The Parthenon (Athens)

The Roman Forum (Rome)

The Supreme Court of the United States (Washington D.C.)

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident (from Latin: occidens "sunset, West"; as contrasted with the Orient), is a term referring to different nations depending on the context. There is no agreed upon definition about what all these nations have in common.^[1]

Though the term originally had a literal geographic meaning and contrasted Europe with the cultures of the Orient or Asia, today the term West does not imply geographic location, as most of Europe and Oceania, major components of the West, lie in the Eastern Hemisphere.^{[citation needed]}

The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, with the advent of Christianity. In the modern era, Western culture has been heavily influenced by the traditions of The Renaissance, The Protestant Reformation, The Enlightenment, and shaped by the expansive colonialism of the 16th-20th centuries. Its political usage was temporarily informed by a mutual antagonism with the Soviet bloc during the Cold War in the mid-to-late 20th Century (1945–1991).

In the contemporary cultural meaning, the Western World includes many countries of Europe as well as many countries of European colonial origin in the Americas and Oceania, such as the United States of America, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, etc. ^[2][3][4]

Introduction[link]

Western culture originated with Greece and Rome. Over time, their associated empires grew first to the east and south, conquering and absorbing many older great civilizations of the ancient Near East; later, they grew to the north and West to include Western Europe.

Historians, such as Carroll Quigley (Evolution of Civilizations), contend that Western Civilization was born around 400 AD, after the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire, leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. In either view, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the West experienced a period of considerable decline,^[5] known as the Middle Ages, which include the Dark Ages and the Crusades.

The knowledge of the ancient Western world was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab World,^[6] and mostly by the concurrent ascendency of the Islamic Golden Age.^[7] The Arab importation of both the Ancient and new technology through Arabs from the India and China to Renaissance Europe represented “one of the largest technology transfers in world history.”^[8][9]

Since the Renaissance, the West evolved beyond the influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Islamic world due to the Commercial,^[10] Scientific,^[11] and Industrial Revolutions,^[12] and the expansion of the Christian peoples of Western European empires, and particularly the globe-spanning empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. Generally speaking, the current consensus would locate the West, at the very least, in the cultures and peoples of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and a great part of Central and South America. There is debate among some as to whether Eastern Europe is in a category of its own. The argument supporting Eastern Europe being a part of the West is that Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Romania are now a part of the European Union, which mostly comprises Western countries. However, there are distinct cultural differences; the impact of Communism on these cultures in the 20th Century was great. Although geographically not located in Western Europe, Greece and Cyprus are usually considered a part of the Western World. This is partly due to political and economic reasons and partly due to Western culture having Greek roots. Some people^[who?] assume developed countries in Asia, such as Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, are a part of the Western world, because of their strong economic, political and military ties to Western Europe, NATO or the United States. However, while there are Western influences in their cultures, they nonetheless maintain largely different and distinctive cultures, religions (although Christianity is a major religion in South Korea), languages, customs, and worldviews that are products of their own indigenous development, rather than Western influences.

Japan and South Korea, in particular, are the only Asian members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and along with Taiwan one of three leading full democracies in East Asia, having a high standard of living and a high level of human development. However, having a high level of human development is not exclusive to the West. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore all have high income levels and high standards of living.

Western culture[link]

History of Western philosophy
Western philosophy
Pre-Socratic · Ancient Medieval · Renaissance · Modern Contemporary 16th · 17th · 18th · 19th · 20th Century
See also
Religious philosophy Christian · Jewish  · Islamic  · Hindu  · Buddhist
Eastern philosophy Babylonian · Indian · Iranian Chinese · Japanese · Korean
Western culture · Western world
v t e

The term "Western culture" is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies.

Specifically, Western culture may imply:

• a Biblical-Christian cultural influence in spiritual thinking, customs and either ethic or moral traditions, around Post-Classical Era.
• European cultural influences concerning artistic, musical, folkloric, ethic and oral traditions, whose themes have been further developed by Romanticism.
• a Graeco-Roman Classical and Renaissance cultural influence, concerning artistic, philosophic, literary, and legal themes and traditions, the cultural social effects of migration period and the heritages of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and other ethnic groups, as well as a tradition of rationalism in various spheres of life, developed by Hellenistic philosophy, Scholasticism, Humanisms, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.

The concept of Western culture is generally linked to the classical definition of the Western world. In this definition, Western culture is the set of literary, scientific, political, artistic and philosophical principles that set it apart from other civilizations. Much of this set of traditions and knowledge is collected in the Western canon.^[13]

The term has come to apply to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration or settlement, such as the Americas, and Australasia, and is not restricted to Europe.

Some tendencies that define modern Western societies are the existence of political pluralism, laicism, generalization of middle class, prominent subcultures or countercultures (such as New Age movements), increasing cultural syncretism resulting from globalization and human migration. The modern shape of these societies is strongly based upon the Industrial Revolution and the societies' associated social and environmental problems, such as class struggle and pollution, as well as reactions to them, such as syndicalism and environmentalism.

Historical divisions[link]

The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the Roman Empire.^[14] The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors.), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Western Europe was substantially cut off from the East where Byzantine Greek culture and Eastern Christianity became founding influences in the Arab/Muslim world and among the Eastern and Southern Slavic peoples. Roman Catholic Western and central Europe, as such, maintained a distinct identity particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived civilized world.

Use of the term West as a specific cultural and geopolitical term developed over the course of the Age of Exploration as Europe spread its culture to other parts of the world. In the past two centuries the term Western world has sometimes been used synonymously with Christian world because of the numerical dominance of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism compared to other Christian traditions, though this dominance is somewhat recent. As secularism rose in Europe and elsewhere during the 19th and 20th centuries, the term West came to take on less religious connotations and more political connotations, especially during the Cold War. Additionally, closer contacts between the West and Asia and other parts of the world in recent times have continued to cloud the use and meaning of the term.

Hellenic[link]

The Ancient Greek world, c. 550 BC

The Hellenic division between the barbarians and the Greeks contrasted in many societies the Greek-speaking culture of the Greek settlements around the Mediterranean to the surrounding non-Greek cultures. Herodotus considered the Persian Wars of the early 5th century BC a conflict of Europa versus Asia^{[citation needed]} (which he considered to be all land north and east of the Sea of Marmara, respectively)^{[citation needed]}. The terms "West" and "East" were not used by any Greek author to describe that conflict. The anachronistic application of those terms to that division entails a stark logical contradiction, given that, when the term "West" appeared, it was used in opposition to the Greeks and Greek-speaking culture.^{[citation needed]}

Western society traces its cultural origins to both Greek thought and Christian religion, thus following an evolution that began in ancient Greece, continued through the Roman Empire and, with the coming of Christianity (which has its origins in the Middle East), spread throughout Europe. The inherently "Greek" classical ideas of history (which one might easily say they invented) and art may, however, be considered almost inviolate in the West, as their original spread of influence survived the Hellenic period of Roman classical antiquity, The Dark Ages, its resurgence during the Western Renaissance, and has managed somehow to keep and exert its pervasive influence down into the present age, with every expectation^{[by whom?]} of it continuing to dominate any secular Western cultural developments.

The major Hellenistic realms; the Ptolemaic kingdom (dark blue); the Seleucid empire (yellow); Macedon (green) and Epirus (pink).

However, the conquest of the Western parts of the Roman Empire by Germanic peoples and the subsequent dominance by the Western Christian Papacy (which held combined political and spiritual authority, a state of affairs absent from Greek civilization in all its stages), resulted in a rupture of the previously existing ties between the Latin West and Greek thought,^[15] including Christian Greek thought. The Great Schism and the Fourth Crusade confirmed this deviation.

On the other hand, the Modern West, emerging after the Renaissance as a new civilization, has been greatly influenced by (its own interpretation of) Greek thought, which was preserved in the Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic world during the Medieval West's Dark Ages and transmitted from there by emigration of Greek scholars, courtly marriages, and Latin translations. The Renaissance in the West emerged partly from currents within the Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

Roman Empire[link]

The Roman Empire under Trajan in 117 AD.

Ancient Rome (510 BC-AD 476) was a civilization that grew from a city-state founded on the Italian Peninsula about the 9th century BC to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. In its 12-century existence, Roman civilization shifted from a monarchy, to a republic, to an autocratic empire. It came to dominate Western Europe, the Balkans and the entire area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea through conquest using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by giving Roman privileges and eventually citizenship to the whole empire. Nonetheless, despite its great legacy, a number of factors led to the eventual decline of the Roman Empire.

The Western Roman Empire eventually broke into several kingdoms in the 5th century due to civil wars, corruption, and devastating Germanic invasions from such tribes as the Goths, the Franks and the Vandals.

The Eastern Roman Empire, governed from Constantinople, is usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire after 476, the traditional date for the "fall of the Western Roman Empire" and for the subsequent onset of the Early Middle Ages. The Eastern Roman Empire survived the fall of the West, and protected Roman legal and cultural traditions, combining them with Greek and Christian elements, for another thousand years.

The Roman Empire succeeded the about 500 year-old Roman Republic (510 BC - 1st century BC), which had been weakened by the conflict between Gaius Marius and Sulla and the civil war of Julius Caesar against Pompey and Marcus Brutus. During these struggles hundreds of senators were killed, and the Roman Senate had been refilled with loyalists of the First Triumvirate and later those of the Second Triumvirate.

Several dates are commonly proposed to mark the transition from Republic to Empire, including the date of Julius Caesar's appointment as perpetual roman dictator (44 BC), the victory of Caesar's heir Octavian at the Battle of Actium (September 2, 31 BC), and the Roman Senate's granting to Octavian the honorific Augustus. (January 16, 27 BC). Octavian/Augustus officially proclaimed that he had saved the Roman Republic and carefully disguised his power under republican forms: Consuls continued to be elected, tribunes of the plebeians continued to offer legislation, and senators still debated in the Roman Curia. However, it was Octavian who influenced everything and controlled the final decisions, and in final analysis, had the legions to back him up, if it became necessary.

Roman expansion began long before the state was changed into an empire and reached its zenith under emperor Trajan with the conquest of Dacia in AD 106. During this territorial peak, the Roman Empire controlled about 5 900 000 km² (2,300,000 sq.mi.) of land surface and had a population of 100 million. From the time of Caesar to the Fall of the Western Empire, Rome dominated Western Eurasia and the Mediterranean, comprising the majority of its population. Ancient Rome has contributed greatly to the development of law, war, art, literature, architecture, technology and language in the Western world, and its history continues to have a major influence on the world today.

The Roman Empire is where the idea of the "West" began to emerge. Due to Rome's central location at the heart of the Empire, "West" and "East" were terms used to denote provinces West and east of the capital itself. Therefore, Iberia (Portugal and Spain), Gaul (France), Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) and Britannia were all part of the "West", while Greece, Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt were part of the "East." Italy itself was considered central, until the reforms of Diocletian, when the idea of formally dividing the Empire into true Eastern and Western halves was introduced.

In 395, the Roman Empire formally split into a Western Roman Empire and an Eastern one, each with their own emperors, capitals, and governments, although ostensibly they still belonged to one formal Empire. The dissolution of the Western half (nominally in 476, but in truth a long process that ended by 500) left only the Eastern Empire alive. For centuries, the East continued to call themselves Eastern Romans, while the West began to think in terms of Latins (those living in the old Western Empire) and Greeks (those inside the Roman remnant to the east).

Christian schism[link]

In the early 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great established the city of Constantinople as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire included lands east of the Adriatic Sea and bordering on the Eastern Mediterranean and parts of the Black Sea. These two divisions of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires were reflected in the administration of the Christian Church, with Rome and Constantinople debating and arguing over whether either city was the capital of Christianity.

As the Eastern (orthodox) and Western (firstly Catholic, then Protestant as well) churches spread their influence, the line between Eastern and Western Christianity was moving towards one another until it was fully set at the time of Lithuanian Christianisation. The border of Western/Eastern Christianity was moving and its movement was defined by the existence of the Byzantine empire and the fluctuating power and influence of the church in Rome. Now its border is East of Estonian border, via the very West of Ukraine until Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, not to mention enclaves in many countries such as Romania, Northern Albania etc. From Middle Ages until late 20th century religion was decreasingly important in Europe therefore the religious division followed a cultural divide and vice versa.

Huntington argued that this cultural division still existed during the Cold War as the approximate Western boundary of those countries that were allied with the Soviet Union. Others have fiercely criticized these views arguing they confuse the Eastern Roman Empire with Russia, especially considering the fact that the country that had the most historical roots in Byzantium, Greece, expelled communists and was allied with the West during the Cold War. Still, Russia accepted Eastern Christianity from the Byzantine Empire (by the Patriarch of Constantinople: Photios I) linking Russia very close to the Eastern Roman Empire world. Later on, in 16th century Russia created own religious centre in Moscow. Religion survived in Russia beside severe persecution carrying values alternative to the communist ideology.

Worldwide distribution of Christianity and other religions

Under Charlemagne, the Franks established an empire that was recognized as the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope in Rome, offending the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. The crowning of the Emperor by the Pope led to the assumption that the highest power was the papal hierarchy, establishing, until the Protestant Reformation, the civilization of West Christendom. The Latin Rite Christian Church of Western and Central Europe headed by the Pope split with the eastern, Greek-speaking Patriarchates during the Great Schism. Meanwhile, the extent of each expanded, as British Isles, Germanic peoples, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, Baltic peoples and the other non-Christian lands of the northWest were converted by the West Church, while Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, lands of Belarus, Caucasus and most of Ukraine were converted by the Eastern Church.

In this context, the Protestant reformation may be viewed as a schism within the Latin Church. Martin Luther, in the wake of precursors, broke with the pope and with the emperor, backed by many of the German princes. These changes were adopted by the Scandinavian kings. Later, the commoner Jean Cauvin (John Calvin) assumed the religio-political leadership in Geneva, a former ecclesiastical city whose prior ruler had been the bishop. The English King later improvised on the Lutheran model, but subsequently many Calvinist doctrines were adopted by popular dissenters, leading to the English Civil War.

Both royalists and dissenters colonized North America, eventually resulting in an independent United States of America.

Colonial "West"[link]

The Reformation, and consequent dissolution of West Christendom as even a theoretical unitary political body, resulted in the Thirty Years War. The war ended in the Peace of Westphalia, which enshrined the concept of the nation-state and the principle of absolute national sovereignty in international law.

These concepts of a world of nation-states, coupled with the ideologies of the Enlightenment, the coming of modernity, the Scientific Revolution,^[16] and the Industrial Revolution,^[17] produced powerful political and economic institutions that have come to influence (or been imposed upon) most nations of the world today. Historians agree that the Industrial Revolution was one of the most important events in history.^[18]

This process of influence (and imposition) began with the voyages of discovery, colonization, conquest, and exploitation of Spain and Portugal; it continued with the rise of the Dutch East India Company, and the creation and expansion of the British and French colonial empires. Due to the reach of these empires, Western institutions expanded throughout the world. Even after demands for self-determination from subject peoples within Western empires were met with decolonization, these institutions persisted. One specific example was the requirement that post-colonial societies were made to form nation-states (in the Western tradition), which often created arbitrary boundaries and borders that did not necessarily represent a whole nation, people, or culture, and are often the cause of international conflicts and friction even to this day. Though the overt colonial era has passed, Western nations, as comparatively rich, well-armed, and culturally powerful states, still wield a large degree of influence throughout the world.

Although not part of Western colonization process proper, Western culture entered Japan in the so-called Meiji period (1868–1912). The traditional Japanese society was virtually overturned into a industrial and militarist power like Western countries such as the United Kingdom.

Cold War context[link]

During the Cold War, a new definition emerged. The Earth was divided into three "worlds". The First World, analogous in this context to what was called the West, was composed of NATO members and other countries aligned with the United States. The Second World was the Eastern bloc in the Soviet sphere of influence, including the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. It included some Eastern European countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now split into Czech Republic and Slovakia).

The Third World consisted of countries, many of which were unaligned with either, and important members included India and Yugoslavia (of which European countries Slovenia and Croatia); some include the People's Republic of China, though this is disputed,^{[citation needed]} as the People's Republic of China is communist, had friendly relations—at certain times—with the Soviet bloc, and had a significant degree of importance in global geopolitics. Some Third World countries aligned themselves with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led Eastern bloc.

European trade blocs as of the late 1980s. EEC member states are marked in blue, EFTA – green, and Comecon – red.

East and West in 1980, as defined by the Cold War. The Cold War had divided Europe politically into East and West, with the Iron Curtain splitting Central Europe.

There were a number of countries which did not fit comfortably into this neat definition of partition, including Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and Ireland, which chose to be neutral. Finland was under the Soviet Union's military sphere of influence (see FCMA treaty) but remained neutral, was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact or Comecon but a member of the EFTA since 1986, and was West of the Iron Curtain. In 1955, when Austria again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remain neutral, but as a country to the West of the Iron Curtain, it was in the United States' sphere of influence. Spain did not join the NATO until 1982, towards the end of the Cold War and after the death of the authoritarian Franco.

Modern definitions[link]

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The exact scope of the Western world is somewhat subjective in nature, depending on whether cultural, economic, spiritual or political criteria are employed.

Many anthropologists, sociologists and historians oppose "the West and the Rest" in a categorical manner.^[19] The same has been done by Malthusian demographers with a sharp distinction between European and non-European family systems. Among anthropologists, this includes Durkheim, Dumont and Lévi-Strauss.^[19]

As the term "Western world" does not have a strict international definition, governments do not use the term in legislation of international treaties and instead rely on other definitions.

Ethnic / linguistic[link]

Indo-European languages.

The Western world is also considered to be the collection of nations, where Indo-European languages and cultures (primarily of Western European origin) are practiced and dominated. Ethnically speaking, it can refer to Germanic, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Baltic and Western Slavic peoples and most of their territories. It can also refer to some Southern Slavic (Slovenia and Croatia) territories.

Cultural[link]

See: Western culture

Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts. In addition, China's widely-used pinyin system employs the Latin alphabet.

From a cultural and sociological approach the Western world is defined as including all cultures that are directly derived from Western European cultures, i.e. Western Europe, the Americas (North and South America), Australia, New Zealand and Israel. Together these countries constitute Western society.^[2][3][4]

In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, in Western Europe and elsewhere. Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. However, while church attendance is in decline, most Westerners nominally identify themselves as Christians (e.g. 70% in the UK) and attend church on major occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. In the Americas Christianity continues to play an important societal role (though at least Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil, specially among the middle and upper classes, are experiencing processes of secularization similar to European ones).

The official religion of the United Kingdom and some Nordic countries is Christianity, even though the majority of European countries have no official religion. Despite this, Christianity, in its different forms, remains the largest faith in most Western countries. Thus another definition of Occident would include reference to this majority Christian content within the culture.

Due to the high influence of European culture in places like South Africa, it could be said that the country is Western or has achieved Westernization. Moreover, White South Africans of European origin make up about 9% of South Africa. Another 9% are of mixed race. Unlike Black South Africans who've maintained their own native languages, most mixed South Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language. Likewise, most Indian South Africans speak English natively today. Therefore, it can be argued that this collective 20% of native English and Afrikaans speakers (both European-derived) live in heavily Western influenced cultures. Similarly, whites and coloureds are over 10% of Namibia. They primarily speak Afrikaans and German as a first language. In addition to that, many Black South Africans and Namibians speak European languages, e.g. Afrikaans and English, fluently and are also considered native speakers of those languages.

Another country which the Westernness is debatable is Cape Verde because most of the population speaks either Portuguese or a Portuguese-based creole language called Cape Verdean Creole natively. Due to it being far off the coast of Western Africa and not having an indigenous population, many of the mainland Africans who moved there or who were brought there have assimilated into a Portuguese-based Western culture.

Modern political[link]

Enlargement of the European Union

  Current members (since 2007)

  Candidate countries

  Current enlargement agenda

Countries of the Western world are generally considered to share certain fundamental political ideologies, including those of liberal democracy, the rule of law, human rights and a high degree of gender equality (although there are notable exceptions, especially in foreign policy). Additionally countries with strong political and/or military ties to West and Central Europe, NATO and/or the United States, such as Japan, Israel and South Korea can be said to be Western in a political sense at least.

As such, this definition of the term "West" is not necessarily tied to the geographic sense of the word. A geographically Western nation such as Cuba is sometimes not considered politically Western due to its general rejection of liberal democracy, freedom of the press, and personal liberty.^{[citation needed]} Conversely, some Eastern nations, for example, Japan, India, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, could be considered politically Western, due to their adoption of liberal democratic political institutions similar in structure to those of the traditionally Western nations.

Economic[link]

World map by quartiles of Human Development Index in 2011.

Very High	Low
High	Data unavailable
Medium

Though the Cold War has ended, and some members of the former Eastern Bloc are making a general movement towards liberal democracy and other values held in common by the traditionally Western states, most of the former Soviet republics are not considered Western because of the small presence of social and political reform, as well as their obvious cultural, economic and political differences to what is known today as described by the term "The West" North America, West and Central Europe, Baltic states and Croatia, Australia and New Zealand.

The term "Western world" is often interchangeablebly used with the term First World stressing the difference between First World and the Third World or developing countries. This usage occurs despite the fact that many countries that may be geographically or culturally Western are developing countries. In fact, most of the Americas are developing countries, which make up a significant percentage of the West. It is also used despite many Developed countries not being Western (e.g. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan).

The existence of "The North" implies the existence of "The South", and the socio-economic divide between North and South. The term "the North" has in some contexts replaced earlier usage of the term "the West", particularly in the critical sense, as a more robust demarcation than the terms "West" and "East". The North provides some absolute geographical indicators for the location of wealthy countries, most of which are physically situated in the Northern Hemisphere, although, as most countries are located in the northern hemisphere in general, some have considered this distinction to be equally unhelpful.

The thirty high-income countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which include: Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Switzerland, the United States and the countries of the EU (except for: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Romania), are generally included in what used to be called "developed world", although the OECD includes three countries, namely Chile, Mexico and Turkey, that are not yet fully industrial countries, but newly industrialised countries. Although Andorra, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Malta, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, Singapore, Taiwan and Vatican City, are not members of the OECD, they might also be regarded as developed countries, because their high living standards, high per capita incomes, and their social, economical and political structure are quite similar to those of the high income OECD countries.

Other views[link]

A series of scholars of civilization, including Arnold J. Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber and Carroll Quigley have identified and analyzed "Western civilization" as one of the civilizations that have historically existed and still exist today. Toynbee entered into quite an expansive mode, including as candidates those countries or cultures who became so heavily influenced by the West as to adopt these borrowings into their very self-identity; carried to its limit, this would in practice include almost everyone within the West, in one way or another. In particular, Toynbee refers to the intelligentsia formed among the educated elite of countries impacted by the European expansion of centuries past. While often pointedly nationalist, these cultural and political leaders interacted within the West to such an extent as to change both themselves and the West.^[20]

Huntington's map of major civilizations,^[21] What constitutes Western civilization in his view is coloured dark blue.

Yet more recently, Samuel P. Huntington has taken a far more controversial approach, forging a political science hypothesis he labeled the "The Clash of Civilizations?" in a Foreign Affairs article and a book.^[22] According to Huntington's hypothesis, what he calls "conflicts between civilizations" will be the primary tensions of the 21st century world. In this hypothesis, the West is based on religion, as the countries of West and Central Europe, Baltic states and Croatia were historically influenced by the two forms of Western Christianity, namely Protestantism and Catholicism. Also, some Anglophone countries share these traits, e.g. Bermuda, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Australia and New Zealand, as well as the more heterogeneous United States and Canada.

Huntington's thesis, while influential, was by no means universally accepted; its supporters say that it explains modern conflicts, such as those in the former Yugoslavia. The thesis's detractors fear that by equating values like democracy with the concept of "Western civilization", it reinforces stereotypes that some perceive as being common within the West about non-traditionally Western societies that some may consider racist or xenophobic. Others believe that Huntington ignores the existence of non-Western democracies such as the East Asian and South-Central Asian democracies. As such, these detractors believe that it will serve to provoke and amplify conflict rather than illuminating a way to find an accommodating world order, or in particular cases a commonly agreed solution.

In Huntington's narrow thesis, the historically Eastern Orthodox nations of southeastern and Eastern Europe constitute a distinct "Euro-Asiatic civilization"; although European and mainly Christian (as well as notable Muslim influence and populations, particularly in the Balkans and southern/central Russia), these nations were not, in Huntington's view, shaped by the cultural influences of the Renaissance. The Renaissance did not affect Orthodox Eastern Europe due in part to the proximity of Ottoman domination, despite the decisive influence of Greek émigré scholars on the Renaissance.^[23]

Other views might be made regarding Eastern Europe.^[24]

A controversial theory of Huntington is that he considered the possibility of South America being a separate civilization from the West, but also mused that it might become a third part (the first two being North America and Europe) of the West in the future.^[25]

The theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin conceived of the West as the set of civilizations descended from the Nile Valley Civilization of Egypt.^[26]

Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said uses the term occident in his discussion of orientalism. According to his binary, the West, or Occident, created a romanticized vision of the East, or Orient, in order to justify colonial and imperialist intentions. This Occident-Orient binary is focused on the Western vision of the East instead of any truths about the East. His theories are rooted in Hegel's Master-slave dialectic: The Occident would not exist without the Orient and vice versa. Further, P writers created this irrational, feminine, weak "Other" to contrast with the rational, masculine, strong West because of a need to create a difference between the two that would justify imperialist ambitions, said influenced Indian-American theorist Homi K. Bhabha.

The term the "West" may also be used pejoratively by certain tendencies and especially critical of the influence of the traditional West, due to the history of most of the members of the traditional West being previously involved, at one time or another, in outright imperialism and colonialism. Some of these critics also claim that the traditional West has continued to engage in what might be viewed as modern implementations of imperialism and colonialism, such as neoliberalism and globalization. (It should be noted that many Westerners who subscribe to a positive view of the traditional West are also very critical of neoliberalism and globalization, for their allegedly negative effects on both the developed and developing world.)

Allegedly, definitions of the term "Western world" that some may consider "ethnocentric" are considered by some to be "constructed" around one or another Western culture. The British writer Rudyard Kipling wrote about this contrast: East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, expressing his belief that somebody from the West "can never understand the Asian cultures" as the latter "differ too much" from the Western cultures. Some may view this alleged incompatibility as a precursor to Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory.

Paradoxically, today Asia and Africa to varying degrees may be considered quasi-Western. Many East Asians and South Asians and Africans and others associate or even identify with the cosmopolitan cultures and international societies referred to sometimes as Western. Likewise, many in the West identify with a transcultural humanity, a notion often found in visions of the sacred.

From a very different perspective, it has also been argued that the idea of the West is, in part, a non-Western invention, deployed in the non-West to shape and define non-Western pathways through or against modernity.^[27]

See also[link]

• Americanization
• Anglicisation
• Anglosphere
• Europeanisation
• Indo-European languages
• Lusomundo
• Russification
• Western mystery tradition
• Westernisation

Organisations

• Group of Eight
• Western European and Others Group

Maps[link]

• 

  Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts

• 

  Legal Systems of the World

• 

  Religions of the world, mapped by distribution.

• 

  Map showing relative degree of religiosity by country. Based on a 2006-2008 worldwide survey by Gallup.

• 

  Human language families

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Ankerl, Guy (2000). Coexisting contemporary civilizations : Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and West. INU societal research. Vol.1:. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 2-88155-004-5. 
• Bavaj, Riccardo: "The West": A Conceptual Exploration , European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: November 28, 2011.
• Duchesne, Ricardo (2011): The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Vol. 28, Leiden and Boston: Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-19248-5
• J.F.C. Fuller. A Military History of the Western World. Three Volumes. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1987 and 1988.

V. 1. From the earliest times to the Battle of Lepanto; ISBN 0-306-80304-6.

V. 2. From the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Waterloo; ISBN 0-306-80305-4.

V. 3. From the American Civil War to the end of World War II; ISBN 0-306-80306-2.

Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson at the 40. St. Gallen Symposium in May 2010
Born	(1964-04-18) 18 April 1964 (age 48) Glasgow, Scotland
Nationality	British
Fields	International history, economic history, American and British imperial history
Institutions	Harvard University
Alma mater	Magdalen College, Oxford
Known for	Counterfactual history Economic history History of empire and imperialism
Influences	Thomas Hobbes, Norman Stone, A. J. P. Taylor, Kenneth Clark, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, David Landes
Spouse	Ayaan Hirsi Ali (m. 2011) «start: (2011-09)»"Marriage: Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Niall Ferguson" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Niall_Ferguson)

Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson (born 18 April 1964)^[1] is a British historian. His speciality is financial and economic history, particularly hyperinflation and the bond markets, as well as the history of colonialism.^[2]

Ferguson, who was born in Glasgow, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University^[1]. He was educated at the private Glasgow Academy in Scotland, and at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Ferguson's books include Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and Civilization: The West and the Rest,^[3] all of which he has also presented as Channel 4 television series.

In 2004 he was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is currently^[when?] a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He is currently^[when?] working on the official biography of Henry Kissinger to whom he has been granted unprecedented access.

Early life[link]

Ferguson was born the son of a doctor father and a physics teacher mother in Glasgow on 18 April 1964, and lived for a time near Ibrox Park.^[4][5] He attended The Glasgow Academy.^{[citation needed]}

Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side.^[6] His journalist maternal grandfather encouraged him to write.^[6] Unable to decide on studying an English or a History degree at university, Ferguson cites his reading of War and Peace as persuading him towards History.^[5] Of late 1970s Glasgow, Ferguson describes "the main industries" of the city as "sectarianism and strike action".^[5] He was brought up as and remains an atheist although he holds that the Ten Commandments remains a solid ethical code by which to live.^[7]

University of Oxford[link]

Ferguson received a Demyship (half-scholarship) at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree in History in 1985.^[8] While at Oxford he became best friends with Andrew Sullivan based on a shared love of right-wing politics and punk music.^[9] He became a Thatcherite by 1982, identifying the position with "the Sex Pistols' position in 1977: it was a rebellion against the stuffy corporatism of the 70s."^[5] While at university "He was very much a Scot on the make...Niall was a witty, belligerent bloke who seemed to have come from an entirely different planet," according to Simon Winder.^[9] Ferguson has stated that "I was surrounded by insufferable Etonians with fake Cockney accents who imagined themselves to be working-class heroes in solidarity with the striking miners. It wasn't long before it became clear that the really funny and interesting people on campus were Thatcherites."^[9]

Regarding slights and criticism, Ferguson has stated: "Nobody should ever imagine that they can do that kind of thing to me with impunity. Life is long, and revenge is a dish that tastes best cold. I'm very unforgiving."^[10]

Career[link]

Academic career[link]

• 1983-1986 M.A. (Hons.) Magdalen College, Oxford
• 1987–88 Hanseatic Scholar, Hamburg and Berlin
• 1989–90 Research Fellow, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
• 1990–92 Official Fellow and Lecturer, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge
• 1992–2000 Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Jesus College, University of Oxford
• 2000–02 Professor of Political and Financial History, University of Oxford
• 2002–04 John Herzog Professor in Financial History at Stern School of Business, New York University
• 2004-continuing Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School
• 2010-11 Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics, located within LSE IDEAS, beginning in 2010^[11]

Ferguson is a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

In May 2010 he announced that Education Secretary Michael Gove in the UK's Conservative/Lib Dem government had invited him to advise on the development of a new history syllabus—"history as a connected narrative"— for schools in England and Wales.^[2][12] In June 2011 it was announced that he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[13]

Business career[link]

In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an Investment Management Consultant by GLG Partners, focusing on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions.^[14] GLG is a UK-based hedge fund management firm headed by Noam Gottesman.^[15]

Career as commentator[link]

In October 2007, Niall Ferguson left The Sunday Telegraph to join the Financial Times,^[16] where he is now^[when?] a contributing editor.^[17] He also writes for Newsweek.^[2]

Ferguson has often described the European Union as a disaster waiting to happen,^[18] and has criticised President Vladimir Putin of Russia for authoritarianism. In Ferguson's view, certain of Putin's policies, if they continue, may stand to lead Russia to catastrophes equivalent to those that befell Germany during the Nazi era.^[19]

Interests and views[link]

World War I[link]

In 1998 Ferguson published the critically acclaimed The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months.^[8][9] This is an analytic account of what Ferguson considered to be the ten great myths of the Great War. The book generated much controversy, particularly Ferguson's suggestion that it might have proved more beneficial for Europe if Britain had stayed out of the First World War in 1914, thereby allowing Germany to win.^[20] Ferguson has argued that the British decision to intervene was what stopped a German victory in 1914–15. Furthermore, Ferguson expressed disagreement with the Sonderweg interpretation of German history championed by some German historians such as Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, who argued that the German Empire deliberately started an aggressive war in 1914. Likewise, Ferguson has often attacked the work of the German historian Michael Stürmer, who argued that it was Germany's geographical situation in Central Europe that determined the course of German history.

On the contrary, Ferguson maintained that Germany waged a preventive war in 1914, a war largely forced on the Germans by reckless and irresponsible British diplomacy. In particular, Ferguson accused the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey of maintaining an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the war or not, and thus confusing Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the war.^[21] Ferguson accused London of unnecessarily allowing a regional war in Europe to escalate into a world war. Moreover, Ferguson denied that the origins of National Socialism could be traced back to Imperial Germany; instead Ferguson asserted the origins of Nazism could only be traced back to the First World War and its aftermath.

The “myths” of World War I that Ferguson attacked (with his counter-arguments in parentheses), are:

• That Germany was a highly militarist country before 1914 (Ferguson claims Germany was Europe’s most anti-militarist country)^[22]
• That naval challenges mounted by Germany drove Britain into informal alliances with France and Russia before 1914 (Ferguson claims the British were driven into alliances with France and Russia as a form of appeasement due to the strength of those nations, and an Anglo-German alliance failed to materialize due to German weakness)^[23]
• That British foreign policy was driven by legitimate fears of Germany (Ferguson claims Germany posed no threat to Britain before 1914, and that all British fears of Germany were due to irrational anti-German prejudices) ^[24]
• That the pre-1914 arms race was consuming ever larger portions of national budgets at an unsustainable rate (Ferguson claims that the only limitations on more military spending before 1914 were political, not economic)^[25]
• That World War I was, as Fritz Fischer claimed, a war of aggression on the part of Germany that necessitated British involvement to stop Germany from conquering Europe (Ferguson claims that if Germany had been victorious, something like the European Union would have been created in 1914, and that it would have been for the best if Britain had chosen to opt out of war in 1914)^[26]
• That most people were happy with the outbreak of war in 1914 (Ferguson claims that most Europeans were saddened by the coming of war) ^[27]
• That propaganda was successful in making men wish to fight (Ferguson argues the opposite)^[28]
• That the Allies made the best use of their economic resources (Ferguson argues that the Allies “squandered” their economic resources) ^[29]
• That the British and the French had the better armies (Ferguson claims the German Army was superior)^[30]
• That the Allies were more efficient at killing Germans (Ferguson argues that the Germans were more efficient at killing the Allies)^[31]
• That most soldiers hated fighting in the war (Ferguson argues most soldiers fought more or less willingly)^[32]
• That the British treated German prisoners of war well (Ferguson argues the British routinely killed German POWs)^[33]
• That Germany was faced with reparations after 1921 that could not be paid except at ruinous economic cost (Ferguson argues that Germany could easily have paid reparations had there been the political will)^[34]

Another controversial aspect of the Pity of War was Ferguson's use of counterfactual history. Ferguson presented a counter-factual version of Europe under Imperial German domination that was peaceful, prosperous, democratic and without ideologies like Communism and fascism.^[35] In Ferguson's view, had Germany won World War I, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire and the world's dominant financial power.^[35]

Rothschilds[link]

Ferguson wrote two volumes about the prominent Rothschild family:

• The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money's Prophets: 1798–1848^[36]
• The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849–1999^[37]

The books won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and were also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.^[17]

Counterfactual history[link]

Ferguson sometimes champions counterfactual history, and edited a collection of essays exploring the subject titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997). Ferguson likes to imagine alternative outcomes as a way of stressing the contingent aspects of history. For Ferguson, great forces don't make history; individuals do, and nothing is predetermined. Thus for Ferguson there are no paths in history that will determine how things will work out. The world is neither progressing nor regressing; only the actions of individuals will determine whether we live in a better or worse world. His championing of the method has been controversial within the field.^[38]

In a 2011 review of Ferguson's book Civilization: The West and the Rest, Noel Malcolm (a Senior Research Fellow in History at All Souls College at Oxford University) stated (without mentioning counterfactuals) that: "Students may find this an intriguing introduction to a wide range of human history; but they will get an odd idea of how historical argument is to be conducted, if they learn it from this book."^[39]

Henry Kissinger[link]

In 2003, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries, letters, and archives for what Ferguson calls a "warts-and-all biography" of Kissinger.^[40]

Colonialism[link]

Ferguson is critical of what he calls the "self-flagellation" that he says characterizes modern European thought.

"The moral simplification urge is an extraordinarily powerful one, especially in this country, where imperial guilt can lead to self-flagellation," he told a reporter. "And it leads to very simplistic judgments. The rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources. Did Senegal ultimately benefit from French rule? Yes, it's clear. And the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all."^[2]

Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at the University of London, has stated that it is correct to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to 'rehabilitate empire' in the service of contemporary great power interests".^[41]

Bernard Porter attacked Empire in The London Review of Books as a "panegyric to British colonialism".^[42] Ferguson in response to this drew Porter's attention to the conclusion of the book, where he writes: "No one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the "ethnic cleansing" of indigenous peoples." Ferguson argues however that the British Empire was preferable to the alternatives:

'The 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century too the empire more than justified its own existence. For the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese Empires were clearly – and they admitted it themselves – far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.'^[42]

Islam and Eurabia[link]

Matthew Carr wrote in Race & Class that "Niall Ferguson, the conservative English historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled ‘Eurabia?’,^[43] in which he laments the 'de-Christianization of Europe' and its culture of secularism that leaves the continent 'weak in the face of fanaticism'." Carr adds that "Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his Oxford college as another symptom of 'the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom'" and that in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled 'The end of Europe?',^[44] "Ferguson struck a similarly Spenglerian note, conjuring the term 'impire' to depict a process in which a ‘political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes – when the energies come from outside into that entity’. In Ferguson's opinion, this process was already under way in a decadent 'post-Christian' Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam."^[45]

Iraq war[link]

Ferguson supported the Iraq war and is not necessarily opposed to future incursions in the world.

"It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out".^[2]

Economic policy[link]

In its 15 August 2005 edition, The New Republic published "The New New Deal", an essay by Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a Professor of Economics at Boston University. The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government's fiscal and income security policies:

• Replacing the personal income tax, corporate income tax, Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA), estate tax, and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, amounting to the FRST a household with similar demographics would pay if its income were at the poverty line. See also: FairTax
• Replacing the Old Age benefits paid under Social Security with a Personal Security System, consisting of private retirement accounts for all citizens, plus a government benefit payable to those whose savings were insufficient to afford a minimum retirement income
• Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a Medical Security System that would provide health insurance vouchers to all citizens, the value of which would be determined by one's health
• Cutting federal discretionary spending by 20%

Criticisms[link]

As scholar[link]

Fellow academics have questioned Ferguson's commitment to scholarship. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, an editor of The Washington Monthly, comments that

"The House of Rothschild remains Ferguson's only major work to have received prizes and wide acclaim from other historians. Research restrains sweeping, absolute claims: Rothschild is the last book Ferguson wrote for which he did original archival work, and his detailed knowledge of his subject meant that his arguments for it couldn't be too grand."^[46]

John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War era historian, characterized Ferguson as having unrivaled "range, productivity and visibility" at the same time as criticising his work as being "unpersuasive". Gaddis goes on to state that "several of Ferguson's claims, moreover, are contradictory".^[47]

Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has praised Ferguson as an excellent historian.^[48] However, he has also criticised Ferguson, saying, on the BBC Radio programme Start the Week, that he was a "nostalgist for empire".^[49] Ferguson responded to the above criticisms in a Washington Post "Live Discussions" online forum in 2006.^[50]

Exchanges with Krugman[link]

In May 2009, Ferguson became involved in a high-profile exchange of views with economist Paul Krugman (winner in 2008 of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics) arising out of a panel discussion hosted by Pen/New York Review on 30 April 2009, regarding the U.S. economy. Ferguson contended that the Obama administration's policies are simultaneously Keynesian and monetarist, in an incoherent mix, and specifically that the government's issuance of a multitude of new bonds will cause an increase in interest rates. Krugman then extended the criticism to China and the European Union, as both pursued policies more in accord with Ferguson's stance than Krugman's.^{[51][52][53][54]}

Krugman has argued that Ferguson's view is "resurrecting 75-year old fallacies" and full of "basic errors". He has also stated that Ferguson is a "poseur" who "...hasn't bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It's all style, no comprehension of substance."^{[55][56][57][58]}

Personal life[link]

Ferguson married journalist Susan Douglas, whom he met in 1987 when she was his editor at the Daily Mail. They have three children.^[59] They separated in 2010 and divorced in 2011.

In February 2010 news media reported that Ferguson had separated from Douglas and started dating former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali.^[60][61][62] Ferguson married Hirsi Ali in September 2011.^[63] News media^[who?] have reported that Hirsi Ali and Ferguson had a baby boy in late December 2011.^{[citation needed]} Ferguson dedicated his book Civilization to "Ayaan". In an interview with The Guardian, Ferguson spoke about his love for Ali, who, he writes in the preface, "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world".^[2] Ali, he continued,

...grew up in the Muslim world, was born in Somalia, spent time in Saudi Arabia, was a fundamentalist as a teenager. Her journey from the world of her childhood and family to where she is today is an odyssey that's extremely hard for you or I to imagine. To see and hear how she understands western philosophy, how she understands the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, of the 19th-century liberal era, is a great privilege, because she sees it with a clarity and freshness of perspective that's really hard for us to match. So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.^[2]

Ferguson's self confessed workaholism has placed strains on his personal relations in the past. Ferguson has commented that:

...from 2002, the combination of making TV programmes and teaching at Harvard took me away from my children too much. You don't get those years back. You have to ask yourself: "Was it a smart decision to do those things?" I think the success I have enjoyed since then has been bought at a significant price. In hindsight, there would have been a bunch of things that I would have said no to.^[6]

Ferguson's younger sister is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.^[6]

Ferguson was the inspiration for Alan Bennett's play The History Boys (2004), particularly the character of Irwin, a history teacher who urges his pupils to find a counterintuitive angle, and goes on to become a television historian.^[4]

Bibliography[link]

[edit] The Cash Nexus

In his 2001 book, The Cash Nexus, which he wrote following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England,^[17] Ferguson argues that the popular saying, "money makes the world go 'round", is wrong; instead he presented a case for human actions in history motivated by far more than just economic concerns.

[edit] Colossus and Empire

In his books Colossus and Empire, Ferguson presents reinterpretation of the history of the British Empire and in conclusion proposes that the modern policies of the United Kingdom and the United States, in taking a more active role in resolving conflict arising from the failure of states, are analogous to the 'Anglicization' policies adopted by the British Empire throughout the 19th century.^[64][65] In Colossus, Ferguson explores the United States' hegemony in foreign affairs and its future role in the world.^[66][67]

[edit] War of the World

The War of the World, published in 2006, had been ten years in the making and is a comprehensive analysis of the savagery of the 20th century. Ferguson shows how a combination of economic volatility, decaying empires, psychopathic dictators, and racially/ethnically motivated (and institutionalized) violence resulted in the wars and the genocides of what he calls "History's Age of Hatred". The New York Times Book Review named War of the World one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2006, while the International Herald Tribune called it "one of the most intriguing attempts by an historian to explain man's inhumanity to man".^[68] Ferguson addresses the paradox that, though the 20th century was "so bloody", it was also "a time of unparalleled [economic] progress". As with his earlier work Empire,^[69] War of the World was accompanied by a Channel 4 television series presented by Ferguson.^[70]

[edit] The Ascent of Money

Published in 2008, The Ascent of Money examines the long history of money, credit, and banking. In it he predicts a financial crisis as a result of the world economy and in particular the United States using too much credit. Specifically he cites the China–America dynamic which he refers to as Chimerica where an Asian "savings glut" helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money.^[71]

[edit] Civilization

Published in 2011, Civilization: The West and the Rest examines what Ferguson calls the most "interesting question" of our day: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?" He attributes this divergence to the West's development of six "killer apps" largely missing elsewhere in the world - "competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic".^[2] A related documentary Civilization: Is the West History? was broadcast as a six part series on Channel 4 in March and April 2011.^[72]

Publications[link]

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Ferguson, Niall (2012). Henry Kissinger: A Life. Allen Lane. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2011). Civilization: The West and the Rest. The Penguin Press HC. ISBN 978-1-59420-305-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=mRO3xuoTTeoC&printsec=frontcover. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2010). High Financier: The Lives And Times Of Siegmund Warburg. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-1-59420-246-9. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2008). The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1-84614-106-5. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2006). The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9708-7.  (also a Channel 4 series)^[70]
• Ferguson, Niall (2003). Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02328-2. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2005). 1914. Pocket Penguins 70s S.. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 0-14-102220-5. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2004). Colossus: The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-7139-9770-2. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2003). Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9615-3. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2001). The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9465-7. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999) [1997]. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02322-3. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999) [1998]. The Pity of War. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-05711-X. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1999). The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1849–1999. New York, N.Y.: Viking. ISBN 0-670-88794-3. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1998). The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81539-3. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1998). The House of Rothschild. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-85768-8. 
• Ferguson, Niall (1995). Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47016-1. 

As Contributor[link]

• “Europa nervosa”, in Nader Mousavizadeh (ed.), The Black Book of Bosnia (New Republic/Basic Books, 1996), pp. 127–32
• “The German inter-war economy: Political choice versus economic determinism” in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German History since 1800 (Arnold, 1997), pp. 258–278
• “The balance of payments question: Versailles and after” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 401–440
• “‘The Caucasian Royal Family’: The Rothschilds in national contexts” in R. Liedtke (ed.), ‘Two Nations’: The Historical Experience of British and German Jews in Comparison (J.C.B. Mohr, 1999)
• “Academics and the Press”, in Stephen Glover (ed.), Secrets of the Press: Journalists on Journalism (Penguin, 1999), pp. 206–220
• “Metternich and the Rothschilds: A reappraisal” in Andrea Hamel and Edward Timms (eds.), Progress and Emancipation in the Age of Metternich: Jews and Modernisation in Austria and Germany, 1815–1848 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 295–325
• “The European economy, 1815–1914” in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Europe: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 78–125
• “How (not) to pay for the war: Traditional finance and total war” in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 409–34
• “Introduction” in Frederic Manning, Middle Parts of Fortune (Penguin, 2000), pp. vii-xviii
• “Clashing civilizations or mad mullahs: The United States between informal and formal empire” in Strobe Talbott (ed.), The Age of Terror (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 113–41
• “Public debt as a post-war problem: The German experience after 1918 in comparative perspective” in Mark Roseman (ed.), Three Post-War Eras in Comparison: Western Europe 1918-1945-1989 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), pp. 99–119
• “Das Haus Sachsen-Coburg und die europäische Politik des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in Rainer von Hessen (ed.), Victoria Kaiserin Friedrich (1840–1901): Mission und Schicksal einer englischen Prinzessin in Deutschland (Campus Verlag, 2002), pp. 27–39
• “Max Warburg and German politics: The limits of financial power in Wilhelmine Germany”, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds.), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism and the Meaning of Reform, 1890-1930 (Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 185–201
• “Introduction”, The Death of the Past by J. H. Plumb (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. xxi-xlii
• “Globalization in historical perspective: The political dimension”, in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalisation in Historical Perspective (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report) (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
• “Introduction to Tzvetan Todorov” in Nicholas Owen (ed.), Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Oxford Amnesty Lectures (Amnesty International, 2003)
• “The City of London and British imperialism: New light on an old question”, in Youssef Cassis and Eric Bussière (eds.), London and Paris as International Financial Centres in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 57–77
• “A bolt from the blue? The City of London and the outbreak of the First World War”, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Yet More Adventures with Britainnia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 133–145
• “The first ‘Eurobonds’: The Rothschilds and the financing of the Holy Alliance, 1818–1822”, in William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations that Created Modern Capital Markets (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 311–323
• “Prisoner taking and prisoner killing in the age of total war”, in George Kassemiris (ed.), The Barbarization of Warfare (New York University Press, 2006), pp. 126–158
• “The Second World War as an economic disaster”, in Michael Oliver (ed.), Economic Disasters of the Twentieth Century (Edward Elgar, 2007), pp. 83–132
• “The Problem of Conjecture: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine”, in Melvyn Leffler and Jeff Legro (eds.), To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Television documentaries[link]

• Empire (2003)
• American Colossus (2004)
• The War of the World (2006)
• The Ascent of Money (2008)
• Civilization: Is the West History? (2011)
• China: Triumph and Turmoil (2012)

See also[link]

• Anglosphere
• Chimerica

References[link]

Notes[link]