TELEVISION Empire states


Civilization: is the West History? CHANNEL 4


A


fter Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (cur- rently to be seen on BBC HD) comes


Niall Ferguson’s Civilization(6 March). There is more to set the two series apart than just a change of spelling. Ferguson’s account of the rise of modern Europe (he calls it “Western Civilisation 2.0”) has no room for the arts: it’s about imperialism and trade, guns and money.


Subtitled “Is the West History?”, the series


sets out to answer two questions: how did the West come to dominate the world? And is Western ascendancy about to come to an end? The opening, in a classroom, saw Ferguson


establish his combative stance. He took a side- swipe at current school history, which teaches “bits and pieces” instead of the “grand narra- tive”. We have, he said, been “brainwashed” into thinking that every aspect of Western expansion was “evil imperialism” and that we have to “atone for the sins of our ancestors by studying every civilisation except our own”. Instead he wants to tell the “big story”, in which the West dominated the world for 500 years. That was a consequence of what, in a trendy but slightly clunky analogy, he called “six killer apps”. These big ideas are: compe- tition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The first programme dealt with competition, which saw a fragmented Europe triumph on the world stage while monolithic China turned inward and stagnated. It could easily have been a different story.


In the fifteenth century, Ming Dynasty China was a vastly more sophisticated society than anything in Europe, which was still mired in medieval chaos and squalor. With an envi- able record of invention, creating


everything from the seed drill to the wheel- barrow, China briefly turned towards the wider world, sending a fleet of gigantic treas- ure ships (some 10 times the length of Columbus’ Santa Maria) around the globe to see what they could find. Some experts think they got as far as Australia, the Cape of Good Hope and even Greenland. They cer- tainly arrived in East Africa, bringing back representatives of 15 native kingdoms and a hold full of exotic animals. But that’s all they did. Ferguson compared


the Chinese explorations, under the eunuch commander Zheng He, to the Apollo space programme: expensive, impressive but ulti- mately “pretty pointless”. And then, in 1424, only 20 years after he had launched the policy, the expansionist emperor Yong Le died and the voyages of discovery came to an end. Indeed, so inward-looking did China become that anyone building a ship with more than two masts was subject to the death penalty. In contrast, when the Europeans began their overseas expansion, at the end of the fif- teenth century, they knew exactly what they were doing. King Manuel I of Portugal sent Vasco da Gama to the East not to explore for its own sake but to compete with the overland spice trade. Other European nations wanted part of the action, and soon their ships were criss-crossing the globe in competition with each other. “It was by being divided that Europeans ended up ruling the world,” said Ferguson, who, I suspect, is no fan of the EU. “While Europe was a patchwork quilt, China remained a vast monochrome blanket.” Trade and colonisation brought Europe


Niall Ferguson: telling the ‘big story’ of history


(Continued from page 29.)


Mrs Brown was, of course, having none of this. “As women, we make different choices at different times in our lives,” she, equally briskly, replied, whereupon I must confess I had to stifle a yawn. There were, however, interesting details of the arrangements made at Number 10 for prime ministers’ wives – an office and two permanent staff – and the juggling of timetables needed to allow visits from the charities whose work Mrs Brown promotes. Was Mrs B going to delve beneath the some- what bland façade offered by her book? Was she prepared to engage with Murray’s ques- tions about role and influence at all but the most rudimentary level? Was she going to say anything even faintly injurious about her distinguished predecessor, Mrs Blair? No, she was not. Whereupon the talk turned to various of the celebrity visitors Mrs Brown had come across. Why did she wear a Marks & Spencer cardigan to greet George Clooney? “I didn’t know I was going to meet him.” Why were the children kept out of the media spotlight? Because the Browns – well, I never – wanted “a normal family life”. The more this continued, the more you


30 | THE TABLET | 12 March 2011


could see Mrs Brown’s point, for to answer any of these questions with the attention, let alone the candour, they deserved would involve a betrayal of everything she had signed up for. After all, if someone asks you live on air in the presence of several million people whether your husband is a bully, you are hardly going to agree. It was the same with Piers Morgan’s pre-election TV interview. Was she convinced, in retrospect, that the camera cut- away that showed her quietly crying when her husband discussed their daughter’s death was “the right thing to do”? “I thought the interview was terrific,” Mrs Brown countered, which was very sporting of her in the circum- stances. It could not have been done without the question; hence the tears. And so it went on. As the blanket fashioned out of the Woman’s Hour interview format (which Mrs Brown had, of course, played up to by agreeing to appear on it and by writing the book in the first place) descended gradually on to her head, there were occasional signs of a personality – a faintly resentful personality, if it came to that – trying to get out from underneath it. But, really, this was horribly unrevealing. D.J. Taylor


better nutrition and provided somewhere to put surplus people; the result was improve- ments in health, income and productivity. China, meanwhile, suffered internal conflict, famine and disease. In 1793, the English sent a mission to try and persuade the Chinese to trade, accompanied by all manner of sweet- eners, including fine clocks – which the Chinese had invented centuries earlier – and scientific instruments. The emperor sent back a message to George III: “There is nothing we lack. We have never set much store by strange or ingenious objects.” They did keep some of the clocks: but no one knew how to repair them. The Chinese have learnt their lesson. Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China and its commercial engagement with the world, said that “no country that wishes to become developed today can pursue closed-door policies”. The eunuch admiral is now much admired. This was vigorous, broad-brush history,


with Ferguson’s own “grand narrative” punc- tuated by facts, dates and figures, and undiluted by dubious reconstructions or the testimony of rival experts; the only person he spoke to here was a dealer in antique clocks. As is customary, the professor travelled the world to make the film, and it was beautifully shot. He has yet to pronounce on the fate of the West, but an emphasis on the rapidity with which empires can fall apart struck an ominous note. John Morrish


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