First appeared in the Boston Globe.
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/qa_with_niall_ferguson
WHEN THE Glasgow-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and I
got together in his office last week, he asked if he might prepare tea before
we launched into a discussion of his new book, "The War of the World:
Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West."
Gracious as the offer was, in England, where Ferguson, 42,
spends part of the year as an Oxford research fellow (he's also a columnist for
the Daily Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times), he is known less for his
disarmingly good manners than for inciting controversy. In "The Pity of
War: Explaining World War I" (1998), he proposed that the 20th century
would have been less murderous had Germany won the First World War--a thesis that could easily irk an
Englishman. In "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire"
(2004), and in numerous newspaper pieces, he challenges Americans to rethink
their place in the world.
