Niall Ferguson's Imperial Passion

Abstract

The defining moment of the six-part Channel 4 series on the History of the British 'Empire' written and presented by the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson comes towards the end of the last episode. Ferguson is discussing the Japanese occupation of Singapore and the capture of British prisoners of war during the Second World War. He is filmed walking across the bridge over the Kwae-Yoi River in Thailand, immortalized in David Lean's largely fictional film. The scene then shifts eighty kilometres north to the Hellfire Pass, which underfed and overworked allied prisoners of war excavated by hand and hammer. The story is told in detail. The viewer is drawn into the narrative by first-hand accounts of the horror of prisoner life. Passages from the diaries of two prisoners of war are read by an actor, and the vignette then concludes with Ferguson reading aloud on location. His voice almost breaking with pathos, he describes Hellfire Pass as 'a place of the most intense, unimaginable human suffering'. Ferguson then tries to place this local narrative in a broader context. His tone is solemn and preacherly. The war in Asia, he suggests, was 'the Empire's passion, its moment on the cross'. The British empire was sacrificed to save the world from the 'truly evil' empires of Hitler and Hirohito. If Ferguson's 'Empire' has an argument, it is encapsulated in this moment. Ferguson wishes to convince us that the British empire was a force for good. The empire had its darker side; Ferguson's story is not only one of imperial glory. But at the beginning of the first episode, he suggests that the British empire spread capitalist economics, Protestant Christianity, 'Western norms of law, order and government' and the English language across the globe. This quartet, he argues, are the 'pillars of the modern world'. If, like Ferguson, 'you like the modern world, you can't deny its debt to the British empire' he tells us. These attributes of modern civilization were threatened by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Through the sacrifice of the British empire and the support of American soldiers those attributes endured to survive to this day. Ferguson argues that the imperial baton passed to the United States during the Second World War. Americans have succeeded the British as the defenders of modernity across the globe. With scarcely a hint of critique or irony, the final programme moves from South-East Asia to its discussion of the American role in the war with the voice of an newsreel announcer 'America's hopes, America's prayers go with the men fighting for civilization and freedom'. Astonishingly, the series concludes with Ferguson echoing Rudyard Kipling's call to the United States to 'take up the White man's burden' (Kipling's poem is quoted), and confidently assert its