Why the West Grew Rich and the Rest Did Not, or How the Present Shapes Our Views of the Past

Abstract

‘What makes a nation is the past’, wrote Eric Hobsbawm (1992: 3), ‘what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it’. Because historiography has always been so mixed up in politics, historians writing about nationalism ‘cannot but make a politically or ideologically explosive intervention’. A prominent recent example of such an explosive intervention is Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power. ‘Watching my three children grow up’, writes Ferguson (p. xix), ‘I had the uneasy feeling that they were learning less history than I had learned at their age, . . . because they had bad history books and even worse examinations’. Children, he said, should be taught that the Big Story of the last 500 years is the rise of Western domination of the world. Ferguson’s book (and the accompanying BBC/Channel 4 television series) sets out to do this, being designed ‘so that 17-years-olds will get a lot of history in a very digestible way, and be able to relate to it’ (see Porter, 2011). Ferguson’s book has created quite a stir (e.g. Bromwich, 2011; Porter, 2011), which escalated when Ferguson chose to publicly respond to Pankaj