After nearly fifteen years of giving undergraduate tutorials and supervisions at Oxford and Cambridge, I approached the challenge of teaching large classes of American graduates with apprehension. It was a relief to find that the experience was not merely painless but pleasurable. Sergio Fonseca and Gopal Tampi did sterling work as my first teaching assistants at Stern. But with such excellent students my duties were very far from burdensome. I should like to thank all those who took my classes; I learned as much from them as they from me. This is an appropriate place, too, for an expression of gratitude to President John Sexton, a truly charismatic pedagogue.
One thing I have come to understand about American academic institutions is that they owe much of their vitality to the continuing involvement of alumni in their affairs. Two in particular gave me both generous support and friendship during my time in New York: William Berkley and John Herzog. To them and their wives, Marjorie and Diana, I shall always be grateful. It was John and Diana who endowed the chair in financial history of which I am the first occupant. To them, by way of thanks, I dedicate this book.
Thanks are also due to the many people who simply made me feel welcome as a new boy in New York—in particular, Martha Bayona, Mike Campisi, Jimmy Casella, Cesar Coronado, Joseph Giordano, Phil Greene, Jorge Lujo, Saleh Muhammed, Hector Rivera, Neville Rodriguez and Giovanni di Salvo.
Last year I was also fortunate to become associated with one of the great American centers of historical research: the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I would like to thank the director and fellows of the Hoover Institution for electing me to a senior fellowship. They and all the staff at Hoover gave me a wonderfully warm welcome to California last fall—the first, I trust, of many.
A further institutional debt of gratitude is to my alma mater, Oxford University, which made me a visiting professor, so that I did not wholly vanish from my old haunts last year. I should also like to thank the principal and fellows of Jesus College, Oxford, for electing me to a senior research fellowship, and the master and fellows of Oriel College, for providing me with a study during my visits to Oxford. I owe a particular debt to Jeremy Catto. I have also been extremely fortunate to have had an Oxonian research assistant, the superb Ameet Gill.
Some of the material in this book had its genesis in journalism. Among the editors who showed me the ropes of American newspaper writing, I should like to thank Anne Burrowclough, Erich Eichman, Tony Emerson, Nikolas Gvosdev, Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic, Dean Robinson, Gideon Rose, Allison Silver, Robert Silvers, Zofia Smardz, Tunku Varadarajan, Michael Young and Fareed Zakaria. Thanks also to George Ames, Ric Burns, Peter Kavanagh, Brian Lehrer, Kevin Lucey, Tom Moroney, Peter Robinson and Geoffrey Wawro for some memorable discussions “on air.”
Sections of Chapter 3 first appeared as “Clashing Civilizations or Mad Mullahs: The United States Between Informal and Formal Empire” in The Age of Terror, edited by Strobe Talbott (Basic Books, 2001). Sections of Chapter 5 were published as “The British Empire and Globalization” in Historically Speaking. Sections of Chapter 6 were first published as “The Empire Slinks Back” in The New York Times Magazine and “True Lies” in The New Republic. Finally, sections of Chapter 8 were coauthored by Laurence Kodikoff and appeared as “Going Critical: The Consequences of American Fiscal Overstretch” in the fall 2003 issue of The National Interest. I am grateful to all those journals for allowing me to reprint the passages in question.
Other parts of the book have been improved by being read in draft by others. Richard Cooper spotted numerous flaws in a draft of the introduction. Eric Rauchway kindly cast his eye over the earlier chapters and helped to improve my freshman-level American history. Chapter 4 owed much to the friendship and counsel of Diego Arria. Judith Brown offered invaluable suggestions for Chapter 6. Chapter 7 was read in draft and much improved by my friends Timothy Garton Ash of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Martin Thomas at the Bank of England. Chapter 8 was significantly reshaped in light of comments by David Hale and Deirdre McCloskey on an earlier version delivered as a lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival, as well as conversations with Ronald McKinnon at Stanford.
Many others deserve thanks for having read and commented on drafts, for having listened and responded to seminar papers or for having proffered hospitality during the writing of the book. My gratitude to Graham Allison, Anne Applebaum, Chris Bassford, Max Boot, Amy Chua, Gordon Cravitz, Larry Diamond, Gerald Dorfman, Maureen Dowd, Michael Edelstein, Frank and Ronita Egger, Gerry and Norma Feldman, Marc Flandreau, Ben and Barbara Friedman, Andrew and Barbara Gundlach, John Hall, Patrick Hatcher, Paul Heinbecker, Michael Ignatieff, Harold James, Robert Kagan, Harry Kreisler, Melvyn Leffler, Peter Lindert, Eileen Mackevich, Charles Maier, Norman Naimark, Joseph Nye, Patrick O’Brien, Kevin O’Rourke, Lynn and Evelyn de Rothschild, Simon Schama, Moritz Schularick, Peter Schwartz, Zach Shore, Radek Sikorski, Lawrence Summers, Giuseppe Tattara, Alan M. Taylor, Mike Tomz, Marc Weidenmier, Barry Weingast, James Wolfensohn, Ngaire Woods and Minky Worden.
The incomparable Andrew Wylie and his excellent team at the Wylie Agency have expertly managed my Atlantic crossing as an author. At The Penguin Press in New York, I would like to thank Ann Godoff and my editor, Scott Moyers, whose critical reading of early drafts much improved the finished article. Equally astute were the suggestions for deletion and addition made by his counterpart at Penguin in London, Simon Winder. An author could not wish for better editors. Thanks are also due to Anthony Forbes-Watson, Helen Fraser and Stefan McGrath, not forgetting my copy editor, Pearl Hanig, Chloe Campbell, Sarah Christie, Sophie Fels, Rosie Glaisher, Rachel Rokicki and the many other indispensable Penguin employees whom the author of a book never gets to meet but nevertheless depends upon.
From its inception Colossus was intended to accompany a British television documentary and I should like to thank Janice Hadlow and Hamish Mykura at Channel 4 for their encouragement; as well as Denys Blakeway and the wonderful production team assembled by Blakeway Productions: Russell Barnes, Tim Cragg, Melanie Fall, Kate Macky and Ali Schilling. Thanks also to Kassem Derghan, Reyath Elibrahim, Mathias Haentjes, and Nguyen Hu Cuong.
But my biggest debt is to my wife, Susan, and our children, Felix, Freya and Lachlan, whom I have neglected unforgivably in order to write this book but who are, nevertheless, its main source of inspiration.
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First published in the United Stares of America by The Penguin Press New York 2004
Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Allen Lane
Published with a new Preface in Penguin Books 2005
Copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2004, 2005
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The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-24-195872-8
* Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
*The conventional wisdom has it that democratization was bound to succeed in postwar Germany because German society was highly advanced and homogeneous and there was a clear memory of how democracy worked from the 1920s. Such comparisons overlook the extent to which the Third Reich had revolutionized German political culture with one of the most extreme ideologies in all history. Hitler’s Germany was a rogue regime far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Only with the benefit of hindsight does its transformation into a stable Western democracy look easy.
*The ostensible reason for the failure of the Brussels summit was the refusal of Spain and Poland to accept the relative dilution of their influence on the Council of Ministers implied by the proposed new rules on qualified majority voting. The Nice system suits them better.
Colossus Page 48