What are the forces that have shaped the United States most?

Ferguson: Well the United States is a fantastic idea with extraordinary resource ___________.  It’s a wonderful combination of the right institutions, the right culture, the right place, the right time.  And it’s really not surprising that the United States has been so astonishingly successful as an economy, as a society, and as an empire.  We know it’s not surprising because it was predicated before 1776 by many commentators, including disinterested commentators like Adam Smith who understood just what the potential was of this place.  But we may be living through the end of something.  Not necessarily the end of the United States.  On the contrary.  I think the United States has a huge future ahead of it.  But perhaps the end of the American empire.  In a book called “Colossus”, I provocatively gave the subtitle “The Rise and Fall of the American Empire”, I made the argument that the United States is a very odd thing.  It’s an empire in denial.  It behaves like an empire.  It does all the classic things that empires do like invading Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, and it wields tremendous military power. It exports its culture to foreign peoples.  It does the full range of imperial things except for one.  It doesn’t celebrate its own existence.  It denies it.  It insists that it’s not engaged in an empire.  And the only people who say that it is are actually a relatively small marginal group of people on the left.  So the question I asked was: (A) Was the American empire a bad thing?  And my conclusion was no.  On balance it was better than all the available alternatives.  It was certainly better than the other empires on offer in the mid 20th century.  But the second question was well how long can it last in its present form?  And my suggestion was not very long, because as a force for wielding power abroad, it’s constrained by three deficits.  The three deficits are as follows. 

The first is a financial deficit.  This is an empire that relies increasingly on foreign capital to keep its economy going.

It is a manpower deficit.  It cannot deploy at any time more than a quarter of a million troops overseas which is a laughably small number considering how many able bodied American men there are.

And it has an attention deficit.  And indeed it’s the first empire to have attention deficit disorder because almost every imperial undertaking has to be over successfully within four years or it gets abandoned.  And that’s not a function of some kind of cultural attention span problem.  It’s a function of the American electoral system.  Results have to be delivered very quickly.  And no empire can deliver the transformation of Mesopotamia in a four year timeframe.  I mean nobody could have done that.  It would take you at least 40 years to turn Iraq into something resembling a stable society, and nobody at any point to my knowledge has anticipated a 40 year timeframe. 

So we have a paradox.  The American empire is economically stronger than any empire ever.  In terms of its military lead over the competition, it’s out of sight.  It was never a time when Britain was so far ahead of its competition.  But despite these enormous advantages it’s very dysfunctional as an empire.  It really can’t direct sufficient financial resources through its imperial undertakings.  It never has enough men where they’re needed.  And above all else its electorate loses interest in hot, poorer countries almost as soon as they’ve been occupied.  And these are the reasons why I think that the American empire may be on the way down.

There’s a fourth deficit which I hadn’t fully appreciated when I wrote the book, but I’m happy to add it now; and that is the legitimacy deficit.  Empires need above all else collaborators. You can’t run an empire on force alone.  You need local indigenous support for it to be viable.  And one of the most interesting failures of this most recent American administration has been its failure to preserve the legitimacy of American power which has collapsed to the extent the United States is more unpopular around the world than it has ever been, certainly since records began.  And that makes it even harder to be a successful empire.  If everybody hates you, it’s not going to last.

Recorded on: Oct 15 2007 

What should we be asking ourselves?

Ferguson: Somebody told me recently that at one of the investment banks in New York, the question that everybody is thinking when they’re looking at you is, “What are you doing for my deal?”  And I don’t think that’s the question we should be asking ourselves.  We should be asking ourselves, “What have I done today to make the world more intelligent to me or to other people?” because it’s understanding that we most lack, that we must strive hardest for. Anything that you do to advance the sum of human knowledge is time well spent, and everything else frankly is just _________.

        Whom would you like to interview, and what would you ask? 

Ferguson: I hate interviewing people because they very rarely level with you.  And so although it would be interesting to sit down with Joseph Stalin and say, “Why on earth did you delude yourself about Nazi plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and nearly destroy your own country?” I don’t think he would tell me the truth.  On balance as an historian, I’ve always chosen the dead over the living for the very good reason that their . . . their letters and diaries are far preferable to what they might have told me in an interview.  So if you forced my hand, I’d probably . . . I would probably elect to spend some time with Stalin, even though he was probably the most frightening man of the 20th century.  Most people who spent time with him were filled with fear throughout.  Still it would . . . it would be a fascinating experience. 

Recorded on: Oct 15 2008

What should we be doing? 

FERGUSON: We should not glorify war.  We should glorify peace and the complex procedures – sometimes somewhat demeaning procedures – of diplomacy __________ and all the techniques that make peace more likely than war.  War is sexy and peace is not; but peace is far preferable.  And those who have never experienced war firsthand as I have not – and I was lucky, unlike my grandfathers – should at least immerse themselves in the study of it to understand better what it means.  So that would be the first thing.  The second thing would be to be content with modest rates in material growth; not to crave an exponential growth in one’s individual wealth or national wealth.  One has to temper one’s greed in a world of finite resources in which the population grows ever larger. And that’s an extremely important, but again unsexy, word of counsel.  I like people to do boring things.  I like them to read books.  I like them to study.  I like them to garden, to swim.  And if human beings could focus on those low risk, non-destructive activities, then we have a chance of preserving civilization for another couple of millennia.  But those who thirst after action and instant riches, who prefer jet skis to swimming to take just one example – those are the people who propel us closer and closer to the abyss.  So we must restrain ourselves.  We must live modestly.

Recorded on: Oct 15 2008

Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic?

FERGUSON: I’m temperamentally a very pessimistic person. I think that’s probably a function of my west of Scotland upbringing. But the great thing about pessimism is that you’re never disappointed; and when you’re wrong you’re pleasantly surprised. So I find this a congenial working assumption for life. When it comes to the issue of international security, I’m on balance pessimistic. On the one hand I see American ____________ empire waning. At the same time I see forces of ethnic hatred growing rather than diminishing, particularly in the Middle East but not only there. And then there’s a third issue and that is economic stability. In the war of the world I made the point that 20th century conflict correlates quite closely to three things: empires in decline, ethnic disintegration, and economic volatility. We’ve been through – all in 10 years – a very low economic volatility in most of the world, and that’s had all kinds of benign consequences. It’s been possible for economies to grow that previously were bedeviled by instability; but it’s hard to believe that this low volatility environment will continue indefinitely. And it may be ending as we speak in the sense that there have been since the middle of 2007 ructions in financial markets unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time. So if you take these things together, I’m pessimistic not only about international security issues; not only about the endurance of American power; but also about financial stability. And a lesson I take away from history is that financial instability can have all kinds of second order affects that aren’t very pretty. So from this point of view, I think there are some quite ugly scenarios quite near to us; nearer to us in time than a profound change in the earth’s climate. And of course there’s a danger that if we devote too much time and energy to worrying about climate change over 100 years, we could lost sight of our ability to destroy ourselves within five years.

Recorded on: Oct 15 2007

    What are the major issues facing the world today?

FERGUSON: Most people today sitting here would probably say that climate change was one of those issues. It’s extremely hard to miss the enormous environmental impact that we’re now having now that Asia has embraced industrialization wholeheartedly. I actually think there are more serious problems that could have an impact before the long unfolding process of global warming has whatever consequences it’s going to have. I take the threat very seriously of climate change, don’t get me wrong. But before we ever get to Al Gore’s worst case scenario, we could have blown the world up. Because happening right now at full speed is a breakdown of the system of nonproliferation set up nearly 40 years ago which very successfully limited the number of powers who could use, acquire, or have the option to use nuclear weapons. And I think that’s a worry because even if an Iran acquires only a very small number of nuclear missiles, that significantly increases the risk of a nuclear exchange of some kind, even if only an accidental one. The superpowers in the Cold War played a very simple game. There were just two players, and they risked mutually assured destruction if they fought. And then it turned out to reduce the probability of a nuclear war quite dramatically. But in a world of multiple nuclear powers where there are lots of small Cold Wars, one between Pakistan and India, one maybe between China and Japan, one between say Israel and Iran and so on. When that world comes about, then the probability of a nuclear war is quite high because the stakes are lower. Only the United States and the Russians still have enough weapons to blow up the world, everybody else can just blow up a few cities; but the probability is higher because you have maybe a Cuban missile crisis every year instead of just one in 50 years. So that makes me very uneasy, and I feel as if we are stumbling towards a much more dangerous world in which a nuclear weapon will get used sometime soon. And this would be a bigger explosion than Hiroshima and Nagasaki because these weapons are far more destructive than they use to be.

Recorded on: Oct 15 2008 

What are forces have shaped humanity?

Ferguson: Greed and fear are pretty high up on the list.  It’s interesting though how complex human motivation is in shaping the process that we call history.  There were people who were unquestionably actuated by greed . . . by the profit motive when they crossed the Atlantic and began the process of colonization of the new world that ultimately produced, low and behold, the United States.  But there were also people who were convinced they were going to build a new Jerusalem whose motivations were primarily religious.  And it’s striking to me how powerful those missionary impulses remain even into the 21st century.  People do behave in ways that are not simple profit maximizing.  A lot of what gets done by non-governmental organizations today is analogous to what missionary societies were doing in the 19th century.  It’s just that the motivations are secular in many cases, but not all, rather than the religious.  So there’s an interplay, to put it really simply, between economic motivations; but also on the other side religious or ideological motivations if you prefer. That in itself is a simplification, because within that broad interplay of forces, individual motives can, in fact, be highly complicated and even irrational because human beings are not well designed by evolution to make careful calculations of probability.  What we know from a lot of what has been done by behavioral psychologists how bad people are at assessing their own self interest; and how poorly they attach probabilities to future scenarios; and how readily they make snap decisions rather than weighing evidence.  So a really critical force – as important as the profit motive, as greed; as important as religion, ideology, and fear – is human stupidity.  And in many ways of the three I suspect that the central inability of the individual human being efficiently to calculate self-interest and accurately to attach probabilities to future scenarios – that is really the main driving force in history.  And it is remarkable given the force of stupidity that there has been any material progress at all.  But then I console myself with the thought that although we’ve made enormous leaps and bounds in the realm of economics, around science, we live longer, we live more comfortably, we have a better physical health during our lives.  All of this is one of the most astonishing achievements of humanity.  We have made life materially so much better, and most of that improvement happened in the last 100 years.  But before you get carried away and conclude that history is a progressive phenomenon, remember in the process we’ve done enormous harm to our environment, to other human beings who haven’t shared in the benefits, and we have developed the technology to destroy ourselves and all living things.  So that’s what I mean by human stupidity.  I may be I’m putting it too crudely, but let me be more precise: about the human inability accurately to access future scenarios, and probabilities, and individual self interests.

Recorded on: Oct 15 2008 

Do you have a personal philosophy?

Ferguson: Well I have a personal philosophy, but I’m always trying to modify it. I think part of the interesting thing about being a historian is that you want to be proved wrong. I mean I want to see some exception to a rule that I thought I believed because that’s the revelatory moment. I have no vested interest in being consistent. And if I think exactly the same 20 years from now as I think now, the intervening 20 years will have been a disappointment to me. If I felt that my objective was to just verify my philosophy I would give up tomorrow. It’s actually to falsify it. So let’s start with what the philosophy is.

I was brought up and remain an atheist. But to be brought up an atheist is very different from lapsing from religious faith. I’ve never had any religious faith. I have heard a profound belief that as a basis for ethical conduct, the Ten Commandments are pretty good; and that actually the monotheisms, and particularly Christianity, offer a really quite good guide as to how to live well. By “well” I mean to live morally. It’s very hard for an atheist to invent from first principals a good ethical basis for behavior, because actually in the natural state human beings don’t behave well. They’re quite strongly tempted to behave badly. And we’re involved in ways that actually encourage bad behavior. We’re designed to kill strangers. We’re designed, in fact, to steal. And so it’s very important that there should be an ethical framework within which we live. And my dilemma is that I don’t really believe in any divine policeman or any afterlife payoffs, but I do believe that we should live well. We should obey some moral code that we’re not likely to invent for ourselves.

So beyond that there are a number of other important things that I believe in. I think I believe in the truth of Darwinian evolution. I think I’m strongly attracted and believe in Adam Smith’s vision of the free market as a superior motive of economic organization. I’m strongly persuaded by ___________ theory about the nature of the natural world and the non linearity’s that are out there to spoil the (32:41) Newtonian party. But I still subscribe to Newton’s laws of motion. I believe in all of these things, and they’re my working assumptions because as I said, I’m the son of scientists but not a scientist myself. I can’t challenge much of that. I guess I take it on trust; but it does seem to me to hang together reasonably well. And for a historian it provides enough of a framework . . . enough of a framework to understand the natural world to enable me to focus on what I’m interested in, which is the way that humans behave within that natural world under the constraints that it imposes on them. So those are the things that I believe in. What I don’t have strong views about are the motivations of human beings themselves. Human nature seems to me to be the stuff of historical study. And although I’m probably instinctively a Hobsian – in other words I think that the state of nature is pretty ugly and civilization is all about trying to rein our natural impulses in – I’m prepared to be argued out of that. In other words if somebody can persuade me that in fact human beings innately have a preference for order and social cooperation rather than killing one another, and that their killing one another is the exception rather than the norm, than I will certainly listen and be prepared to be convinced.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2007

                What impact does your work have on the world? 

Neil Ferguson: Oh probably none.  I mean what can one do as a writer and lecturer but to write, put it out, make the arguments as best one can, and hope that somebody somewhere is listening?  All my life I’ve . . . all my adult life I’ve dabbled in journalism.  It’s been my hobby the way other people have fishing as a hobby.  And I also write for a serious reason, which is that I want as many people as possible to hear what I say.  And they may also be inclined to read 1,000 page long books.  So I give them the 1,000 word version or even the 900 word version.  Or I make television programs.  Or I do interviews for web sites; because in this idealistic way I want to communicate to the largest possible audience and not just to that privileged elite of people who get to study at Harvard.  Whether anybody is paying the blindest bit of attention is very hard to gauge.  It’s not like being an opera singer.  You know you’ve had a good night when they stand and cheer.  When you write, often it’s a deafening silence.  You can’t even tell if the people who buy the book have bothered to read it.  And you can’t even tell if the people who’ve read the book have made the first bit of sense of it.  So I don’t know.  I suppose I try to make arguments about the issues that I’ve wrote towards understanding.  And I have this naïve, undying optimism that at least some people are listening to these arguments; and maybe, maybe, maybe in their decision-making, whether it’s the decision to vote or some higher order decision, they will be influenced by something I’ve said. 

Recorded on: Oct 31 2008 

Is history driven by individuals or by larger forces?

Niall Ferguson: Well the larger forces are in some measure the product of individual action, too. Naturally there are natural phenomena over which we have limited control. And most of history was shaped by the weather, because most of history consisted of agricultural societies trying to eke out a living with pretty poor technology. Now I don’t tend to study that period. I’m a modernist concerned with the post industrial world. And in that world the role of the weather diminishes, though it still remains an important factor. And who knows? It may become more important as time goes on. But allowing for those natural constraints under which all historical processes operate, the individual decisions never stop being taken. Everybody is making a decision every day, even if it’s a very humble decision. Do I plant tomorrow or wait a week? But the great forces that historians used to talk about when they tried to make deterministic arguments are just the net result of all the individual decisions collected together. Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations” says that when everybody pursues his own self interest, there’s an invisible hand that operates which actually produces benign positive economic outcomes if people are left to decide freely. Now I don’t think the world is quite so simple, and I don’t believe that the free play of individual choice necessarily produces optimal outcomes. Still I think that’s a reasonable working assumption for decisions about economics. Trouble is that people don’t live their lives just with some simple economic utility function trying to profit maximize. Often we make our individual decisions for quite batty reasons because, for example, we believe in the imminent end of the world. Or we believe in the attainable utopia that’s being promised to us by some secular prophet. And then our individual decisions can really become quite dysfunctional and produce wars. And war is one of the things I like to study – the great disruptions that more or less account for most of the big changes in human history and society.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2008

Was WWII the last good war?

Ferguson: Well I’m not convinced that you can describe it as a good war in the first place, though we’d love to. And documentary makers in the United States particularly like to represent World War II as a kind of morality play – a contest between good and evil, forgetting conveniently that the war was waged principally in its later phase by the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. That is where the (16:10) preponderance of the fighting occurred on the eastern front. And the Soviet Union though it was allied to the western democracies was really out of the _____________ to totalitarian regime as the others that we were fighting against. And it had, of course, begun the war in 1939 before the United States had became involved on the same side as Nazi Germany. So in the war of the world, I try to make it clear that this is extremely hard to take seriously as a morality play. It was a horrible event which could only be won by using the worst possible tactics that had been pioneered by the access of power. For example, it was only possible to win World War II by bombing civilians. This is an extremely efficient way of killing people. It was a way of killing people that had been denounced by western leaders in the 1930s, but it was wholeheartedly embraced by them after the war begun. And its ultimate product was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons. It’s hard to see this as a good war in any real meaningful sense except that it had a good outcome compared with the old available alternative outcome of an access victory. I’m certain that that would have produced a worst world than the world that we inherited in 1945. That is as much as I think one can say about World War II. Subsequent wars actually may have better claims. The Cold War was a much better war than World War II in two respects. Firstly the issues were far more clear cut. The choice between freedom with all its disadvantages and complexities, and totalitarian communist rule was a clear cut choice. And it is obvious which the right side was, although there is no question that the United States and its allies made many moral compromises in order to win the Cold War, it was nevertheless the right side to be on. And I felt that passionately in the last decade of the Cold War when I was coming of age politically. And it must be said that not many of my contemporaries at Oxford in the early 1980s saw as clearly as I think I saw which side was the right side in the Cold War. The other good thing about the Cold War was that relatively few people died compared with World War II. Of course there was violence – and most of it happened in the Third World – it wasn’t quite the long piece that some people call it, but it was certainly preferable to a full blown nuclear war. So I’m, in that sense, a fan of the Cold War.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2008

Have we reached the end of history?

Ferguson: Well there is an end of civilization that isn’t difficult to imagine because civilization hasn’t lasted that long in the great scheme of this planet’s history. And it is a fragile thing which is constantly pushing the earth’s resources to their limits as the population rises toward the 9 billion mark; as the challenges of energy utilization become ever more daunting; as the risks of climate change grow; and more importantly as the risks of war grow larger – larger in the sense that weaponry has never been more destructive than it is today. Then we certainly now have the capability to destroy human civilization. And if we destroy human civilization, we certainly destroy history. So the end of history is conceivable, but it didn’t happen in 1989 as Francis Fukuyama famously suggested. Because what he meant by the end of history was the triumph of one model of social organization – namely the model of western, liberal, capitalist democracy. Well I think even then it was a pretty heroic assumption that that model was going to prevail and become the only model in town. It’s become an even less credible hypothesis since 1989. Clashing civilizations have come along and spot the story. But it seems to me that this is a use of language. Though it made for a great article title, the end of history can only really happen when civilization ends, and men and women cease to be able to record their deeds because that really is the ____________ for history.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2007

Is there such a thing as historical objectivity?

Niall Ferguson: There isn’t, but there ought to be. That’s to say that in practice all the historian is doing is taking such past thought as he can retrieve, and trying to order it in some way that is meaningful. Now there cannot be an objective truth at the end of that process, much as the historian wishes he could say, “I found it. Here it is.” We perform a kind of confidence trick because we write as if we are unveiling truth, and we want our readers to feel that this is indeed what they are seeing, what they’re reading. But of course there is no definitive objective truth on which all historians will one day agree. And no matter how well I write, no matter how persuasively I reconstruct the evidence, it won’t be the last word because of the issue of interpretation and inference. In the end one is drawing inferences from a one time experiment. The past can’t be recreated. We can’t rerun World War II to see if Hitler really might have won had he acted differently. There’s only one run, and we can only infer as best we can motives from documents which may not themselves be truthful. And so it’s an extremely delicate process quite unlike the scientific enterprise which can involve experimentation and verification through the repetition of experiment. That isn’t what history can do. So it aspires to truth, but it never attains it.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2008

        Is there such a thing as historical objectivity? 

There isn’t, but there ought to be.  That’s to say that in practice all the historian is doing is taking such past thought as he can retrieve, and trying to order it in some way that is meaningful.  Now there cannot be an objective truth at the end of that process, much as the historian wishes he could say, “I found it.  Here it is.”  We perform a kind of confidence trick because we write as if we are unveiling truth, and we want our readers to feel that this is indeed what they are seeing, what they’re reading.  But of course there is no definitive objective truth on which all historians will one day agree.  And no matter how well I write, no matter how persuasively I reconstruct the evidence, it won’t be the last word because of the issue of interpretation and inference.  In the end one is drawing inferences from a one time experiment.  The past can’t be recreated.  We can’t rerun World War II to see if Hitler really might have won had he acted differently.  There’s only one run, and we can only infer as best we can motives from documents which may not themselves be truthful.  And so it’s an extremely delicate process quite unlike the scientific enterprise which can involve experimentation and verification through the repetition of experiment.  That isn’t what history can do. So it aspires to truth, but it never attains it.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2008 

                            Who were the most important historical actors?

Neil Ferguson: Well there’s a vast number to choose from, and perhaps it’s worth emphasizing the arbitrary nature of the selection process. If one’s thinking in terms of billions of past human beings, it’s extraordinary how hard it is to make a selection. Generally the selection has been made for you by previous historians, by posterity, by the contemporaries who built statues or wrote books about famous men and women. And so often one finds oneself writing about people who are already great or evil men or women before you even show up. But I found myself recently in the book called “The War of the World” writing a considerable amount about Winston Church, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt – the stars, heroes and villains of the 20th century. But part of what I do is to try to write the history of non-political institutions like firms; to look at the history of capitalism, the history of business; and to give equal billing to entrepreneurs as well as to generals and politicians, because I the history of modernity actually requires that balance to be struck. And then you get to know slightly less familiar figures. The first hero of any book I’ve ever wrote was a German-Jewish banker named Max Warburg who turned into the hero of my doctoral dissertation rather to my own surprise, simply because as I rummaged around in archives in Homburg trying to understand why Germany had imploded economically in the 1920s, he kept cropping up and emerged as the central hero of my first book “Paper and Iron”.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2008

What is the challenge of historical interpretation?

Neil Ferguson: Begin?  With as little as possible.  Ideally without a hypothesis, without any preconception.  You read.  More than any other activity, history involves the assimilation – and this is particularly true of the kind of history I do at the modern end – of vast quantities of documentation.  And you have to eat voraciously and indiscriminately this raw material in order to try to get a sense first of the chaos of the past, because the historical process is not like a novel or a play.  It doesn’t actually have a naturally recurring, dramatic or narrative structure.  It’s chaos.  It’s a mess.  And the first challenge is to confront that chaos. ___________ put this very well when he said that the past was an ever-changing chaos of being.  So the first thing is to embrace the chaos.  Immerse yourself in it.  And once you’ve done that than if you’re lucky, you will begin to discern some kind of structure that you can impose on this chaos to make it intelligent.  And the process of making it intelligent was the ___________; how you can craft some understandable analysis which you then try to pass on to the people living to explain what it was like.  As _________ said, part of what we’re doing as historians is trying to explain these __________ what it was essentially like.  And that’s what historians are supposed to do.  We don’t always succeed in doing that, but that is ideally what a historian does.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2007 

How would you describe what do you do for a living?

Niall Ferguson: I commune with the dead. That’s what historians do. I spend as much time as possible in the company of dead people, which sounds a little bit morbid and perhaps it is. I think in some ways to be a historian you have to be a little asocial, because to commune with the dead requires a great deal of solitude. You can’t really spend too much time with the living if you want to really understand the dead. You have to spend your time in archives and libraries reading what they wrote down and all, whatever trace they left of their past thoughts. Now it’s not very often that historians talk about what they do this way, but that’s how I’ve come to understand it. My role is really to try to interpret the majority of human kind – because the majority of human kind are dead – to the minority who just happen to be alive. In that sense being a historian is really rather an awe-inspiring activity. It’s also an impossible task because you can never really know what somebody thought 100 or 200 years ago, much less 1,000 years ago. You can only infer it from what they left behind and what has survived by what they left

What are you working on today?

I’m writing two biographies, one of which I’ve nearly finished, which is about a banker. As I said earlier sometimes it’s worth studying the less famous players because they may have been just as important as the famous ones. And in the 20th century, finance in my view as been as important as politics. ___________ Warburg was the nephew of that banker I mentioned earlier, Max Warburg, who was the central figure in my doctoral thesis. And in recent years I’ve worked my way through ___________ Warburg’s papers which are a wonderful chronicles of the financial history of the 20th century – most of which he lived through, much of which he wrote about and thought deeply about. So that’s one project.

My more prominent project is also a biography of a famous man. I’m writing a biography of Henry Kissinger whose contribution to . . . not only to international relations and American politics requires, in my view, reassessment; but also whose contribution to history is a neglected subject. The reason I was attracted to this project is that Henry Kissinger is a very rare thing – an academic historian trained to a very high level who enters the world of power. And we can therefore see how far history influenced his decisions, and see to what extent his . . . his actions can be understood as part of a broader philosophy of history. Now two projects would never suffice. I’m rather promiscuous when it comes to research. And of course teaching obligations at Harvard mean I have to think about this stuff, too. So I have a small, modest side project which is a financial history of everything. The great realization I had was that most people don’t understand the first thing about the financial world, whereas as a tiny elite understand everything about it. And what I think I can contribute at this point is a book that illuminates how the financial world originated, where it all came from, how it works, so that the lay reader can gain some insights into what can often seem a dangerous and intimidating financial world.

Recorded on: Oct 31 2007

Niall Ferguson: My name is Niall Ferguson. I’m Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, but I’m also William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. And I’m a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and of Jesus College, Oxford. I was born in Glasgow in 1964, and I grew up in an atmosphere of, I suppose, late Calvinism crossed with the Scottish enlightenment. My parents were both scientists. They were rationalists and are rationalists, and encourage me to think of the world in the terms that had been in so many ways pioneered in 18th century Scotland. If I took a day off school, my father would hand me a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and say you should use this time usefully. Read that. And so I guess I acquired from early on his work ethic. Max Faber was right about Protestants and work, at least where the west of Scotland was concerned. But I think that was tempered by a kind of skepticism that Scotland produced rather later in the 18th century. Card: How did living in Kenya shape your sense of colonial history? I was very small indeed when my father took a job in Nairobi. I think I was all of two years old, and we lived there for two years. So this was in my early, early childhood. My earliest memories are of Africa and of its extraordinary luminosity. This became much more powerful as a memory in contrast with the dreary, gray, cold Glasgow that we returned to when I was turning five. I can say that at the age of four, I had very sophisticated political insights. I don’t think I then knew the difference between a colony and an independent state, which Kenya had only just become. So I’m not sure that I can claim that those childhood experiences had a very profound affect on my thinking as an historian; but they did implant in me a passionate, visceral love of that part of the world. And whenever I go back to east Africa, I’m amazed at the power of these deep childhood memories. I have my pristian moments exclusively in Africa.

Recorded on: October 31 2007