A profile, written 2 years before he made the programme:
Niall Ferguson: The empire rebuilder
On the eve of his new television series, the formidable academic and historians' historian argues passionately that the decline and fall of empires was the true cause of the bloody mess that was the 20th century
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You should have been born to serve the British Empire. But you are trapped inside the body of a man born in the 1960s, so what do you do? You become an ardent Thatcherite - aggressive on the battlefield and the economy. You write 'why oh why?' polemics for the Daily Mail. You eventually quit the insular mother country for the new empire across the Pond. You pour your Protestant work ethic into books, journalism and television, a medium which you never really watch. And you write a lot about empire.
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'The societies that are industrious are the societies that are more powerful,' he says, his vision that of a pitiless Darwinian struggle. 'I don't think the Protestant work ethic really exists much in England anymore and it's totally absent on the Continent. One of the reasons I like being in the States is that so many of the people around me have the same approach.'
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Ferguson doesn't care about being unpopular. He has said that America should face up to its imperial responsibilities and occupy Iraq for 40 years. Britain should not have gone to war in 1914 but allowed Germany a mainland empire. The problem with the Treaty of Versailles was not the amount of reparations imposed on Germany, but that they were not collected in full. The British Empire was not all bad, but, in fact, had some rather good points; his book and series on the subject saw him compared to Hitler's propaganda film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl. Now the book and series of The War of the World, which cites the decline of empires as one of the reasons for the 20th-century's unprecedented violence, have already been branded by left-wing journalist Johann Hari as 'startlingly obscene'.
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As for the right-wing tag, he counters: 'Does it make any difference to David Beckham as a football player whether he votes Conservative or Labour? Of course it doesn't. It's totally irrelevant. In the same way, it's totally irrelevant to how good my work as a historian is that I was strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2006/jun/18/academicexperts.highereducation
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