Civilization: The West and the Rest

By Niall Ferguson

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Civilization: The West and the Rest
  • Hardback : 432 pages
  • Imprint: Allen Lane; (28 February 2011)
  • ISBN-13: 9781846142734
  • Dimensions: 24.0 x 16.2 x 3.9 cm
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  • How Not To Write History

    Civilization: The West and the Rest, by Niall Ferguson

    While imprisoned for twelve years in the Tower of London, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the first volume of his History of the World (1614). He abandoned the project in despair after witnessing a murder from his window. As one of three eyewitnesses to the crime he was called to testify and was appalled that each person told a totally different but equally plausible version of what had happened. If eyewitnesses to the same event cannot agree on what occurred, said Raleigh, how is it possible to believe historical accounts?

    This problem has forever bedevilled historians.

    Historical scholarship is the discovery, collection, organization, presentation and interpretation of information about past events and the lessons to be drawn from same. Needless to say this is a highly subjective and selective process and can never claim to be neutral or objective. A Marxist historian and a Catholic historian examining the Wars of the Roses will come to conclusions so disparate it is as if they are talking about two different sets of events.

    There are fads and fashions in historical scholarship as in everything else. The latest hot trend is represented by the prolific, aggressive, controversial British historian Niall Ferguson, who cites as major influences the colorful A.J.P. Taylor, who was wrong about almost everything, and the magisterial Sir Kenneth Clark of Civilization fame, who ignored any historical event that did not occur in Europe. Both men made their greatest impact on TV and Ferguson’s books are also often accompanied by a TV series.

    Ferguson is refreshingly upfront about his biases and makes no apology for them: he is a neo-conservative; a Thatcherite; a fan of Dubya and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a loather of President Obama; a proud Protestant and anti-Catholic; not just Eurocentric but Anglocentric; a nostalgic apologist for the overall beneficence of the British Empire; and a beady-eyed critic of any historical approach that is teleological (assumes a purpose or goal to history, such as Marxism) rather than contingent (uncertain, random). His writing style is forceful, self-confident, and compulsively readable, with a tendency to slide into the glib, with some really bad (and thus enjoyable) puns.

    His relatively nouveau historical method is called ‘virtualism’ or ‘counterfactualism.’ This form of historiography attempts to answer ‘what if’ questions, such as what if the 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler had succeeded? What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Napoleon had not had a savage attack of hemorrhoids just before Waterloo? The most playful example of this approach is from Winston Churchill, who once wrote a counterfactual essay addressing the question, “What if Robert E. Lee had not won the battle of Gettysburg?” (think about it).

    Ferguson’s argument in Civilization is plainly put: “Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small impoverished polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”, thus eclipsing the once invincible Chinese and Ottoman empires, among others. His answer is that the West developed six “killer apps” that the rest of the world (he actually calls them Resterners) did not: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. Interestingly, he does not mention a crucial seventh app, which I suppose you could call brute force. And Ferguson argues that the days of Western predominance are numbered, not because of a clash of civilizations a la Samuel Huntington, but because the Resterners are now downloading the killer apps we once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith (i.e. Christianity) in itself.

    Counterfactualism is often dismissed as entertaining but essentially non-historical: kind critics call it ‘speculative’, unkind critics ‘guessing’ and really unkind critics ‘an exercise in uselessness.’ On my bookshelf, falling apart from constant use, is the only really indispensible reference for an historian or a fan of history: Pulitzer-prize winner David Hackett Fischer’s wise and witty Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Fischer lists over 100 fallacies that many if not most historians fall into at some time or other. Ferguson falls into a lot of them: the fallacy of statistical impressionism; of question-framing; of motivation; of false analogy; of semantic distortion; and so on.

    But it doesn’t really matter, although there are some really inexcusable factual errors, such as which civilization invented hospitals. Ferguson is more interested in the grand sweep of history, and he has marvelous insights that suddenly illuminate an obscure event or taken-for-granted assumption like a bolt of bright lightning. Biased, bold, arrogant


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