Charles Martineau

I would like to write a short post on three doc­u­men­taries by my favorite his­to­rian Niall Fer­gu­son from Har­vardUni­ver­sity. Fer­gu­son is not like any other his­to­rian. First of all, he is really enter­tain­ing and does not believe at study­ing the past to pre­dict the future. With PBS & Chan­nel 4; Niall Fer­gu­son has released 3 doc­u­men­taries, each con­tain­ing 6 parts (47min each). Below are the titles of each doc­u­men­tary and part 1 for all three doc­u­men­tary (free online via PBS or Youtube) with a descrip­tion pulled for the books:

Why, if life was improv­ing so rapidly for so many peo­ple at the dawn of the 20th cen­tury, were the next hun­dred years full of bru­tal con­flict? Fer­gu­son (Colos­sus) has a rel­a­tively sim­ple answer: eth­nic unrest is prone to break out dur­ing peri­ods of eco­nomic volatility—booms as well as busts. When they take place in or near areas of impe­r­ial decline or tran­si­tion, the unrest is more likely to esca­late into full-scale con­flict. This com­pelling the­ory is applic­a­ble to the Armen­ian geno­cide in Turkey, the slaugh­ter of the Tut­sis in Rwanda or the “eth­nic cleans­ing” per­pe­trated against Bosni­ans, but the over­whelm­ing major­ity of Ferguson’s analy­sis is devoted to the two world wars and the fate of the Jews in Ger­many and east­ern Europe. His richly informed analy­sis over­turns many basic assump­tions. For exam­ple, he argues that England’s appease­ment of Hitler in 1938 didn’t lead to WWII, but was a mis­in­formed response to a war that had started as early as 1935. But with Ferguson’s claims about “the descent of the West” and the smaller wars in the lat­ter half of the cen­tury tucked away into a com­par­a­tively brief epi­logue, his thought­ful study falls short of its epic promise.

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, read­ies, the where­withal: Call it what you like, it mat­ters. To Chris­tians, love of it is the root of all evil. To gen­er­als, it’s the sinews of war. To rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Fer­gu­son shows that finance is in fact the foun­da­tion of human progress. What’s more, he reveals finan­cial his­tory as the essen­tial back­story behind all history. Through Ferguson’s expert lens famil­iar his­tor­i­cal land­marks appear in a new and sharper finan­cial focus. Sud­denly, the civ­i­liza­tion of the Renais­sance looks very dif­fer­ent: a boom in the mar­ket for art and archi­tec­ture made pos­si­ble when Ital­ian bankers adopted Ara­bic math­e­mat­ics. The rise of the Dutch repub­lic is rein­ter­preted as the tri­umph of the world’s first mod­ern bond mar­ket over insol­vent Hab­s­burg abso­lutism. And the ori­gins of the French Rev­o­lu­tion are traced back to a stock mar­ket bub­ble caused by a con­victed Scot mur­derer. With the clar­ity and verve for which he is known, Fer­gu­son elu­ci­dates key finan­cial insti­tu­tions and con­cepts by show­ing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the dif­fer­ence between a stock and a bond? Why buy insur­ance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do? This is his­tory for the present. Fer­gu­son trav­els to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free mar­ket can’t pro­vide ade­quate pro­tec­tion against cat­a­stro­phe. He delves into the ori­gins of the sub­prime mort­gage crisis.Perhaps most impor­tant, The Ascent of Money doc­u­ments how a new finan­cial rev­o­lu­tion is pro­pelling the world’s biggest coun­tries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a sin­gle generation–an eco­nomic trans­for­ma­tion unprece­dented in human history.Yet the cen­tral les­son of the finan­cial his­tory is that sooner or later every bub­ble bursts–sooner or later the bear­ish sell­ers out­num­ber the bull­ish buy­ers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scrap­ing by or rolling in it, there’s never been a bet­ter time to under­stand the ascent of money.

f in the year 1411 you had been able to cir­cum­nav­i­gate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the daz­zling civil­i­sa­tions of the Orient. By con­trast, Eng­land would have struck you as a mis­er­able back­wa­ter rav­aged by plague, bad san­i­ta­tion and inces­sant war. The other quar­rel­some king­doms of West­ern Europe — Aragon, Castile, France, Por­tu­gal and Scot­land — would have seemed lit­tle better. The idea that the West would come to dom­i­nate the rest for most of the next half mil­len­nium would have struck you as wildly fan­ci­ful. And yet it happened. What was it about the civil­i­sa­tion of West­ern Europe that allowed it to trump the out­wardly supe­rior empires of the Orient? In Civ­i­liza­tion: The West and the Rest, Niall Fer­gu­son argues that the West devel­oped six “killer appli­ca­tions” that the rest lacked: com­pe­ti­tion, sci­ence, democ­racy, med­i­cine, con­sumerism and the work ethic, and takes read­ers on an extra­or­di­nary jour­ney around the globe with a defin­ing nar­ra­tive of mod­ern world history.