 Niall Ferguson, Imperialist
Niall Ferguson has a strong predilection towards making many small points seem like they prove his broader arguments. They rarely do, and his books amount to imperialist propaganda, pushing for a greater likelihood that his fantasy of having the U.S. pick up the imperial torch from the UK will some day come true. Well Niall, with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, you got your wish. You were dead wrong. The book can be seen as a case for war in Iraq, even before 9/11. Check out the final chapter/last paragraphs. You were wrong, Niall. And you were wrong about the benefits the British Empire provided for the broader world.
Niall essentially tries to cover up the dark side of the British Empire, making a new imperialism seem like it might be useful...and fun. Readers wanting to get something more than old 19th-century assumptions repackaged for the 21st century need to look elsewhere. His numbers hide disgusting unreformed racism and brutal imperial violence. He downplays the negatives, and creates the impression that the world needs more American-style imperialism. Iraq. Good call.
 Day-Old Bread Still Nourishing
Not for nothing is economics known as the "Dismal Science." And not for nothing is Niall Ferguson universally considered the finest expositor of economic history of recent, and, indeed, long past times. Nonetheless, having read virtually all of his works, I had missed this one, and am not sure I would have undertaken it but for the fact it was given to me as a gift.
And it proved well worth the read, somewhat ironically because it first appeared nearly a decade ago. That was before 9/11, the Iraq War, the recent, ahem, financial unpleasantness, etc., and it's fascinating to consider Ferguson's observations on the world of 1999-2000 to assess to what extent he anticipated the tumultuous near-decade to follow.
Not surprisingly, he made some interesting calls. He mentions several times his belief that the stock market was significantly overvalued in the late 90's and thus vulnerable to dramatic reversals, and writes with startling prescience (on page 412), "Plainly, it is highly unlikely that any state would contemplate a direct attack on the United States in the foreseeable future, though a terrorist campaign against American cities is quite easy to imagine." (Maybe for him, eh?)
Somewhat more perplexing are his comments on Iraq. Noodling once again about the United States as the world's reluctant hegemon, a theme that he developed with admirable conviction in "Colossus," the Professor invokes (on page 423) the "precautionary assertion of American power to impose democracy and the market economy on `rogue' states while the going is good," and implicitly responds affirmatively to the rhetorical question (on page 417), "[W]ould it not be desirable for the United States to depose tyrants like Saddam and impose democratic government on their countries?"
These statements brought back to me the Professor's appearance on C-Span's "Book Notes" program shortly after the commencement of the 2003 invasion of Iraq when he seemed downright censorious (in his charming way) about the chances for success in anywhere near a timeframe acceptable to the American public and, more fundamentally, about the whole notion of the gratuitous imposition of "freedom" by one country on another. I may be mis-remembering his remarks, but what I do recall certainly don't fit comfortably with his musings in "The Cash Nexus."
Having said all this, I believe it impossible for Professor Ferguson to write anything either boring or inconsequential (not necessarily the same things), and this book is no exception. It is a terrific layman's introduction to world economics in the momentous three centuries treated. Personally, I can't wait for his account of the origins and likely consequences of the current economic calamity, a preview of which we're enjoying in his current PBS series, "The Ascent of Money." How this guy finds time to teach is beyond me.
 Complementary readings to Ferguson's book
There are already some good reviews on this book so I will only suggest reading the following books (whose scope is amazingly global) instead of, or in addition to, Ferguson's peculiar work: 1) Economy: 1.1 "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 1.2 and 1.3: "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes appeared on December 2007); and 1.4 "The spirit of capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth" by Liah Greenfeld; 2) Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 3) Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 4) Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5) Political Thought: 5.1. and 5.2: "The West and Islam. Religion and Political Thought in World History" plus "A World History of Ancient Political Thought" by Antony Black; 6) Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 7) War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.
Reads a lot like a string of individual essays tied together
Definitely not a book to take to the beach. Pretty dense, though not theoretical. Mostly, Ferguson wades through mountains of empirical data about spending to GDP ratios and democracy indices in search for answers to big questions: economic determinism, the rise of the state, the spread of democracy, etc. I mostly read it for the thesis about how tax rates are related to the ratios between taxpayers and voters, i.e., the lower the ratio, the higher the rate of direct taxes, and the higher the ratio, the higher indirect, or regressive taxes. An interesting book, though not destined to be a classic.
the socialist interpretation of history?
Is there a prize for "most boring graphic"? If so, and it must be a hotly contested field in the subsection Economic History, I would like to nominate Figure 1., The Square of Power. It's a square, with at the corners "tax bureaucracy", "parliament", "central bank" and "national debt". That's it.
The book's subtitle "Money and power 1700-2000" does the author no favours either. The eighteenth century saw the birth of the consumer society (coffee, sugar, mirrors, mobility) and (arguably) 2000 saw its apogee. Daniel Defoe, visiting Norfolk in 1720, remarked that everyone was "busy in the principal aim of life, getting money".
How did this happen? Before, people weren't just poor, they also had no money. Could the gold of the New World (kindly recycled by the Hapsburgs thanks to their enormous deficits) have something to do with it? Why are the poor so much richer today than they used to be? (Marx, inadvertently, shows that this was by no means fore-ordained.) Why are we so rich? Why has the gap between rich and poor remained about the same? Why now? Why are so many foreigners still in subsistence poverty?
Search in vain for answers to these questions. Silly me, I thought this book might discuss some private enterprise. No, Figure 1, the square of power, IS the book. It should properly be subtitled "Tax Money and Government Power, 1700-2000" to show where its focus lies. The research was conducted largely in the bowels of the Bank of England and it shows, though Ferguson is too intelligent a writer to have gone entirely native. The only private individuals in the book are Rothschild and Baring; that's because they floated the government loans. Limited liability or joint stock or invention don't even get a mention in the index.
Welfare, Ferguson suggests, might do for states what warfare used to do. i.e. make them go bust. Then weirdly, he suggests spending even more money bringing democracy to the benighted by force.
If you are a fan of comparative tables of historical yields on Belgian and Swedish bonds, and are prepared to wade through a stream of low flying percentages, this is the book for you.
You may omit the chapter on currency unions, it it somewhat too sensational.
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