The popular historian should produce their facts and state their case in a manner which can capture the imagination of the man in the street. Everyone should be able to understand what he is on about and come away better informed about the world and their place in it. Niall Ferguson rather tightropes between the popular and the academic. His books are rigorously researched. But they are about decidedly populist things and are perhaps deliberately contentious. All the same, he is amongst our best historians. He is able to take a big slice of history and boil it down so that it not only says something new but is accessible to a wider audience.
Ferguson is sometimes described as ‘controversial’, which is fair enough. Some believe that Ferguson is a white supremacist, apologist for empire, and opponent of equality and diversity in the classroom. Of course, such opinions are founded on existing political predjudices, always articulated by those who, like me, are Ferguson’s political opponents. Certainly Ferguson is markedly right-wing, and in my view rather Whiggish in his histories. (Whiggish, by the way, is somewhat technical jargon for a belief in moral progress towards nineteenth-century Protestant capitalist parliamentarianism, but you’re probably not interested.)
Notionally, the Tories have appointed Ferguson to a post advising the government on reforming the history curriculum. But, as he wearily remarks from behind a barrage of checked-shirt professionalism, ‘there’s no formal structure at all. I’m not even sure Simon [Schama] has been appointed Tsar. It all exists in the imaginations of journalists because of a few informal and rather spontaneous conversations at Hay. At this stage we’re just talking about what might be done better in history in schools.’ It looks like his opponents might have less to worry about than they hoped.
On the other hand, Ferguson has some very strong opinions about what could be done better. ‘Far too many people give up history too soon compared with our continental counterparts. We need to make it compulsory for another year. And we’ve got to stop teaching it in these segments that aren’t connected. Through accident or design people leave school only knowing about Henry VIII, Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. That is not a caricature. The extent to which huge proportions of time are devoted to the Third Reich is just extraordinary. So my preference would be for people to cover a broad sweep of history, to get some sense of the narrative arc of history. That should be done at both the level of national history, but also at the global and international level. I think the need for history to be taught as world history is very, very important.’
His own work is noticeably broad. He has written volumes on the British and American Empires, the First World War, the Rothschilds and financial services. This lack of focus extends to the education system. ‘I don’t see any particular period as exceptionally important. For me the really important thing is to get the continuum so that when somebody leaves school they’ve got a sense of the major events that produced the country and the modern world. It’s not as if I’d say God, we’ve really got to do the English Civil War or the reign of Henry VIII. Every historian that I read when I was your age was making a grand claim about his or her little sub-period- “oh it was the Tudor revolution in government, oh it was this oh it was that.” Come on guys. The truth is that there isn’t actually some kind of super-seminal event. Macaulay thought it was the Glorious Revolution, which magically produces modern Britain. It’s a continuum. That’s how history works.’
Ferguson is perhaps a tad elitist in his view of history at the centre of the curriculum. To be fair he seems to mostly be interested in knowledge being gained for its own sake. That, he says, is something we’ve lost sight of. ‘It seems to me that ignorance of ancient literature and culture is one of our major aesthetic problems. In my view a properly educated person, even at school, should learn not only modern but also ancient history. It’s an important part of what makes Western civilisation special – the Greeks even more than the Romans but the Romans too. This is the great danger: that we take a crude utilitarian view of education. “If it’s not going to help you work for Samsung forget it.” I mean, tcha!’
The danger of the end of historical excellence is something which Ferguson is extremely concerned with. His mole-like Scottish eyebrows furrow at the thought. ‘If decline continued at its rate, then in fifty years’ time we would have achieved a total ignorance of history on behalf of people leaving school. We’re very close to letting that happen. I mean it’s astonishing if you look at surveys of school leavers and university entrants, just complete ignorance of the past – shocking ignorance. If you’d told me the survey was of drop-outs from secondary school in an inner city I would believe it. But university entrants and even people taking courses in history! They know nothing! What exactly this strange thing is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? I would say probably 98% of people leave British schools without knowing that’s the name of their country. Why bother, you know?’
Ferguson has an acute sense of excitement about the past. He was a Magdalen man who taught here and Cambridge. Then the books were published, and the money rolled in. No longer tied down by tutorial commitments, he is free to pursue a Jamie Oliver-like campaign for better education. This includes visits to schools. ‘I had a very exciting conversational class with a bunch of working-class kids in the East End earlier this year. We spent the morning talking about what might be an interesting way of looking at the past. And my sense was that there’s enormous potential and enthusiasm for history even the bottom 10 or 20 per cent in educational attainment. So I don’t see this as being part of the top ten set. Everybody in this country – and the same could be said of any country – needs to have a sense of the context within which their lives unfold. They seemed extremely excited about the big questions of history – why did the West dominate the rest?’ (A rather catchphrasey catchphrase which I don’t like.)
I hate to be technical – alright, I don’t – but I asked Ferguson which historians he liked best. ‘Gibbon is still the greatest of the English-speaking historians, without question. Also Friedrich Meinecke – there are few more profound historical essays than his Causality and Values. And I was always a great admirer of A. J. P. Taylor.’ His First World War: An Illustrated History is one of my personal favourite history books. Ferguson agrees. ‘It’s a wonderful introduction to the subject. And it does show up something of the accidental error-strewn character of the war. It is in many ways not a comedy of errors but a tragedy of errors.’ And that’s that. ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.’
