Television: The War of the World

The Independent – United Kingdom; Jun 17, 2006
Gerard Gilbert

Every historian worth a television series should have a grand unifying
theory, even if that theory (we can safely laugh about it now) says
that we are living at the "end of history". Professor Niall Ferguson,
the poster boy of history TV and, according to Johan Hari in this
newspaper, "a court historian for the imperial US hard right"),
has swept up the entire 20th century for his big one. Those 100
years, he claims as we first encounter him at the end of a sky-blue,
corridor-like set, as if we are visiting an oracle, represented a
vast global struggle. This was not merely about great powers, classes
or ideologies. It was about race, and in particular the decaying,
Western colonial empires and what was once called the Orient. The
20th century wasn’t about "the triumph of the West at all, but the
resurgence of the East".

The empire strikes back, in other words. It might seem
opportunistically modish of Ferguson to make this point at a time
of China’s emergence as an economic superpower. But then it isn’t
necessary to buy wholesale into Ferguson’s grand idea (or its apparent
sub-plot that empires stem from ethnic violence) to appreciate that it
is taking you to interesting places in a century whose conventional
narrative is now over-familiar. Indeed, his stress on the ethnic
nature of the power leads us to such largely buried corners of the
20th century as the Russo-Japanese War (the Russians of 1905 badly
underestimating the "racially inferior" Japanese) and the Armenian
genocide, as modern Turkey emerged from the Ottoman Empire. He also
stresses the Russian civil war of 1918-1922, which in purely human
terms cost almost as many lives as the whole of the First World War.

Ferguson’s series begins with a reading from The War of the Worlds,
HG Wells’s prescient science-fiction novel, written on the eve of the
20th century. Instead of Martians, says Ferguson, it is men who have
been driven to act like Martians – depicting the enemy as aliens in
order to justify the killing. Again, you don’t have to buy into this
artful analysis to be rewarded by an eye-opening traverse of what he
hasn’t yet called the Second Hundred Years War.