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors.”

Though he argues in another of his contentious books, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002), that the British empire was, on the whole, a successful enterprise, well worth imitating, we Yanks, he says, just do not have the stomach for it. We suffer, says he, from three fundamental deficits, which hinder us from flexing our muscles and making the world a better place: an economic deficit, a manpower deficit, and “most serious of the three,” a huge attention deficit. The economic deficit is remediable, though not entirely without risk down the road: “[Americans] can carry on borrowing from abroad since there seems to be an insatiable appetite on the part of foreign investors for dollar-denominated securities, no matter how low the return on them.”

The manpower deficit is problematic because, as he notes, Americans do not want to spend long years abroad serving in the armed forces or supervising a colony somewhere. He offers a mischievous proposal: “If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless, and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army.” More seriously: “One of the keys to the expansion of the Roman Empire was, after all, the opportunity offered to non-Romans to earn citizenship through military service.”

But our attention deficit may well be our undoing: we are a people sunk in unseemly denial. Ferguson quotes a dispirited American general: “We preach about values, democracy, human rights, but we haven’t convinced the American people to pony up….”

With which Ferguson essentially agrees: like it or not, we Americans not only can afford to “play a more assertive global role, but [can]not afford not to.”

If Ferguson has had a signature theme, it is this: the importance of an energetic liberal empire and how best to carry it off, as did, for the most part, the British and Romans. Though his next few years will be dedicated to his other principal interests, namely money, German-Jewish history, and power, it is his multiple works on empire that have brought him notoriety.

At the age of 43, the prodigious Ferguson has produced eight meaty, weighty books, and has another two in progress; hundreds of scholarly articles, tumbles of introductions and book chapters, and an assembly line of regular columns and op-eds for American, British, and German newspapers, all while editing the Journal of Contemporary History. (He once told an interviewer, “My puzzle is with people who spend 10 years not producing a book. What do they do?”) And all while commuting among Harvard, the Hoover Institution at Stanford (where he is a senior fellow), and the United Kingdom, where his wife Susan, a media executive, and their three children live.

Moreover, in the United Kingdom, he is also quite the media celebrity. In 2002-3, for Britain’s Channel 4, he wrote and starred in a six-part history of the British empire. In 2004, he followed with American Colossus—both programs based on his books. And in 2006, Britons watched his six-part The War of the World, dramatizing his latest, a huge volume subtitled Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West.

Visiting Ferguson in his office at the Center for European Studies, I asked him about the strain of separation from home and family, what he has called his transatlantic “trilemma.” “I can testify that it is extraordinarily hard,” he said. “It’s unfair to the family, and I’d so much rather they were here. But with every passing year, as children get older, they become harder to move. So I feel that I’ve lost this particular argument.” After a pause, though, he added, “Another way to look at it is that historically it’s not that abnormal for husbands and fathers to spend significant time away from their families—seamen, army officers, colonial administrators. Actually, funnily enough, these long separations perhaps do allow me bouts of extreme work, which suits my temperament.”

In the oration Ferguson delivered at Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises in June 2004, he noted: “Throughout much of my life, the United States has seemed to be tapping on my shoulder, urging me to quit the Old World for the New.”

Niall (pronounced “NEEL”) Campbell Douglas Ferguson—born in Glasgow in 1964, his father a doctor, his mother a physics teacher—grew up in the west of Scotland, except for two years in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father had taken a job teaching. (His younger sister is now a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania.) He prepared at The Glasgow Academy, which he describes as “a school produced by the Scottish bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century to educate their sons for commerce. I was lucky because, though it was clear that I wasn’t going into business or law, the school was encouraging of those who were obviously effete intellectuals, and encouraged us to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. My parents never opposed this path. My father wasn’t the kind of man who wants to clone himself—he was delighted that I was academically motivated. The ethos of my family was work and education.”

So it was off to Oxford, where he promptly went straight to the devil. “In the true tradition of Calvinist lads who lapse,” he says, “I spent two years doing everything but work. I played the double bass in the jazz quintet, debated rather badly at the Oxford Union, edited a student magazine, and even appeared as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, hookah and all.” At that moment, says he, he fortuitously discovered he was not cut out for the stage and, according to his account, sprinted to the Bodleian Library in the nick of time. “Oxford, unlike Harvard, doesn’t do continuous assessment. If you can get it together for your final examinations, which in those days meant 10 three-hour papers over seven days, it won’t matter how bad you’ve been before.”

Dare we say the rest is history? Graduating with first-class honors in 1985, he was a demy (a foundation scholar) at Magdalen College until 1989. He then spent two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, where he learned German, worked on his dissertation (subsequently his first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927), and worked as a journalist for British and German newspapers—using a variety of pseudonyms, to avoid academic reproach. At this point, he took up a research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, soon afterwards moving to a lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, and in 2000, he was appointed professor of political and financial history. Two years later he jumped the Atlantic to take the Herzog chair in financial history at the Stern Business School of New York University (where he was voted “Professor of the Year” in 2003). In 2004, the year he arrived at Harvard, Time magazine included him in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Ferguson is a bonnie and beamish lad—genial, open, and charming. His admirers have suggested that in a movie he might be played by Colin Firth or Hugh Grant. In Alan Bennett’s recent play and film, The History Boys, he is the model for the contrarian teacher Irwin, played by Stephen Campbell Moore. But there is no reason he could not play himself. He certainly has the media savvy and experience. In his films he uses to great effect his mellifluous actor’s voice, Oxonian wrapped in unmistakable burr. As he does his good looks: In the film of Empire, he treks all over the former British colonies, looking very cool, from the Caribbean to Africa to India, speaking from dungeons and castles, from churches, gardens, and deserts, from parades, bazaars, and ritual ceremonies, from dugout canoes and rickshaws, and even while clambering up peaks, all the while overflowing with names, dates, customs, exotic anecdotes, and even the occasional familiar chestnut, such as “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!”

To those inclined to turn up their noses a bit at the concept of a media historian, Simon Schama, University Professor of art history and history at Columbia, and himself a media celebrity in much the same mold as Ferguson, snaps, “Well, let them try it themselves before they sniff. Trying to be a historian and a public intellectual is the most demanding, challenging task one can undertake. My professor, Jack [Sir J.H.] Plumb, and a mentor of Niall’s, taught that reaching a wide public is the most exacting challenge you can have as a scholar, without compromising the truth and the complexities of what you want to say. Niall does that extremely well, both on the printed page and on television. I am his number- one fan!”

On the other hand, it will come as no surprise that some of the concepts expounded by Ferguson rub many people the wrong way. Indeed, the very word “empire,” it seems, touches off severe reactions. To take but a couple of examples, the British journalist Johann Hari, under the headline “There can be no excuse for Empire,” writes in the Independent: “For over a decade now, Ferguson has built a role as a court historian for the imperial American hard right, arguing that the British Empire from the Victorian period on was a good thing with some unfortunate ‘blemishes’ that have been over-rated and over-stated.” In a review in the Guardian, entitled “The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale,” Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge, says that Ferguson, whom she refers to as a “neocon ideologue,” is rewriting history, “driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right….Colonialism—a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, land-grabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement—is rewritten into a benign developmental mission….” Ferguson is used to these imprecations. Although he did write a published letter chiding “Horrible Hari” (the epithet alludes to the Horrible Histories series by British author Terry Deary), Ferguson says this kind of criticism comes with the (imperial) territory.

We cannot deal here with all these charges. Anticolonialism, after all, is Gopal’s career. But take, for example, Gopal’s charge of slavery—an integral element, she says, of empire. In Ferguson’s film, one of the most significant points made is that Britain abolished slavery in its empire. Returning to Empire, the book, one reads in the section on the Clapham Sect about this evangelical group’s success in bringing about abolition:

It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people. It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart.

He goes on to discuss the broad and diverse leadership of the campaign for abolition, and its unstoppable resolve, so that the slave trade was abolished in 1807 (and slavery itself in 1833). “From now on,” he continues, “convicted slavers faced, by a nice irony, transportation to Britain’s penal colony in Australia.” (In short, “indentured labour.”)

Furthermore, despite the anti-Western imperial scenarios constructed by his critics, Ferguson (without denying the undeniable) is emphatic about the benefits that accompanied British rule, including active efforts to eliminate female infanticide and sati (the self-immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre).

“Without the spread of British rule around the world,” he continues, “it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.”

Those empires that adopted alternative models—the Russian and the Chinese—imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today. India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models.

Ferguson is resolute in his defense of the relative stability and calm created by the British empire. In fact, one of the three principal causes of the “extreme violence of the twentieth century,” he writes in The War of the World, was the fracturing of empires—the British, yes, but also the others, the Axis powers, “the worst empires in all history.” (The two other determinants he cites—to simplify the vast tapestry of this book—were the violent coming apart of multiethnic societies and the boom and bust of economic volatility.) If the British empire was far from unblemished—and Ferguson describes the blemishes in great detail—it was also impressively noble in its “finest hour” against the Axis powers; and

what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?

The War of the World takes the reader on a long and gruesome march through the century-long racial tensions and economic uncertainties that led to the Second World War and the “descent” of the West: that is, the descent into unimaginable horror, and the concomitant political rise of the East. His conclusion essentially is that the war would have been less costly in every way if the West, instead of fretting and temporizing, had taken pre-emptive action in, say, 1938. Hitler’s goal, he writes,

was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials.

However, “Hitler wanted not merely a Greater Germany; he wanted the Greatest Possible Germany. Given the very wide geographical distribution of Germans in East Central Europe, that implied a German empire stretching from the Rhine to the Volga. Nor was that the limit of Hitler’s ambitions, for the creation of this maximal Germany was intended to be the basis for a German world empire that would be, at the very least, a match for the British Empire.”

But the British and their allies continued to dither. “Thus,” in Ferguson’s view, “the only one of the options that was never seriously contemplated was pre-emption—in other words, an early move to nip in the bud the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany…. [T]he tragedy of the Second World War is that, had this been tried, it would almost certainly have succeeded.”

But war is not always inevitable, as Ferguson stresses in his magisterial earlier book, The Pity of War. The book’s title is taken from Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”:

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now, I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Ferguson plays on the subtle double meaning of the word: pity as the infinite sadness of war, and perhaps even more heartbreaking—pity as the avoidability of war.

In the very beginning of the book, he tells us about his grandfather, John Gilmour Ferguson, who joined up at age 17 and was sent to the trenches as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders, the “devils in skirts.” He was wounded and gassed, reminding us of the more famous Owen poem, “Dulce et decorum est,” with its vivid “Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!....” But the lucky John Ferguson returned to Scotland to become in time a grandfather, unlike a huge number of his comrades.

The book is full of unexpected conclusions, not least that the outbreak of war itself took almost everyone by surprise. In spite of decades of predictions, treaties, broken treaties, and precautions; in spite of the fact that virtually every member of royalty throughout Europe was related and constantly in touch; in spite of all the spies and double agents and best-selling books; in spite even of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, “thanks to the most famous wrong-turning in history”—the fact is that on August 4, 1914, it seems that the whole world was shocked that war had begun.

But was it avoidable? In Ferguson’s words:

Had Britain stood aside—even for a matter of weeks—continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today—but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars. Perhaps too the complete collapse of Russia into the horrors of civil war and Bolshevism might have been averted.…And there plainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world. Granted, there might still have been Fascism in Europe in the 1920s; but it would have been in France rather than Germany that radical nationalists would have sounded most persuasive….

In addition, perhaps “the inflations and deflations of the [succeeding decades] would not have been so severe.” But of course, Germany would have been the victor. Not such a terrifying prospect in 1918. In fact:

With the Kaiser triumphant, Adolf Hitler could have eked out his life as a mediocre postcard painter and a fulfilled old soldier in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain. And Lenin could have carried on his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to collapse—and forever disappointed.

“It was Germany which forced the continental war of 1914 upon an unwilling France (and a not so unwilling Russia), but it was the British government which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war, a conflict which lasted twice as long and cost many more lives than Germany’s first ‘bid for European Union’ would have….It was,” he concludes, “nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”

Schama, who says this book is probably his favorite—“I just love the narrative, the passion, the way it is written”—is nevertheless not sure he agrees with Ferguson’s conclusion. “Though I’m not a complete determinist,” says he, “I have a little bit more of the predestination person in me.”

Also disputing Ferguson’s position is Saltonstall professor of history Charles S. Maier, who co-teaches a conference course, History 1965 (“International History: States, Markets, and the Global Economy”), with Ferguson. “He makes his arguments with great verve and panache and learning,” says Maier, “but I don’t agree that Britain might have been better advised to stay out of the war. I don’t agree with him in that I think the Germany that would have won would not be the Germany of today—no one could have foreseen the Third Reich.” As Maier writes in a review of the book, “Ferguson’s thought-experiments are warranted for reflecting on the irony of unintended consequences, but not to persuade us that the statesmen of 1914 should have acquiesced in German demands….” No, he continues, “World War I was fought with a pervasive consciousness of iron inevitability.” For himself, Maier writes, “the abiding lesson of this stimulating book is that rational choices can produce absolutely catastrophic outcomes. For that sobering demonstration, I am grateful to Ferguson as well as to his grandfather.”

The “thought-experiments” mentioned by Maier are the “counterfactuals” through which Ferguson arrives at his painful conclusion in The Pity of War. It is history in the subjunctive past perfect, a jeu d’esprit that he deploys with the utmost seriousness throughout his work and teaching. Anyone needing more background on Ferguson’s opinion that Britain’s entry into the war was indeed “the greatest error of modern history,” is herewith referred to his detailed essay, “The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Britain had ‘stood aside’ in August 1914?” This is one of nine chapters in Virtual History, edited by Ferguson, who, along with eight other historians, plays the game of “What if?”—toying with concepts such as “What if Germany had invaded England in May 1940?” “What if Charles I had avoided the Civil War?” “What if John F. Kennedy had lived?”

Ferguson admits that the book comprises a “series of separate voyages into ‘imaginary time.’ It may smack of science fiction to offer the reader glimpses through a series of worm holes into eight parallel universes.” But far from apologizing, he argues, “The world is not divinely ordered, nor governed by Reason, the class struggle or any other deterministic ‘law.’”

Though counterfactual history has been dismissed by some historians as a parlor-game, a red herring, even “the complete rejection of history,” Ferguson will have none of it. “Virtual History,” he says in his office, “was a very important moment in my intellectual development. It came about because my Ph.D. had ended up posing a counterfactual question: What if the Germans had stabilized their currency in 1920 and not embarked on their deranged hyperinflationary policy? Without actually knowing what I was doing, I tried to think that through, and argued that there really was an alternative, that it wasn’t inevitable, that there was a moment when, as a result of a series of very bad decisions, Germany ended up plunging into hyperinflation.

“I sent off an article making that point, and it came back with a referee’s report from one of the grand old men of German economic history, denouncing the very notion that an historian could ask a what-if question.

“I thought about this damning report, and I decided that he was wrong, and in a sense Virtual History was born at that moment. My feeling was, and I’m still very committed to the notion, that we need to ask this stuff. We can’t duck these questions. There’s a reluctance among mainstream historians to engage what seems to me a philosophically irrefutable point: that if we’re going to propose anything of a causal nature, we’ve got to make explicit the counterfactual that statement implies. I think it’s almost fraudulent not to make your counterfactual explicit. You’re cheating your readers and your students. If you really do think that, let’s say, the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression, then you have to show how a different monetary policy would have avoided it.

“The other thing I deeply believe,” he continues, “is that it helps you recapture the uncertainty of the past. We are about recapturing past thoughts, recapturing and reconstructing them, like the moment in August 1914, when absolutely nobody knew what was coming. Historians have been writing for years and years that the origins of the First World War date back to the 1890s. Well, that’s not how it felt at the time.”

Then there was Colossus, the book, he says “that managed to annoy just about everybody.” “Back in the dying days of the Clinton administration,” he says, “I concluded—somewhat heatedly—that ‘the greatest disappointment facing the world in the twenty-first century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it.’ Little did I imagine that within a matter of nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of September 11, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated. Since the declaration of the war against terrorism, the question has ceased to be about guts. It is now about grit, the tenacity to finish what has been started.”

It is not hard to see why this book “managed to annoy just about everybody.” And it becomes easier to understand why his liberal critics call him a neocon stooge of the American hard right. (Especially when it gets around that he was, in his words, a “confirmed Thatcherite.” He had fallen in with the Thatcherites at Oxford—“clearly the most interesting people there,” but was too “junior and insignificant” to do more than write “a lot in support of her, and Reagan, too.” As he once told an interviewer, “Britain was on the road to becoming Argentina” when, fortunately, Lady Thatcher came along to the rescue.)

But he claims he has never had the slightest contact with the Bush administration, and says the “neocon” charge is “absolutely malicious.” He notes, “I was always consistent in saying that the United States was not likely to make a success of the invasion of Iraq because, unlike Britain, it had the three deficits I wrote about: in manpower, capital, and above all, staying power. I also opposed British involvement in the war. I wrote in the Financial Times that this may have been in the interest of the United States, but it was not in Britain’s interest. But I was heeded neither in London nor in Washington.

“My lament and refrain in those distant days was, ‘Why does America ignore British history? Why does nobody here talk about 1920, and Britain’s experiences in Baghdad?’ Remember what Churchill said: ‘At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of sitting on an ungrateful volcano out of which we will in no circumstances get anything worth having.’ It was a revelation to me that Americans were so parochial. I must say I came here no doubt with all kinds of illusions, but I was still surprised. I think that what happened is that people said, ‘Well, this guy is in favor of empire (which empire they don’t say), so therefore he must be in favor of the war.’ What I did say was that the United States should use its power more aggressively to get rid of rogue regimes and failed states, but the notion that that had any role to play in 2003 is absurd.

“I also said that the time for a ‘surge’ was 2004—I mean, if you’re going to do it, do it right. And the piece I wrote then for the New York Times, which got me into a lot of trouble, said the time for ruthlessness was at that moment. You had to stop the insurgency then and there; you had to whack Fallujah, you had to whack al-Sadr. But the army backed off, and that was a disastrous mistake. The credibility and legitimacy of U.S. forces on the ground have only gotten shakier.

“We need another idea at this point. I’ve suggested putting in UN troops.” (This column was roundly derided, too—particularly in that part of the media where the UN is synonymous with fecklessness and corruption, opinions he actually shares.) But, he persists, “I’m thinking of, say, Indians with blue helmets. Where in the world can the United States expect to find an ally prepared to put up sincere interest and support? Perhaps in India; India is a country with a large conventional force, and with a commitment to fight the war on terror.”

One way out of the appearance, so distasteful to his critics, of creating an empire in Iraq, is, to put it succinctly: hypocrisy. He wrote in the New Republic:

As in Bosnia, the United States should hand over some of the dirty work….But that will only be possible if the Europeans get what they want: the semblance of an imminent U.S. handover of power in Iraq. Note the word semblance. As the British showed in Egypt, you can keep up this kind of hypocrisy for quite a long time before you actually have to restore self-government for real.

“I don’t think running away is an option,” he explains. “I think regardless of who is president, we are still going to have a military presence in Iraq by 2012. It’s not like Vietnam; you can’t just walk away, leaving it to go to hell, with everybody killing one another. As bad as that was, it had no geopolitical cost at all for Americans; the costs of failure were zero. Whereas the geopolitical cost of running away here is almost unimaginable. Not only would a full-scale regional civil war create all sorts of opportunities for Iran. It creates all sorts of opportunities for the Iranian-backed Shi‘ah and the wildest Sunni radicals who are behind al Qaeda. It makes your most important ally in the region, Israel, desperately vulnerable.”

These dark and freighted subjects—Vietnam, Israel, indeed most of the life-and-death questions of the last half-century—will be examined in Ferguson’s forthcoming undertaking: a biography of Henry Kissinger. It will be a “global” biography in the sense, he says, that “there isn’t a government that doesn’t have a view of this man. You’re dealing with an individual who had a significant role in almost every international crisis of the 1970s.”

Kissinger himself invited Ferguson to write the biography, and gave him access to his papers, upon which work has begun. But first, Ferguson must finish his book on Siegmund Warburg, who, though hardly known in the United States, was highly influential in European financial circles between the 1950s and 1980s. The Warburg book began back in Ferguson’s days in Hamburg, when he met a Warburg relative who invited the young Scot, a historian now morphing into an economic historian, to look at the family papers.

“So there I was,” Ferguson recalls, “sitting in the M.M. Warburg bank offices in Hamburg, and it was there that I really had my first encounter with serious historical research. Reading through the Warburg papers, I realized that here was an economic story I needed to understand. Why did the Germans lose control of their currency? What exactly had gone wrong?

“But there was another story which was not new to me. I’d always understood its importance. This was the story of the German Jews and their predicament. I was gripped by the most important and certainly the most perplexing tragedy of modern history, which was the tragedy of the Jews. The Jews—tremendously successful, not only in economic life, but also in cultural life, the standard-bearers of modernity in the arts and in political innovations of the modern period, and of course the ultimate victims of the backlash against it in the 1930s and ’40s.

“That really started my interest in German-Jewish history,” he continues. “And it wasn’t long after finishing my book, Paper and Iron, in which the Warburgs were central figures, that I was asked to look at the Rothschild archives, with a view to writing a substantial work on the history of the Rothschilds. It was an opportunity I seized with both hands, and I spent five years practically living in the Rothschild archives in London, with visits to important stuff in Russia and Frankfurt. By the time I was done, I think I was about as deeply immersed in German-Jewish history as it’s possible for a non-Jew to be; after all, it was ironic that somebody with my background was asked to write this book.”

The House of Rothschild has been called the finest book ever written about this dynasty, a work that “reaffirms one’s faith in the possibility of great historical writing,” according to historian Fritz Stern. Dense with family details, it unfolds a formidable skein of transactions, contracts, codes, and regulations that took the family from the ghetto of Frankfurt to the status of wealthiest family in the world—perhaps in history—in a deft shadow play illuminated against the grievous background of the ugliest kind of anti-Semitism.

But why is Ferguson destined to find himself so “deeply immersed in German-Jewish history”? Has he not enough to do defending and perhaps perpetuating his arguments on empire? There is no answer—yet—to the “irony” that a disputatious Scot should be chosen to write the story of not one, but three, German-Jewish world players who dominated history. Perhaps a hint can be found in Ferguson’s own suggestion that the Scots are in many significant ways similar to the Jews: “Scottish Calvinism gave rise to impulses comparable to those we associate with Jews in the modern period. A high regard for literacy. An emphasis on education as a route to social mobility. An aptitude for finance and for science.” Whatever the reason, he says with a laugh, “through it all, I have become a thorough philo-Semite.”

For more on this irony, we must await the coming cascade of books. Meanwhile, we might contemplate a possible counterfactual: What if we prove Ferguson wrong, don the purple, and show up as the next empire?

Janet Tassel is a contributing editor of this magazine.

Click here for the May-June 2007 issue table of contents

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