Accused of being an apologist for colonialism, he pointed at the lack of nuance in such a reading and asked critics to compare the British Empire to its German and Japanese alternatives.ĭoom: The Politics of Catastrophe (Allen Lane, 496 pages, Rs 999), published last month, is a global history of catastrophe in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. His view of Britain (and its empire) as a great modernising force was understandable, but offered at a wrong moment in history. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) is a case in point to study how and why Ferguson generates intellectual controversy. Ferguson-an academic, winner of an International Emmy for documentary, once among TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people-is famous as a popular historian whose counterfactual adventures can be vigorously contested but never dismissed. His Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (2015), the first of a promised two-part biography, hasn’t got as much popular attention as it deserved but, together with the second volume, could become his greatest work. The nine or 10 major books usually cited in assessing his skills as historian and writer tend to exclude his acclaimed and awarded double volume on the Rothschilds based on original research. A financial historian, primarily, whose range of expertise-or domain of scholarship-spans the landscape of economic and financial history as well as the history of the British (and American) empires, Ferguson is conventionally, and rather too easily, labelled “conservative” but prefers to see himself, not without reason, as an upholder of the classical liberal tradition going back to the Scottish Enlightenment. To say Niall Ferguson is synonymous with controversy would be an unfair exaggeration.

Niall ferguson catastrophe