Ferguson's triumph

Edward McLaughlin

"Mass immigration is not necessarily the solvent of a civilisation."

That's upset me, that has.

Jack

I'm sorry, but this series just was not balanced, it came across to me as brazen propaganda - OK you could argue that other historians do similar, but this really was of another degree altogether.

Fraser, to be honest, in signing up to this nonsense do show yourself to be either easily duped or a brazen propagandist yourself.

dearieme

"Between 1999 and 2009 a total of 119 individuals were found guilty of Islamism-related terrorist offences in the UK, more than two-thirds of them British."

"British" in what sense, I wonder?

Caspar Henderson

I recall Ferguson at RUSI in 2003 or so calling for the ever greater expansion of the American Empire: as a proportion of GDP the expenditure on war was trivial and could easily be expanded. Does he think the same today?

Verity

I'm going to try to get the book.

One sentence in your blog stood out, Nelson: "— Many Asian powers, notably India, wasted decades on the erroneous premise that the socialist institutions pioneered in the Soviet Union were superior to the market-based institutions of the United States."

And but for this tragic waste of 50 years -- India could now be 2nd in the world after the US and on the way to the number one spot, had it not been for Nehru and his ideas rooted in the 19th Century.

His idea that India shouldn't bother building good ports and good roads to the ports because that was what the West wanted was so stupid it still chills the blood. What he recommended instead of exporting India's much-wanted cotton was, getting a spinning wheel into every home in the country so everyone could spin their own cotton.

He wasn't a visionary. He was a daft, self-righteous, egotistical old man.

If India had built the roads and the ports they would have been floating on wealth from cotton by middle of the last century.

Both the Nehrus - pére et fille - followed his strangulated, petty reasoning. It wasn't until Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister that daylight began to filter through ... and he facilitated the building of the first new car (I think it may have been a Toyota ... anyway, he OKayed a Japanese car factory) since the primeval Ambassador.

I still get angry when I think about it. I don't know why I take it so personally, but when I first started going to India, I was astounded by the energy and intelligence, yet they were still driving donkeys and riding bicycles and the only car was the Ambassador - an absolute horror.

Today, India is third after the US and Germany in applications for new technical patents.

Perry

Shallow self-centred ignorant arrogant grasping politicans and 'leaders' are, and have been the curse of this world.

A brief survey of those we have (and have just had) inpsires little confidence.

Andrew Fletcher

His thesis is over simplistic and he is pompous, but it's a good enough read for a train or plane journey. Pop history for the masses

and I'll go to bed at noon

I wasn't aware that thinking the brutal exploitation of millions was a bad thing was a preserve of "the left". Silly me.

REPay

Note that Ferguson (or Starkey) are never on BBC TV...that is reserved for the soft left Hunt, Schama et al...

TrevorsDen

'Japan attacked America - thats why its Empire crumbled.

We, the UK did not defeat Japan or Germany. We played our part and bankrupted ourselves, building a national debt which only Gordon Brown came close to equalling.

I do not get this obsession with religion. Chinese communists do not have religion. the Italians have it in bucketloads as do say the Spanish. How well are they doing?

China is a country of heaven knows how many billion. Its economy grows! Shock Horror!

daniel maris

Your praise is overblown. It was (the parts I saw) a good and interesting series, but it was hardly original stuff. Calling success factors "killer apps" doesn't really take you much farther forward does it, however arresting the phrase?

However, unless I missed it, he didn't really address the fact that the most successful economy on the planet at the moment is one that rests on a communist political dictatorship, firm rejection
of Christianity, oppression of its people, no free market in labour, no idea of private property as we would understand it, centralised planning and absence of academic freedom.

Incidentally what does the mass immigration thing mean? Solvent can be taken to mean something that dissolves OR paradoxically it is commonly used to mean a glue.

IIRC Ferguson was claiming that it was a low figure? Is that right? Well that is absurd, because behind those 100 plus people lie 1000s of close associates and beyond them hundreds of thousands of general supporters - the sea in which they swim.

Mass immigration is nearly always favoured by capitalists who benefit from cheaper labour and are insulated from the negative effects (their children don't go to the schools where 50 languages are spoken).

I suppose Scots feel they have to justify our imperial past given you find them in the forefront of the imperial project: colonisation, slaughter of natives, the slave trade and slave management (including of the women of course). It's a dirty disgusting past and we should be ashamed of it. We should always ask how we would feel if the tables were turned (and some of us to now know how it feels).

Thankfully, I think the age of trade is probably coming to a close. We see the signs everywhere. Now with renewable energy, a country can have its own energy industry wherever on the global, no need to import energy. With advanced hydroponic and polytunnel agriculture we in the temperate zones can grow crops associated with the tropics. With improved recycling and use of novel materials, the need for imports is decreasing as well.

yank

— Collapse can be sudden. Japan’s empire reached its maximum territorial extent in 1942, after Pearl Harbour. By 1945 it was no more. The UK’s age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan.

.

Ferguson's a smart guy, glib, but here is his achilles. He has that Brit romanticism re empire.

The UK's hegemony began to ebb while the US was fighting a Civil War, nearly a century before Ferguson's call here. By the time Germany and Japan rolled around, the UK was nearly incapable of defending even their homeland alone, let alone anything more, and certainly did not emerge "victorious" in that conflict.

No, hegemony is a long time in the losing. The US may be losing it as we speak. Hard to imagine that a nation so rich in resources could get onto that slope, but Rome wasn't burnt in a day, and it just may be happening.

Japan never had hegemony, I reckon. They fashioned a quite sharp spear tip, and used it, but it was quickly blunted because real hegemony saw to it.

Sudden collapse would require foolishness along the lines of Imperial Japan and its militarists, or the Nazis. Slow collapse would be the norm, I'd think.

China could collapse suddenly, if internal revolution crops up again. They fear it, as we see. So do I. Then again, if it's a Soviet style break up, with a federation emerging, it might not even be considered a collapse, but simply a reformation.

A Prat

I liked him before he went commercial.

daniel maris

On the subject of the Yangtze and the Thames, I saw another TV series that gave an explanation about why China couldn't achieve an industrial revolution. Its coal deposits were placed beyond several rapids along the Yangtze. By the time the coal got to the population centres (a journey of about 1000 miles by mule pack) it was prohibitively expensive.

I think incidentally that the analysis of the rise and fall of civilisations is eternally fascinating. If you have ever seen the primitive pottery being produced in Greece about 600BC and then compare it with the exquisite pieces being produced just a couple of hundred years later one is left with a huge puzzle. Clearly it couldn't have been genes by themselves producing the high art. Certainly cross fertilisation of societies must be a key issue. It certainly seems Greek society benefitted from African civilisation (Egypt) through trade and the travel of ideas. Then as Ferguson remarks of Europe and its city states, I feel there was something in the city state structure of Greece that contributed to civic virtue and success. Free speech was another factor I feel.

Of course I have then to explain the paradox of China - hardly a guardian of free speech, but I feel they have a counterfeit culture i.e. they copy what the free societies produce in terms of technical and scientific advance but also in terms of psychology and sociology without allowing freedom within their own society.

Foundavoice

Verity - Excellent post.

Andrew Fletcher - what you say is true (save the unnecessary insult). But given the span of which he covers, it could realistically be nothing more than that.

What I would say is that he's very engaging for most people and makes them interested. If they go away and research deeper, all the better. If not, they're still less ignorant than before.

TrevorsDen - (I'm an atheist) Chinese have a strong culture: most (over 90%) identify them as Han Chinese when in reality only a maximum 10% could be. The point is that it has become a belief system and a common way of thinking and acting. Such uniform belief unites a group and allows them to progress faster together, which I think is the point of the religion, er, point.

Also, the China growth is strong as GDP per capita is increasing so rapidly - remember the country has been extremeley populous for some time and this hasn't been the case. The urbanisation of the country is a clear indication of this. The potential that China has to grow is just starting to be realised.

David Farrer

Fraser, You wrote this:

"His series this time is about how ‘the market’ — or, more accurately, voluntary human co-operation — created Western civilization."

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The word "market" means voluntary human action.

Don't surrender intellectually to the enemy class.

alan campbell

Right-wing ideologue likes work of other right-wing ideologue. Incredible. He will always be "Irwin" from The History Boys.

Nicholas

" . . you find them in the forefront of the imperial project: colonisation, slaughter of natives, the slave trade and slave management (including of the women of course). It's a dirty disgusting past and we should be ashamed of it."

Curious that you (and other socialists) don't feel the same way about communists and the communist project, which enslaved and slaughtered their own people instead. Who could expect worse treatment - a dissident under Stalin or a dissident in British India? As a supporter of socialism (which is the vanguard of communism) do you feel ashamed for communism's dirty, disgisting past - and present? Of course not. You never mention it. As usual with socialists and communist apologisers the moral appraisal is subjective, partisan and ideologically motivated.

Alex

Fraser,

The UK Debt Management Office publishes the data on non-resident holdings of gilts. At the end of 2009, non-resident holdings (NRH) were £225 billion, accounting for approximately 16% of total gilts outstanding. Over 1995-2005 NRH averaged 6.5% of total gilts but has clmbed very rapidly since. (2010 data are probably available but the DMO website is currently down.)

Maddy1

You see it before your eyes, the Mau Mau who slaughtered so many of their own and acted on such a savage, base level are being reinvented as "freedom fighters". One million of your money meant for education was filtered off by their present descendents no problem to "Sanders, Brown of the African Money River, just write it off and look for the next project. It is amazing they cannot get a trial together for people who were involved in slaughter a few years back, but half a century, ago, no problem. Obama's father was part of the problem not the solution!

Mike Spilligan

@dearieme; 10:19pm on 10th:-
I'm sure that the 119 are mostly people who've accidentally been given British documentation.

TomTom

Ferguson's series is plodding, pedestrian and narcissistic. Fun to read Live Twitter comments during the programme. He obviously needs Fellow Scots to plug this dire crap. As for India..it had ports, Calcutta was built by the British. As for the rest Verity, just think how families like Tata got very very rich ? Exploiting monopoly just like Duke, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford, that is how India got its mega-rich families and Nehru learned his Socialism in Cambridge not Moscow.

Simon Stephenson.

daniel maris : 12.41am

"However, unless I missed it, he didn't really address the fact that the most successful economy on the planet at the moment is one that rests on a communist political dictatorship, firm rejection
of Christianity, oppression of its people, no free market in labour, no idea of private property as we would understand it, centralised planning and absence of academic freedom"

There are a number of reservations that need to be made to the assertion that China has the "most successful economy on the planet".

Firstly, in PPP terms, gross GDP certainly shows China to be a big economy - second only to the USA, which is c.50% larger. In per capita terms, however, China comes 93rd of the 182 listed countries, just above El Salvador, Albania and Tonga, but below such economic colossi as Ecuador, Belize and Bosnia/Herzegovina.

Secondly, Chinese economic expansion has been very reliant on its ability to practise mercantilism - using the rest of the world as a source of demand for its products but with little reciprocity in its domestic market. There's nothing inevitable about this state of affairs, and if things become intolerable for the debtor nations, China could find itself cut off from its markets. There's a limit as to how far the rest of the world will see the general advantage in being accommodating to mercantilist-led Chinese economic growth.

And thirdly, when China's growth becomes impossible to maintain by export expansion, there will have to be some pretty fundamental changes in the domestic political scene before the home market will be in a position to assume the role of purchaser-in-chief of cheaply produced non-essentials.

Charles

Fraser - perhaps worth you re-reading Huntingdon.

Although much of his book was about religious-ethnic conflicts between different cultural blocs (Sino, Islamic, Hispanic, Western, etc) this isn't the "Clash of Civilisations" that he refers to (he sees this as inevitable).

In his view (and it seems pretty compelling to me) - it is the clash WITHIN Western civilisation that matters: secularism/group rights/left-liberalism vs the Judeo-Christian values that underpinned our historical development. In his view if the former triumphs (thereby undermining what Ferguson calls the killer apps) then Western Civilisation is doomed

chris

You say the government does not release figures on ownership of its debt. It does - in the DMO's quarterly review: http://www.dmo.gov.uk/index.aspx?page=publications/quarterly_reviews
This shows that, at the end of Q3, 30.8% of UK gilts were owned by overseas investors, and another fifth by the Bank of England.

Anne-Kit

Jack April 10th, 2011 10:04pm:

The series wasn't 'balanced'? What is this balance that certain people hanker after? Why do you need everything to be balanced?

OK, so you obviously don't subscribe to the same world view as Niall Ferguson - so what? He could be right and you could be wrong. I bet if someone with your world view (whatever it is) wrote and presented a series biased accordingly, you wouldn't have made this comment about it!

You would perhaps even have praised it for its even-handed treatment of the subject matter.

How blind we are to our own biases. I'm all for one-sided views of this that and the other, then at least we've got something to compare and make our own minds up. Imagine if everyone, from all sides of politics, made only "balanced" statements and wrote only "balanced" books and essays.

How utterly, utterly boring and uninformative it would all be!

mattghg

That final quotation is devastating and probably accurate.

Derek Pasquill

He forgot to mention Pelagianism!

Norbull

I think Ferguson got it wrong: the protestant religious link is more one of people giving thanks for commercial success rather than the religion causing the success.
The sooner we all see 'Religion' for what it is the sooner we will stop having wars.

and I'll go to bed at noon

@Nicholas

Are you sure that "at least we weren't quite as bad as Stalin" is quite the message you want to be shouting from the rooftops? Evil is not negated by the existence of greater evil.

Prodicus

The wife fancies him something rotten.

davidk

It was crap.

Fatbloke on tour

Trevor

You are easily impressed.

NF is a money obsessed "North Brit" on the make.

He is a complete muppet who has grown rich working the "outsider giving it to you straight" angle to the max.

First the English.
Then the Yanks.
Now the Chinese.

He is a first rate story teller, second rate academic, a third rate numbers man and a complete fanny.

If and when democracy is seen as being bad for business, he will provide the huge tome that tries to justify dictatorship as being a price worth paying for a new level of supposed economic efficiency.

File under complete twat.
Frankie Boyle but without the charm.

oldtimer

I have only watched a couple of the episodes, including last night, and have bought the book to read. The TV series is, necessarily, superficial compared with the detail provided in the book.

Flicking through the book I spotted his comment on the role of debt, as well as war, in contributing to the collapse of civilisations. He quotes 16thC Spain where the Hapsburgs faced interest charges on the `juros` in excess of annual revenues; 18thC France where interest and amortization payments rose from c25% to 62% of tax revenues between 1751 and 1788;
19thC Ottoman Turkey where debt service rose to 50% by 1877; 20thC Britain where debt charges absorbed 44% of government expenditure in the mid 1920s. As for the 21stC it is clear that the UK, the USA and several Eurozone countries (the PIIGS) are in deep trouble. This is telling evidence.

The only part of the book I have read so far is the preface to the UK edition where, among other things he discusses historical methodology, his approach to the task of writing this book and his debt to R G Collingwood. I think that criticism of what he writes need to be placed in this context.

Minnie Ovens

He was a daft, self-righteous, egotistical old man.
Verity about Nehru.

A good comment and it seems that Messrs Blair and Brown must have been fans.
Over ten years ago I was asked to undertake some analysis of the then current Indian socio-economics by a Toy company.
What slapped me on the side of the head was that the nascent middle class was already over 40 million people but the distribution systems still working along 19th Century models. A mass of Momma and Pappas.
But once you have that rump of middle class installed everything becomes more easy and grows exponentially, as we have seen.

Nicholas

"@Nicholas Are you sure that "at least we weren't quite as bad as Stalin" is quite the message you want to be shouting from the rooftops? Evil is not negated by the existence of greater evil."

Is that the message I was shouting? Clean out your ears. Or at least wipe your eyes and RTFP. I was drawing attention to the fact that socialists have a mysteriously blind eye when it comes to crimes perpetrated in the name of their own ideology.

Putting words in other peoples mouths to demonise them is another socialist trait.

But having said that I am no apologist for Empire and despise those who are. Especially when they are British - and socialist.

Simon Stephenson.

Fatbloke on tour : 11.12am

This seems to be the sum total of your critical thinking ability:-

Those who support Gordon Brown = have the password to everything that's correct.

Those who are sceptical about Gordon Brown = completely useless, haven't got an idea worth considering.

Is this what human intellectual achievement is all about to you?

old fogey

Well I enjoyed the series and found it illuminating; one really doesn't expect complexities in a tv display, however important. But, on a very trivial note ( though I did find it distracting), in every shot, in every location, in different weather conditions, Mr Ferguson always wore the same blue shirt, the same cream (by the end creamy-ish) trousers. i didn't notice the shoes. Was the budget that restrictive ?

John Montague

I find Ferguson over-rated and reductionist, even in his speciality area, the circulation of imperial capital. He's degenerated into a pop historian who gets collaborators to do the serious work, while he just grinds his axe.

If you're interested in imperial economic history of this kind, much better to read Edelstein or Davis & Huttenback first, or even Kennedy. There's also Amartya Sen's indispensable work on democracy and famines.

"Rome wasn't burnt in a day” Well put.

Roman, Byzantine and Persian collapse came after periods of civil war that brought these great civilizations down and allowed barbarian invaders to finish them off. All too often an inferior culture can achieve ascendancy over a civilization divided against itself.

Europe's great wars in the first half of the 20th Century could be taken as another example.

daniel maris

Nicholas -

(a) I am not a socialist and (b) I have here and elsewhere frequently condemned the crimes of communism.

I am a populist and democrat and it is on that basis that I condemn the imperialist project which did v. little to benefit the common man either here or abroad. Incidentally all the crimes of communism were at some stage replicated under the British Empire including ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, inhuman centralised planning, forced population movements, price fixing, secret police activities, murder of democrats...need I go on? The fact you don't want to see those truths, is a matter for you to consider.

Fatbloke on tour

SimpleS @ 11.37

Any chance of some analysis on the thoughts and words of NF?

He has had plenty to say about himself so there should be no shortage of raw material.

daniel maris

Simon Stephenson,

I am not here to defend or big-up the Chinese economy but I think on any measure it is phenomenally successful, despite all those "killer apps" being side-stepped one way or another.

I was impressed by the figure - can't remember if it was from this series - that centralised planning allowed China to allocate 10,000 (!) people just to PLANNING for its High Speed Rail project. That is an incredible way of proceeding - more Peter the Great than Adam Smith. It has nothing much to do with the "Killer apps" and in its disregard for private property is positively not anything to do with them.

We have now saddled ourselves with a big problem by allowing this slave state access to world markets. This was done on the assumption that the Chinese would happily chug along at the low end making cheap goods for us. But of course this resourceful nation intends to penetrate all markets: electronics, HSR systems, chemicals, space, shipping - you name it, they're in it. And the fact that with official connivance they disregard private property rights such as patents makes it all the easier for them.

China has already destabilised our economies in the democratic, law-based countries. I believe it will continue to do so as it will be directly competing with us in all sectors.

Tiberius

I've always found Niall Ferguson to be "one of us". His column in the ST used to be compelling, and his performances on QT and This Week reinforce his analytical capability. I've only seen one of the broadcasts in this TV series and, again, he tells it as it is.

His conclusions about the crisis that Western civilization faces correspond with those of our spiritual leader, Mark Steyn. His style is easily absorbed too, unlike the repeat hammer blows of Melanie Phillips.

D.Short

Free advert for the DVD book by a right-wing Scotsman by one of the two senior Scottish journalists on the right-wing Spectator whose chief executive is a right-wing Scot and whose owners are tax exile Scots. Very subtle.

Andy Carpark

'I am a populist and democrat.'

So where do you stand on capital punishment?

Knew NF a quarter of a century ago. Never liked him. Louche preening narcissistic little shit then. Louche preening narcissistic little shit now. In fact he gets steadily worse.

Junior Research Fellow in glorified tittle tattle. Professor of cosmic generalities.

decafT

Fraser, Britain becoming less religious may be anomalous, but it's still progress.

protestantism may have encouraged work and thrift, but it's still nonsense.

FF

China was at its richest in the 18th C and vastly richer than Europe at the time. It was also a much more sophisticated society in terms of its economy, governance and so on. I think Ferguson is wrong on the facts here. It's perfectly OK to put Britain or Europe first because we live here. But you shouldn't translate your subjective view into a universal truth.

Simon Stephenson.

daniel maris : 1.20pm

"I was impressed by the figure - can't remember if it was from this series - that centralised planning allowed China to allocate 10,000 (!) people just to PLANNING for its High Speed Rail project. That is an incredible way of proceeding - more Peter the Great than Adam Smith."

I expect Stalin had an even greater number than this planning the extermination of the kulaks. Very impressive indeed, although I understand that one or two kulaks failed to see quite the glory in it as was expected of them.

FF

If you take a long view of history (where China's displacement from the top spot can be seen as a temporary blip), then something interesting did happen at the end of the second millennium. The previous backwaters of North Europe and North America were ascendant. I think this can be put down to the effects of religion, and specifically the protestant tradition of acting from first principles, its stress on efficiency and its willingness to challenge the status quo.

Simon Stephenson.

Fatbloke on tour : 1.16pm

The commitment I have made to myself, if we ever see something you write something that is based on analytical consideration, and not ranting propaganda, that this will be the occasion to get involved in a purposeful discussion with you. But ranting propaganda, I'm afraid, deserves no more than a continued repetition of how infantile and stupid the originator must be.

Toodle pip!

Nicholas

daniel maris: "(a) I am not a socialist" - yeah, right

"and (b) I have here and elsewhere frequently condemned the crimes of communism" - yeah, right.

"I am a populist and democrat" - aka socialist - socialists always dress up their cant as "populist and democratic". Inside is usually a communist with a big dollop of sanctimonious moral superiority.

" and it is on that basis that I condemn the imperialist project which did v. little to benefit the common man either here or abroad." How do you know? How can you quantify benefit? As subjectively judged by 50+ years of socialist/communist self-hating, revisionist guilt and propaganda? Define "common man".

"Incidentally all the crimes of communism were at some stage replicated under the British Empire including ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, inhuman centralised planning, forced population movements, price fixing, secret police activities, murder of democrats...need I go on?" All absolute rubbish. Again history from a self-hating, guilt-ridden, socialist perspective masquerading as truth. You are not Nial Ferguson, objective historian, but daniel maris, socialist with an agenda, posting predictable soundbites on a forum.

"The fact you don't want to see those truths, is a matter for you to consider." Truths? History depends very much on the perspective it is viewed from and the context of the time. You view it from a post-colonial, guilt ridden, revisionist, over-whelmingly self-hating socialist basis. That's up to you to consider too. I don't ignore the brutalities and iniquities of Empire - or excuse them. But I don't apologise for them either. And I don't use a socialist-constructed, subjective cartoon of Empire as a weapon to undermine, deconstruct and confuse modern British identity.

Patricia Shaw

His PR puffery appearances on QT and This Week put me right off him.

Then you came along blowing wind up his chunnel.

Confirms I was right.

Craig Strachan

He was a prefect at my school. Suffice it to say, I wasn't a fan.

Baron

I’ve enjoyed the series alot, liked the language, cool, not the video shots, Neil's attire, didn’t agree with everything either, but then I never do, it was thought provoking, however, most likely tailored somewhat to the prevailing orthodoxy in that part of the academia that does history, the guy needs a job, hopes to collect his pension, don’t we all? I also like Anne-Kit’s, Tiberius’s observations, Nicholas’s, too, in particular the sharp, deadly accurate take on the Red Menace, but that goes without saying.

the coupling of Protestantism with work ethics ain’t anything new, has always been questionable unless one assumes that the link is but of many, you know, belief systems other than the Protestant creed may similarly engender hunger for one’s betterment, hence work as the conduit to achieve it.

touched irrevocably by Marxist education, my preferred look on history threads through the prisms of capital, labour, land, the system of governance, the number, the DNA make-up of the unwashed. Hard to be more specific unless, God forbid, I were to bore you with a longish rant again.

and another thing: there will come a time when future historians will find nothing but praise for the British Empire in spite of all the boils, warts and all. In my humble view, the world would be today in far deeper shite if the Empire wasn’t around, pity it didn’t last longer.

John Montague

Nicholas, I think the modern liberal notion, backed up by analysis of financial data, is that the Empire provided a locus for a certain kind of highly profitable but not widely appreciated investment, but was paid for by general taxation.

In other words, it partly functioned as a way of transferring wealth from the general commonwealth of these islands to those members of a quite narrow elite, narrower than the general class of business people, who were best placed to exploit the opportunities it offered.

yank

daniel maris
April 11th, 2011 1:08pm

I am a populist and democrat and it is on that basis that I condemn the imperialist project which did v. little to benefit the common man either here or abroad.

.

I think you should look a bit closer. If they stopped to think about it, there's 310M here who might disagree with you, and another couple billion around the globe who want to join them.

D Short

An interview with him in today's Guardian says a lot about his character, particularly his position that he never forgets a 'slight' (never mind an insult..) and that he would seek revenge however long it took.

The last person I remember making a threat like that was that lovely property man, Nicholas van Hoogstraten.

TomTom

He owes it all to Rothschild and the hedgies and he sings for his supper

Hysteria

what Yank said...

daniel maris

Simon Stephenson -

What's your point?

That the Chinese Communists' central planning is contempibly ineffective? Or loathesomely effective? You don't seem to want to say, because clearly neither answer fits into both your world view and the facts.

My own view as I have made clear is that China is ruled by a cruel communist dictatorship that treats its people like a slave labour force. However its use of centralised planning has proved very effective (as it has previously in Japan, S. Korea and Singapore to name a few other Asian countries).

daniel maris

Nicholas:

You quote me saying:

"Incidentally all the crimes of communism were at some stage replicated under the British Empire including ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, inhuman centralised planning, forced population movements, price fixing, secret police activities, murder of democrats...need I go on?"

And then comment on that as follows:

"All absolute rubbish. Again history from a self-hating, guilt-ridden, socialist perspective masquerading as truth. You are not Nial Ferguson, objective historian, but daniel maris, socialist with an agenda, posting predictable soundbites on a forum."

Well I can stand up each of those charges:

Ethnic cleansing: seen in Tasmania, North America, and Africa where natives were either hunted to extinction or cleared from settler areas and put in reservations.

Aggressive war: Plenty of examples - the Chinese opium wars, the attack on the Transvaal Republic, various aggressive actions in India, the attack on the USA in 1812.

Inhuman centralised planning includes removing whole populations from areas designated for military bases, atom bomb tests and so on.

I could go on but I am getting bored, and I have mentioned a few million Africans enslaved and more often than not worked to death, raped and subject to cruel punishments.

There's nothing much for a British person living in the 21st century to feel guilty about but if you've got a trust fund that ultimately was built on exploitation of slaves, then I think you may perhaps
feel a more direct responsibility.

Incidentally I don't buy all this nonsense about different values in previous times. Slaves clearly felt the wrong of slavery. Masters clearly displayed signs of guilty conscience (read Thomas Jefferson's desperate attempts to prove to himself the innate inferiority of Africans as rational justification for slavery). Spartacus didn't feel his slavery was justified. Justice is not a modern concept. Franciscans were outraged by the treated of Native Americans by Spanish colonialists.

Maddy1

@FF
Simply not true about China being the richest...............................
in the sense most people take its meaning to be true.

Also Ferguson is trying to make Ferguson the richest, you will not have neutral, unbiased, original thinkers like Bronowski or Clark coming on screen and virtually saying that MA's David, based on Greek ideals is the nearest we will come to God on earth. What would all our illiterate muslims think to this thesiis? This people are long dead now.

Nicholas

"Ethnic cleansing: seen in Tasmania, North America, and Africa where natives were either hunted to extinction or cleared from settler areas and put in reservations."

Typically simplistic, one-sided judgement which takes no account of context and presumes all acts of aggression and evil were British. Please provide evidence of where the British in North America (beyond the use of native Americans on both sides in the Seven Years War) hunted them to extinction and put them in reservations. You are conflating the Empire with the USA but beyond that you have a sadly lacking comprehension of the reality of frontier wars and the motivation of native Americans in participating in them.

"Aggressive war: Plenty of examples - the Chinese opium wars, the attack on the Transvaal Republic, various aggressive actions in India, the attack on the USA in 1812."

The British response to China came after months of provocation, treaty breaking and murder. It was not one-sided. The Chinese government's position was cynical and manipulative to the extreme too. Your understanding of the Transvaal is also simplistic and takes no account of the complexity of tensions arising from the changing demographics and the discovery of gold.

Don't get me started on India. Britain's role was incremental and in most cases benign. India under the British was more just, less murderous and more peaceful than it had been under the princely states where thuggee, suttee and other murderous delights had held sway. In fact there is a distinction to be drawn between the pre- and post-Mutiny relationship between Britons and Indians. The British record in India cannot be reasonably summarised in an "all bad" soundbite. The reality of the times was that if Britain had not colonised India another European power would have, with results probably much worse for ordinary Indians.If you don't believe that study French, Dutch and Spanish patterns of colonisation.

Your citing of the War of 1812 is hilarious. It was the Americans who declared war on the British and one of the reasons, apart from their territorial aspirations in Canada, was because of British support for native American tribes against US expansion! Until 1814 British strategy in the war was defensive, e.g. against American aggression and only the efforts of Hollywood and US romanticism have given the perfidious Albion perspective you have evidently swallowed hook, line and sinker.

"Inhuman centralised planning includes removing whole populations from areas designated for military bases, atom bomb tests and so on."

Hmm. Maybe that had something to do with the overwhelming threat to the security of the world from your Soviet chums, e.g. the Cold War. Remember that? In the context of Nuclear Apocalypse the action was probably considered to be justified.

"I could go on but I am getting bored"

Clearly this onset of boredom extends to your grasp of history. Had you not become bored after digesting the simplistic tripe of the British Socialist Big Book Why Empire Was Bad you might have developed a more objective and balanced viewpoint. People only wore black and white hats in the cowboy films you know.

John Montague

“Britain's role was incremental and in most cases benign. India under the British was more just, less murderous and more peaceful than it had been under the princely states where thuggee, suttee and other murderous delights had held sway”

That's all very well, but for a hundred years before the Empire in India was established, there was only one major famine there. The beginning of British rule, and the imposition of British taxation, was followed by the terrible famine of 1769-1770, and famines recurred regularly thereafter, killing hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, time after time, right up until the disastrous events in Bengal in 1943, which were clearly attributable to British mismanagement.

Famines on that scale simply ceased once Indian independence was achieved.

Callous and dogma-driven ineptitude may have been the British trademark, as opposed to the more direct repression by means of scorched earth policies employed by the continental empires, but for those on the receiving end, it made little difference.

These famines, and what was done in Tasmania, are the major blots on our imperial history, and it is quite inappropriate to minimize them in any way. When I read a book that devotes more pages to the Durbar in 1877 than to the Madras famine, I am inclined to hurl it across the room in disgust.

Maddy1

@John
Listen carefully I am only going to say it once! The Moguls and thier ilk accepted famine as a regular occurence throughout. It was the benign Victorians who made a science and attempted a cure for it. Some of us are fed up with this argument. Arguably in the eightes there was in all intents and purposes a famine in the Bihar Region. If you do not publise a famine you do not have a public famine.

John Montague

Molly, the casualties from the Bihar famine, at a time of massive population growth, were measured in thousands, not hundreds of thousands.

Please point me to a source or a quote that documents major 18th Century famines under Mughal rule. There was one at the very beginning of the century, I believe, mentioned by Fukuzawa, and that was it.