Content area
Full text
Daniel Snowman profiles the historian of War, Finance, Empire and 'Virtual' History.
JOHN FERGUSON, NIALL'S PATERNAL GRANDFATHER, was one of the lucky ones. He fought in the trenches in the First World War and survived to live out his days to their normal span. His other grandfather, a journalist with literary leanings, spent much of the second World War fighting in India and Burma. Great-aunt Aggie had emigrated to Canada, while Uncle Ian worked in India, Africa and the Gulf. As for Niall's father, a Glasgow doctor, he whisked his family off to do good works in Kenya for a couple of years in the 1960s. You don't have to look far to find out why Niall Ferguson has written so powerfully about war and empire; the subjects are in his blood. This summer, just forty years of age, Ferguson became Professor of International History at Harvard. Not that being a Professor was anything new. In 2000, he became Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford and two years later took up the Herzog chair of Financial History at New York University's Stern Business School. Books and articles have continued to pour off his computer while he has also become a skilled TY presenter and journalist (his wife was one-time editor of the Sunday Express). Today, Niall Ferguson is one of the most prominent historians of his generation. He is also one of the more controversial, a convinced neoconservative arguing, for example, in favour of more assertive American imperialism. Some academic critics ask if he is still really a historian.
Niall Ferguson came from an ambitious, middle-class Scottish family which, while free-thinking almost to the point of atheism, was deeply imbued with an almost Calvinist ethos of hard work and self-improvement. Education, particularly in the 'hard' sciences, was understood to provide the best route up the social ladder from the mines and shipyards to bourgeois respectability and thence perhaps to England or the colonies. Mail's earliest memories include the magic of those two childhood years in Nairobi. When the family returned to Glasgow, Dr Ferguson resumed his medical practice. Was it a source of disappointment that the son didn't follow in his father's footsteps and instead, encouraged by excellent teaching at the Glasgow...