Conversations with History: Niall Ferguson

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler or the Institute of International Studies I guess today is Neil Ferguson who holds the John Herzog chair in financial history at New York University his senior research fellow of Jesus College at Oxford University and is a visiting fellow this fall at the Hoover Institution Stanford University he's the author most recently of Empire the rise and demise of the British World Order and the lessons for global power Neil welcome to Berkeley nice to be here where we were raised I was born in Glasgow in 1964 the 60s didn't happen in Glasgow so I was raised in a previous era I think it may have been the 19th century actually the west of Scotland bourgeoisie was firmly rooted in a no vanished world and and looking back how did your parents shape your thinking about the world well my parents are both scientists in the sense that my father's a doctor and my mother as a physicist so I'm a great disappointment to the family although my my mother's father was a journalist and therefore writing for a living was seen as a perfectly respectable thing in the family which wasn't true necessarily throughout West of Scotland society mmm-hmm and and what got you interested in history Tolstoy uh-huh why Tolstoy and how well most people who read war and peace don't read the coda at the end the NSA on determinism hmm I found it actually by far the most enthralling part of the book when I was a schoolboy I can remember feeling rather ill and taking a day off school which I did rather regularly in order to pursue my own autonomous study and reading war and peace in the garden because occasioned the Sun does shine in Scotland I got to the end in a state of great excitement having had the meaning of life largely resolved through thee and through the experience of peer the central character and then came across this extraordinary essay on on determinism and contingency in history and it absolutely electrified me and from then on I think it was fairly clear that it would be history rather than in literature that I studied and you have a real passion for history is that is that a first statement I mean you live it and breathe it yes I think it's a kind of condition almost a medical condition to be obsessed with the past because the activity of history is essentially an engagement with the dead and to be absolutely precise a lot of historical research takes the form of reading letters written by dead people and spend the best years of your life sitting in archives or libraries reading dead people's letters is really rather an odd condition but but luckily it's not regarded as certifiable so we're allowed to wander the streets and even to teach in academic institutions we're in another culture we might very well be under some kind of heavy sedation now I noticed that that your your background comes up in in either footnotes or introductions to some of your histories at the beginning I think of the book on war you talk about your grandfather and his experiences and then in the empire book I noticed there's a whole section on the Scots in in as soldiers and and administrators of the Empire talk a little about that is that is that that must be really satisfying to elucidate both your your your family background and and Scotland's well it might seem terribly self-indulgent to begin books by talking a little bit about one's own family I mean I talk about my my grandfather's experience in the First World War right at the beginning of the pity of war and describe his experience as a teenager at drawing joining up right at the beginning of the war actually under age and the beginning of Empire I talked about the experience of my great aunt Agnes who emigrated in 1911 to Canada now what's this Self Indulgence the answer is not really it's a way it's a device to introduce readers to big big subjects but through a kind of human playful if you like I think it's much easier to eat somebody into what is actually quite a difficult argument about the First World War by saying right away upfront history is about people it's about individuals and it seems to me impossible to understand the historians motivation one doesn't understand his own as it were ancestral connections with the subjects and I certainly would never have written a book about the First World War had it not been for my grandfather and also all the things his generation left behind in Glasgow including war memorials that I saw every day at school these were the things that really inspired my youthful interest in the past and I think if it encourages readers to pick up a book if they can see at the beginning something to which they can relate because after all a great many readers of that book had grandfathers or great-grandfather's with some kind of wartime experience then good that that's a good device to use now now what does it take to do your kind of history because you have a remarkable breadth to your work it's when you're talking about war it's not just diplomatic and military history you're also talking about the economy you know in society so so what what what what is involved in in preparing for that kind of work in that view of history well you could argue this as slightly did a temptation in an age of professional specialization I'm not a promiscuous in that I dabble in economic history and and flirt with military history and and then hang out for a little bit with the diplomatic history and even do some cultural history and I'm sure some people in the academic world would regard this as very unsound to my mind those specializations those compartments that we've erected in academic institutions are in fact a barrier to understanding because it's the connections between economic for example economic and military history those are really interesting and all the work that I've done from the very first book I ever wrote has been about if you want to put it this way the interface between economics and wider social and political questions it's just that that interests me and if one was simply to say Niall Ferguson does financial history and his books were exclusively about financial transactions and had no relationship for example to 19th century literature or to the great military conflicts of the 20th century well they would be a more boring books but they would also be far less illuminating I think and so really this this strategy works toward giving a big picture of what you're discussing or a different cut into the problem I think there's some very profound problems of causation in modern historiography that are rather under explored there used to be a straightforward causal model which was more or less on the shelf to be used by students and professors alike and it was called Marxism and in Marxism it was the economics and economic change that essentially drove everything else now that's long gone but in its place are a whole range of far less clearly articulated and intelligible models and indeed there are some models which don't really have any room at all for the economics and a great deal of the cultural history that's done today seems to be almost completely divorced from economic reality and that's just seems to me pretty futile because certainly the study of modern history is simply inseparable from the study of economic history and my mission is really to join the dots together again and to say look history is a holistic undertaking we simply cannot exist in two boxes talking to mutual really interested specialists if we want to have some understanding of the way in which to give one single example financial markets interact with grand strategy it's an issue which really is at the center of global politics today and it was at the center of global politics 100 years ago but you can't understand it if if there's one group of people studying the financial markets and one group of people studying the wars and they never meet now you are associated with a way of thinking about history that has another dimension to it and it's called counterfactual history tell us what what that is and how it adds another layer another dimension to this holistic view what counterfactual history is a mouthful and a rather off-putting one and some people might find it a more accessible idea of one said it is to do with what-if questions what if the United States had never intervened in the first world war and even the Second World War just to take a single example those kinds of questions used to be regarded as frivolous and unserious by professional historian the great eh car in his dreadful palenik what is history dismissed them as the kinds of questions that would be asked by bad losers and in fact it's a really very frivolous argument to make against counterfactual history because in my view it is impossible to understand any major historical event without posing a what-if question either implicitly which many historians do or and I think this is much better explicitly for example if you think the Great Depression was the reason for the rise of Hitler then you are implicitly suggesting that if there had been no Great Depression then there would have been no Nazi regime but that's the kind of implicit counterfactual but I argue in a book called virtual history should be explicit we should be straight with our students and with our readers and say as I tried to do in the pity of war I think if Britain had stayed out of the first world war in 1914 a perfectly plausible scenario since it was a cleanly hotly debated question in the British government the world would be very different the entire 20th century would have turned out differently and I think it's in a sense a matter of scholarly responsibility to say that explicitly and then to try to show the reader what an alternative history would have looked like and and what is involved here I guess you're saying is that you actually have to look at the alternatives that were presented to the actors for which there is evidence and which might have pointed to a different course for history I think that's the key it's not a matter of plucking imaginary scenarios out of their virtual history and this is a very very important point which isn't understood by many people who dabble in what-if questions is only legitimate if one can show that the alternative you're discussing the motive scenario you're discussing was one that contemporaries seriously contemplated and in all the essays in the book virtual history the contributors were asked to make it absolutely clear what the evidence was for their alternative scenarios and after all that's not difficult to do because in the present we don't know the future we have plausible futures from which to choose we make plans we build scenarios we do this in our everyday lives because we've absolutely no idea what's coming a year from now so it's not difficult to go back and find that in 1914 just to give that example again British politicians were imagining plausible scenarios including non-intervention that's how they made the decision that they set these scenarios to discuss them and they and they opted for intervention because they saw a nightmare future of German domination of the continent that's the key point you've got to look at the alternatives contemporaries considered and after all if we are in the business as rohnke said we should be of capturing the past Vyas eigentlich evasion as it actually or essentially wars that has to include the experience of decision-making the experience of contemplating futures including futures that never actually happened and it also leads to a critique of earlier decisions because I believe in the world war one book you suggest that had the the Brits spent more money on armaments they might have deterred the Germans which they didn't do and then they wound up intervening at a time when it was too late because they didn't have enough armaments yes I think the next step that one can take with the counterfactual method is to make assessments judgments about past decision-making and this is it students to me an extremely important part of the historians responsibility it's not obligatory but Monica said this that history was about causality and about values it was about evaluation it was about judgment it wasn't simply about so to speak presenting the pasts and simply leaving the readers to choose to my mind once you've shown why a decision was taken and what the alternative scenarios were it seems perfectly impossible to resist the temptation at least I find it impossible to resist to say well actually maybe they chose the wrong one and when you make that kind of argument you're subject to a lot of controversy I guess in the field because you're really going against the conventional wisdom of the meaning of the British intervention in World War one well in that specific case it was certainly controversial because people generally speaking liked to live with the past that happened and they might troubled when they're presented with the idea that there were as it were parallel universes in which that past didn't happen now in the world of science this notion is perfectly well understood and incidentally also in the world of the law where but for Arctic arguments what if argue is indeed a routine part of of arguments about responsibility and causation for some strange reason historical professional walks away from this kind of reasoning I suspect because some people find rather difficult and therefore when one comes along and says well in fact there were alternatives in 1914 here is the documentary evidence that the cabinet was was not just divided but in fact that a majority of the cabinet favored non-intervention and here are the consequences Britain doesn't go in the Germans were in a limited continental war and the consequences for the rest of 20th century history are not only different were preferable this was the thing that I think many readers including many readers in Germany incidentally German academics absolutely hated the book found quite difficult to imagine because because because they had a sort of pre-programmed notion that any kind of German victory in a twentieth-century conflict would be the worst possible outcome and one obvious implication of the book was that Germany in 1914 was a far less malevolent Germany than the Jeremie of 1939 which I firmly believed to be true I mean a German victory in a limited continental war against France and Russia in 1915 or 1916 would have had really quite benign consequences not least and this is a point often misunderstood for the Jews Eastern Europe who would have been much better off under the vilho mine Imperial Reich than they were under Soros Russian rule I think you suggest that Hitler might have continued painting in Vienna well they never been out of the job to put it mildly because there's a simply no way to imagine a Nazi regime emerging or indeed if I'm our Republic emerging if the kinds of I if the Imperial Reich is victorious in the war that it begins in 1914 that regime would have then endured and actually I think interestingly might well have endured and liberalized because one of the interesting consequences as contemporaries pointed ours of the decision for war 1914 was that the Social Democrats were brought into government for the first time so the the kaisers wartime government initially moved to the left and many German conservatives rather worried that one consequence of the war would be a shift in the direction of constitutional concessions to the working class as the price for their collaboration in the war effort so so what your the history that you're describing and the particular example seems to require kind of a comprehensive set of knowledge and by comprises set of knowledge is I mean coming at the problem from different fields basically you know what economics tells us about Germany then what diplomatic history tells us about German at them or Britain on the one hand so that a lot of different kinds of knowledge brought together in a new way which then suggests the what's at work here is really historical imagination of a different time I think they're in a way two stages to the work that I do generally what stage one is to try to understand what contemporaries thought was happening understanding contemporary thought is the first thing their story and should be concerned with and in that respect I'm a kind of classical historicist I think what we're about is trying to recapture past thorns and past experience with all its uncertainties and so once one's actually entered if you like the mind of past actors you're halfway there you can see what their options were you can assess the decisions that they made but part two of the process is then to say well with the knowledge that we have subsequent knowledge garnered from you can and social another research we can perhaps eat better than they could see which of the decisions was to be preferred and I think juxtaposing contemporary perception with what I would very crudely as economic or strategic reality is really quite a satisfying way of interrogating historical problems it's of course a little simplistic to say here are the perceptions and here is the reality one always wants to avoid the condescension of this store into the past what we know with the benefit of hindsight is knowledge that has to be very strictly separated from what we know contemporaries knew when we're assessing their decisions there's no point saying they got it wrong because they didn't know for example the German economy was about to outstrip Russian economic growth in the 20th century how could they possibly have known that if you're going to make a value judgment you can they judge them on the basis of what they knew at the time but I think there's a second-order judgment you can make which is the judgment with the benefit of hindsight as long as you make it clear that's what you're doing that seems to me perfectly legitimate now much of your work has been about what you call the nexus of money and power and your book is called that actually I can show the book and tell us about what grew you to that set of problems was it a particular mentor that you had or it was it didn't all come from Tolstoy financial history it's true I think from a fairly early stage in my undergraduate career at Oxford I became interested in economic questions more interested than my tutors who were rather horrified when I said I'd rather read Adam Smith than Hobbes this was a great turning point in my oxford career I think it was regarded as distinctly a revolutionary from then on but from my point of view as somebody who was fundamentally interested in in the modern period it was far more important to understand Adam Smith that to understand Hobbes and far more important to retains than to read Marx who manifestly had no idea about economics that he is and quite interesting German philosophical insights so I spent some of my undergraduate career almost teaching myself economics and economic history on the side the traditional Oxford history course didn't have terribly much of that sort of thing and I wonder if that was partly a function of my my Glaswegian background I mentioned earlier Versailles I sprang from the Glasgow bourgeoisie I remember being given Adam Smith as a present by my father on one occasion with an obvious implication that it really was time I started thinking about the cash Nexus and Scots generally speaking are more prepared to talk about about money than the English Thomas Carlyle the great mid 19th century historian a Scotsman himself was the man who coined the phrase the cash Nexus and the interesting thing was that Carlyle argued against many nineteenth-century materialist philosophers that money wasn't everything that money wasn't really the driving force in political change so when I used the words the cash Nexus it's partly in order to capture Carlisle's idea this is important the relationship between politics and economics between power and finance is very very important but we shouldn't assume that it's a one-way street in which economic development determines political outcomes the central arguments of the cash Nexus as a book was that quite often the direction is in the opposite way and that it's actually political crises political events and particularly wars that shape economic and financial development and what what that book really becomes is a statement about the kinds of institutions that were created by the state as part of the state building process right in the front of the war making process which had broader implications for the economy and you have a square of power or power Square tell us what that is and what what actually you you wound up concluding well this came about because I was trying to persuade my wife a very skeptical woman that the argument of the book was worth making and on the back of a paper surveyors in Venice where we were celebrating our wedding anniversary I sketched what I thought was the essence of the argument of the book and I drew a square and I said look there are four institutions but come about almost inadvertently as a result of war making and the exigencies of war finance and these institutions are tax collecting bureaucracy a representative assembly a central bank and and some kind of financial markets in which the national debt can be can be financed these are the institutions that arise they arise primarily out of the exigencies of the military conflict but when they come together first in in Holland and then spectacularly in England in the 17th and 18th centuries they turn out to be the magic key that unlocks economic development it's not intentional it's not supposed to bring about the Industrial Revolution but once you get this combination of non corrupt tax collectors of representative assemblies in which property owners actually have a say about the tax rates that they pay once you get a central bank in which the money in an economy is managed in a rational way with that the kind of multiplicities of coins or or worthless pieces of paper and other systems and finally once you get financial markets where governments can borrow really quite large sums of money at low interest rates then you're off there are all kinds of what economists call externalities that's to say unexpected side benefits the prepare economic development in the private sector that was the crux of the argument and I know little diagrams with squares and triangles often look like the worst kind of political science but look it convinced my wife so how can you argue with that that's right it was done on a napkin you say yeah well that's how we make economic policies that's right down on the back of paper napkins that's right so so in a way what what you in this power grid whatever you call it power square you're you're establishing the basis for not only the building of the state but the criteria by which you can anticipate which states will become more powerful than others right but there's actually quite a wide range of different combinations in the modern period as states adopt or choose not to adopt this combination of institutions some for example don't get adopted at all or get adopted very late you could have a system in which one corner of the square is missing now the interesting thing about the United States they didn't have a proper central bank until the eve of the First World War it muddled through the 19th century with only periodic central banking functions being performed by the first and second bank of the United States and in the later 19th century before the creation of the Federal Reserve System there was actually a tremendous chaos in the monetary institutions of the US giving rise to quite severe financial crises so what's interesting about the square of par as I call it is that you can have three of the institutions and be missing a fourth and that can have quite important consequences for economic development it's not in a sense an equation it's just a representation that allows us to see which institutions matter what I was really trying to do was to say in the most recent economic work on institutions it's been very clear that institutions matter and markets don't operate without the right institutional framework so this wasn't a novel insight I was really just applying it to the past and then saying this helps us do things with social history too because instead of thinking in terms of classes which traditionally historians did following a long tradition going back to Ricardo not just two marks instead of thinking about classes we could think about particular functions associated with these different institutions and that gave rise to another concept which is central to the books argument that there are circles of influence and they're not classes but they're separate if you like function taxpayer voter borrower bondholder and these functions overlap individuals can be all three of these things are all four of these things or they can be only one of these things and I find that far far more illuminating than traditional class analysis now how does a theory if that's what this is like this emerge from somebody who is a historian I mean how do you come upon this set of ideas how do they come to you so to speak well dissatisfaction with what I'm reading I suppose would be part one part two I think and this is important to emphasize is that in teaching and I've spent well 15 years giving tutorials to Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates you very often have your own rather complacent views challenged by by bright students so first dissatisfaction with the existing literature then some slap in the face from a bright 19 year old followed by a kind of back of envelope attempt to come up with something something better I suppose more than many historians I am drawn a resistant Lee to theorize but but I'm a historian because I posed I do some serious digging without particularly strong preconceptions before I come up with a theoretical model whereas of course the conventional mode in the social sciences is to first design the model and then find the data I had a very funny discussion when I spent a year at the Bank of England and it was a very intimidating year I wanted to learn some more financial economics and I had a little theory which I had been working on about the way the financial markets had worked in the nineteenth century and I talked to somebody who was very expert and in the in in a modern bond market working with the Bank of England but she was a trained economist so I said well here's the stuff I've been gathering and and I wonder what you think what you think of this and she said very worried she said well before I can I can look at the stuff I first I would first have to construct a model and I said well don't you think it would be better to look at yeah at the evidence first and then drop the model that's a very profound methodological difference it was something that rank understood in the 19th century that made history different but we sort of mess around with a lot of of rather random data before we had before we hasn't ly formulate a hypothesis then actually think much healthier now the other element in your work that really stands out and and there's obviously a nice transition when you talk about state building is your sense of the globe of the world of different places where these phenomena happening and then how in the case of state power once state does it all right everything's comes together and and suddenly they're they're all over the globe hence your your work on the British Empire and before we talk about that well how do you how do you explain that intellectual leap you know from the focus you know on the state to a global perspective then this is your new book on Empire well I think the answer is that once I had begun to think in terms of political structures and financial institutions it hit me that the world was not in fact made up of nice neat discrete nation-states and a lot of 19th century history textbooks tended to argue that it was but when I was writing a history of the Rothschild Bank which was in some ways the biggest scholarly undertaking of my career to date which involve five years in the archives of the biggest financial institution of the 19th century it suddenly hit but the nineteenth century world wasn't like that at all but there were actually relatively few nation-states in the classical sense and the world was far more shaped by empires and their satellites colonies and dependents and so writing the history of Rothschilds bought me right up against the simple truth that the the later 19th century particularly was was an age of globalization dominated by a supranational entity called the British Empire now once I hit that subject it was really one of those epiphanies I suddenly thought I've been teaching 19th century history British and European history and I've completely missed the most important thing about this period that is that a quarter of the world is under some form of British rule Bharata and the areas outside that area of formal Empire are also pretty clearly under British influence so after that insight came once I had in a sense come up with a theory of 19th century globalization that said actually it's Anglo realization well I really had to go off and and do some work on on the British Empire face to face directly and before we talk about that tell us all about the Rothschilds what what emerged from that study that that enormous tome that surprised you if anything was something that was really a discovery for you oh it was a huge discovering a revelation that there were there were two parts to it the first was the sheer scale of this institution it was vastly bigger in terms of his assets and its operational extent in most states this this was a an institution which you could only imagine existing today if tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal he read the Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were merging with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and that was the the scale that the Rothschild bank's operations represented a century ago so the scale of it just blew me away the the second part of the realization was just how financial power operated through this extraordinary and rather intimidating thing called the bond market because what the Rothschilds did was they traded government debt they issued government debt and they traded it and if a government went into financial difficulties needed to raise a loan which was usually to fight a war in the 19th century it was quite hard for them to avoid dealing with the lost jobs so I suddenly realized that a lot of 19th century history at the classical diplomatic history that I had been raised on reading AJP Taylor as a student that was missing a key actor that it was almost a lately invisible from the scene if you look through the diplomatic documents but if you look through the archives of the Rothschild Bank you discovered that the likes of Bismarck or Metheny these great towering political figures where at times and that Korea is entirely in hock to this financial institution really very very dependent on its on its financial power indeed so this was a real revelation and and I do think actually that 19th century historians haven't yet fully taking on board the magnitude of the Rothschild contribution partly because there's still this professional sense that that's business history Ferguson wrote the history of Bank very good very nice but it's really got nothing to do with us we do political history sorry folks political history in the 19th century was completely inseparable from the way in which the bond market worked because all these governments are really narrow tax bases if they wanted to go to war Bismarck wanted to unify Germany he had to do it with the connivance of the bond market otherwise he simply didn't have the resources mm-hmm and did that suggest that the arrows flow the other way for money to power or is it just rather that power really had to negotiate with the Rothschild it was fascinating to see the way in which the arrows went in both directions of course there was a great 19th century and often anti-semitic myth that said the Ross Charles ruled the world American populace believed it at the time that the u.s. want onto the gold standard so part of my objective was to see just how true that was just how powerful this institution Wars and the and the answer to the question was it was powerful but there were limits to its power there were moments when a political decision could trump the power of the financial markets when in fact by inducing a financial crisis an event like say the 1848 revolution could very nearly wipe the Rothschilds out so for me the really satisfying thing about this study was to see that financial power really mattered but it wasn't as enormous as as absolute as its critics often alleged so I interrupted with you when you are on the road to Empire so so what what you were what are the lessons if that isn't too presumptuous a question to ask someone like you but what are the lessons that that you learned about the the British Empire in your study well it's not presumptuous because the word lessons of course appears in the subtitle of the American edition I should not say that the the lessons for global power was the subtitle I wasn't entirely comfortable with the subtitle of the of the British edition of the book is how Britain made the modern world but strangely enough American publisher felt this wasn't the ideal subtitle was the US Edition so there are explicit lessons and I draw them out in the conclusion to the book one of the key arguments and it's tremendously topical today is whether an Anglophone imperial power engaged in what we now call nation-building but which one hundred years ago was called Empire can successfully transform the institutions of failed States or rogue regimes and lay the foundations for the things that both British and American empires believe in namely free markets the rule of law non corrupt administration and ultimately representative government and the lesson of the British imperial experience is that this can indeed be achieved Mars that it takes really quite a long time for this to happen occupations of such States and there were a great many but it could be in the second half of the 19th century when I would say the British Empire entered its most liberal phase there really were lots of these countries that came under British rule but they stayed under British rule for many decades and of course the most obvious and important example here is that it's the case of India which was under British rule really from the mid 18th century right up until 1947 for nearly two hundred years now that is an important distinction because I think if one contemplates American policies today the timeframe is a long way short of 200 years the nation-building supposed to be done in roughly at 24 months as far as I can see and I think most important lesson that my book draws summer British experience is that that's not realistic and what were the the British contributions to to World Order as you see it well I think there are two things really the quiet prior to be emphasized the first is that by creating a kind of military dominance particularly in naval dominance this of course was the year of before airborne it was the seed that really mattered the British did create a period of relative global peace lots of small Wars but very few big ones between the Crimea and 1914 so there's a kind of if you like a global order within which economic development is unquestionably more easy in which free trade and international capital movements are a great deal less subject to disruption than they had been in previous ages which has been punctuated by big great power Wars now that brings me to the second thing that one would want to emphasize and in some ways it's a it's a rather technical economic point at that is the extraordinary way in which international investment cross-border investment spread out all over the world including two relatively indeed in some cases very poor countries now globalization 100 years ago was different in this respect from globalization today because most capital flows today are within the developed world they go from north america to europe to east asia and whole areas of the world have no if you like contact with with globalization that's the real reason they're poor it's not globalization that makes them poor it's the fact that they're not involved in it whereas a hundred years ago because the british empire governed a great many poorer countries investors were prepared to put their money at relatively low interest rates into to give just one obvious example a country like Rhodesia no Zimbabwe and now as a result of disastrous independent government tyranny of Robert Mugabe now one of the great economic basket cases of sub-saharan Africa four hundred years ago somewhere where you would actually quite willingly invest your money if you were a London capitalist so it's a combination of global security and a relatively even distribution of capital which I argue and this is that's the most controversial argument of all was on balance good not just for the British economy but for the world economy now in in distinguishing the British Empire from America's global power today you also emphasized the that the flow of both people and and capital was out so to speak to the provinces whereas that's not the case with the United States today that the people are coming to the United States and the u.s. is borrowing very heavily yes I think if it wants to understand the difference between British Parra century ago and American parts today one would want to emphasize these if you like deficits manpower deficits and capital or current account deficits British powers was based fundamentally on the export not just of capital but of people as you just said I mean 20 plus million people leave the British Isles and this great explosion of human migration and that's why the British Empire Trump's the French Empire it's white trumps the Dutch Empire it really Trump's the Spanish Empire no other European country has this kind of surplus manpower willing to go from very often the Celtic periphery to very remote port to dangerous countries and stay there and settle them so the fact that the u.s. today is not exporting people in fact Americans are quite reluctant to go abroad even for relatively short business trips as far as I can see means that it doesn't have people on the ground in the way that in the way that the British Empire did I mean today they're they're maybe three and a half million Americans who actually are resident abroad and most of them live in either Canada Mexico or Western Europe which aren't really the kind of key if you like France and the great war against terror they're hardly any Americans who live in the Middle East outside Israel hardly any live in sub-saharan Africa so it is an empire without settlers today's American Empire and that necessarily makes it a less I think a less powerful Empire now you you are in your book the cache Nexus were critical of the United States I could say and in fact you you basically I think in your conclusion fault the United States because like the British in the 19th century it had put this this these four dimensions that you had identified earlier in in your discussion of the build-up of state power it had put all that together in a way but but somehow was almost cowardly in and that's my word you had a word that was fairly strong in assuming the responsibility that went with what that power allowed it to do with the responsibility talk a little about that well the book was written in the later of Clinton years it was a pre 911 book mm-hmm and at that time the the thing that most preoccupied me I had begun teaching in New York and was very strong about this was the extent to which Americans regarded themselves as living on a more or less separate planet from the rest of us I used to tease my students by calling at Planet Nasdaq because it seemed it seemed really to be quite distinct from the rest of the world that their preoccupations with the stock market and indeed their preoccupations with with American life more or less excluded interest in let us say Rwanda it had made it extremely difficult to interest Americans although they ultimately did accept their responsibilities in the Balkans so my my anxiety in the late 1990s and going into 2000 was that here we had globalization big time extraordinary economic change going on in the world integration of markets unseen in a hundred years bars the dominant power in the world was not willing to underwrite this with any kind of political structures it was in a sense the lowering large past the world to to descend into at best at best a kind of organized chaos and I I argued at the end of the book that what was most wrong with the world there in the year 2000 was that we had globalization but the world superpower was talking about a missile defense shield as if the future lay in retreating into some huge electronic plant or shell and I explicitly said in the last chapter of the book that what the US should be doing was to use its enormous material resources in vast wealth to increase its military capability and to get rid of rogue regimes including I specifically mentioned I also mentioned mimosa which is Serbia I couldn't really have predicted that so swiftly after the publication of the book events would unfold that made those things happen one of the other things I said in the book was that the US was kidding itself and that a major terrorist attack was quite likely to happen in an American city so that happened within about six or seven months of the book's publication in the US and after that as buildings to be spelt how's everything changed administration which had narrowly been elected on an anti interventionist almost isolationist campaign became the most interventionist administration we've seen since the 1960s so things which at the cash Nexus have seemed tremendously reckless and rash I was pilloried by some American reviewers for suggesting that the US should engage in regime change against countries like Iraq on our government policy quite surprising meaning as a historian what what do you see as enduring qualities of the United States or characteristics that will deter it from assuming this new role even though clearly the Bush administration has moved further along the path of assuming responsibility for global security two things I'll emphasize what is the Republican Constitution I mean the u.s. is designed not to produce emperors it's designed to produce no one charismatic leaders as president as top field pointed out Americans always lament to me particularly in university towns that their president isn't a towering figure and I say the whole idea of the Constitution is to keep towering figures out of the White House what do you want so part of the point is the republican constitution it's not really designed to abuse emperors and to run an empire and i think it's it's it's very clear that what congress tends to tends to represent very accurately is the desire of a great many Americans particularly those who don't live in the in the major policymaking cities to keep out of nasty places like Iraq to keep out of nasty places like Afghanistan point one it's a constitutional issue republics only really become empires when they become empires the Roman case is of course very instructive here it took about four hundred years after the republican constitution was introduced in Rome for Caesars across the Rubicon and the Constitution to be changed so we have a long way to go yet we're about half way if you like in American history from from Republic to Empire but the second point I think is that Americans think that they're an anti-imperialist Society I think that historically since I suppose 1776 they've stood for resistance to Empire this is a very widely held theory I guess it comes from high school history it's absolute rubbish because in fact from the very outset the United States babe just like an empire expanding over the entire North American continent and then beyond the shores of that continent but I think partly since Vietnam Americans have rewritten their own history to say oh we don't do Empire we never have done anymore and this is a mantra that all American politicians will will in incant and it's something that's very widely believed so part of the problem is the Constitution but the other problem is almost a mental state Americans are in denial about the fact that they are an empire they just don't want to face that fact because it has too many bad associations with the great debacle of Vietnam and one of the symptoms of that is the notion that there cannot be one American life lost in an external intervention we've moved away from that somewhat but it is still a kind of a dominant thought about our behavior in the world which may come back to haunt the president and Iraq as the casualties mount is it very striking to make this comparison I've been working on this because the next book I want to to produce which will be published next year is about American Empire would be called Colossus and I thought I would just look at this this bodycam story because it's so clearly crucial it's pretty striking is that it took around about 30 to 40 thousand killed in action in Vietnam to cause public approval of the waterfall by 20% and then that took about three years we've seen a 20% drop plus in approval for the war in Iraq and actually less than four hundred four hundred American troops have been killed in Iraq and only about two thirds of them have been killed in action so in fact the Vietnam syndrome is worse as far as I can see in 2003 then it ever was in the mid 1960s and that is a serious problem for for a would-be empire it's very very hard to make a success of an undertaking like the one the u.s. embarked on in Iraq this year if the public regards even 350 American service personnel dead as being an excessive price in a timeframe as short as six months and the fantastic the unrealistic expectations that seem to me to lie behind this this public reaction are a big big problem and it does make me very pessimistic because it seems to me to make a premature withdrawal of the u.s. from Iraq almost inevitable now you're suggesting in a new article in the national interest that another Achilles heel is back to debt and the u.s. inability to do something about the debt that it's growing in and here you're saying it it's not that wars cost a lot or the Paul Kennedy wasn't right that that we would be stretched too far by Oh military expenditures that has been totally disproved but it's really handling the domestic fiscal budget and the debt owed to retirees to to citizens for medical coverage and so on is just sort of creating a level of fiscal irresponsibility that that could lead to disaster it's it's extraordinary that if you go back to late 1980s Paul Kennedy was arguing that the Imperial overstretch would overtake the US but in truth America's overseas military commitments have been getting cheaper and cheaper and and you still have a defense budget which is roughly half in relation to gross domestic product what it was in the Cold War and the cost of the entire reconstruction budget that the president has requested for Iraq and Afghanistan is 0.8 percent of u.s. GDP I mean it's not big money although headline writers in The New York Times would love you to believe that this was the end of of American solvency these are not the problems it's really actually reading that's mounting up in the American welfare state that spells what I would call a kind of over stretch at home in the coming years as the so-called baby boomer generation retires the system of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid is going to be stretched very very severely and there's some very very interesting calculations been done by American economists including my co-author Larry Kotlikoff at Boston University let's show a widening I really rather terrifyingly large gap between the revenues of the federal government and its projected expenditures and these numbers dwarfed the cost of nation-building in Iraq and when we're talking about a long term gap between expenditure and revenue of 45 trillion dollars and none of that has to do with with virtually none that has to do with nation-building nearly all of it has to do with domestic welfare programs so look we started on this intellectual odyssey in Glasgow with Tolstoy we went into history but now we've really come to policy so I guess the the final question is what can history contribute to to the policy debate that we have today a lot I mean one of the things that's most striking about coming into the United States is the relative lack of of historical awareness among policy makers decisions are based on a very small amount of American history there is virtually no reference to the history of any other country now you would have thought perhaps at least I thought that if you're in the business of invading Iraq it might be worth taking a look at the previous attempts to invade and transform the institutions of Iraq and we've infected I say we I mean the British have invaded Iraq three times in the last hundred years and we undertook a very radical attempt over all its institutions after the first world war i find no discussion I found when I came to New York at the beginning of the war no discussion of this issue whatsoever all one gets is a caricature of rushman of recent American history that goes something like this Vietnam was terrible we mustn't do that again and and that's that's it some people say we mustn't do it again by never intervening in another foreign country and other people say we must not do it again we must make sure that when we intervene we do it right and it's a tremendously unsophisticated debate if America is in the business of empire and I think it is whatever name you give to this this policy then you have to learn from the history of other empires it's simply not possible to talk any longer in terms of American exceptionalism and to pretend that comparative history is something for the Europeans to do Americans need to realize that what they're doing has a long long history and the idea of transforming Mesopotamia institution and politically is not something that was dreamt up in the White House in the 1990s by by Cheney and Rumsfeld it's something that is deep deep historical antecedents so although my interest is history and I see policy as as something really for policy makers my my principle interest and it's become much more powerful since I've been in the States has been to make policymakers aware of the historical dimensions of the problems that they face and how finally for the final question how would you advise students to prepare for the future where we're clearly America is going to have this important role is is going to be well I guess a reluctant Empire how should they prepare think about preparing well when students particularly undergraduates come to me and say well what should I be doing one important piece of advice I I give them this is to think about what languages they should learn because powerful of the English language is that will never be a time in the whole world speaks one language there will never be a time when there is only one amp in the sense that but the the future of not only of the world but of historical study is a future in which the weight of Asia grows and perhaps the relative weight of Europe declines now back in the 1980s when I was a student I took a decision to learn German because Germany still seemed to be a big deal sitting in in Oxford trying to work out what to research learning German and living in Germany and studying German history seemed like an extremely shrewd strategic move and I don't think it was a bad move but now I wouldn't advise a student to do that I say there's a choice you can learn Chinese or you can learn Arabic but you have to choose one and perhaps one day I love a student so brilliant that they can do both but but these are these are much more difficult languages than German so it's it's a more difficult world we inhabit today but the most important thing particularly for American students is to recognize that it isn't a unipolar world it was never going to be and the most important thing for a successful Empire is to understand the other empires kneel on that note I'll thank you very much for joining us today for this fascinating conversation about your intellectual Odyssey thank you thank you very and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

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Keywords: Britain, history, international, politics, United, States

Id: DtEwupxygBo

Length: 56min 47sec (3407 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2008