Niall Ferguson: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think is the empirical or historical view that you hold — and maybe others do not — that makes you so much less anti-Victorian than Keynes or many, many others, including the woke of today? Well, my heretical position — and it’s been my view for at least 20 years — is that the benefits of the British Empire outweighed the costs. If one does a cost-benefit analysis of British imperialism, one comes to the conclusion — if one is in any way rigorous about it — that it was a remarkably benign empire compared with other available empires. And the counterfactual is crucial here because those people on the left who make a living out of comparing the empire to the Third Reich are just not being rigorous. They’re committing category errors, and more importantly, they’re not positing realistic counterfactuals. Empire is a book that you couldn’t write today. I don’t think you could publish that book today. Certainly, if you tried to, you’d encounter all kinds of pushback. Bruce Gilley’s article that got unpublished basically makes the argument of that book. My only regret when I read Gilley’s article was that he didn’t cite it. The basic argument of Empire is an economic one. It is that if you think about what the empire became in the 19th century, it became an empire of liberalism, an empire of free trade, an empire of free migration, of free capital movement. It was also an empire that turned away from slavery before others did. So the argument of the book was that, compared with the available alternatives, including indigenous empires — because that was the alternative — the British Empire was a very positive force in the 19th and even more positive force in the 20th century. This is a deeply unfashionable view. It has made me a hate figure for the academic left because, in the last 20 years, it has become mandatory to regard imperialism as an unmitigated evil, to dismiss economic cost-benefit arguments, to ignore counterfactual rigor, and just to engage in a massive act of condescension to the past, and this is the opposite of what Collingwood had in mind. Collingwood’s idea was that we should reconstruct past thought faithfully and juxtapose it. The modern historical ethos is to go back with our value system and condescend to the past and regard it as a blinding insight of scholarship that people in the past were racists or, for that matter, sexists. I can see that the British Empire was much better for Singapore, much better for Hong Kong, at least after some point, better for places like Barbados. But if I look at India — post-independence India, even with very poor economic policy — it seems to have higher economic growth rates than it did under empire. It seems that under empire, just very, very little was invested in public-goods provision.…

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