There is one very important point to which I am in accord with Niall Ferguson, and that is the need for a clear and consistent narrative in the teaching and understanding of history. The current vogue of offering school kids an eclectic patchwork of bite size mouthfuls of history is simply of no value. A few weeks of the Romans followed by a few more weeks of 1066 and the Norman Invasion, closely followed by a month of Tudor history and then, inexplicably, a lurch into the rise of the Nazis, with perhaps a unit of American civil rights thrown in, makes absolutely no sense at all. No, the human story, the most intriguing of all stories, needs to be presented in a coherent, chronological and intelligible manner. On this I agree with Ferguson but then, on much else, we must part company.

Ferguson attempts to portray the last five hundred years of human history as the supremacy of the west over the backwardness of the rest. He cites six identifiable novel complexes of institutions and associated ideas and behaviours at the root of this supposed western superiority; competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic. This approach, on the surface seems an eminently sensible one, for who could really argue that these six factors were not at the core of western dominance for so long, but on closer examination, this wholly artificial edifice starts to crumble. And it crumbles for one very central reason; it is superficial and facile to attempt to tell the human story in terms of the rise of one civilisation and the decline of another. Human history moves not by the rise and fall of empires, but in the rise and eventual demise of socio-economic epochs.

When history teachers attempt to teach children about the ancient Romans they invariably miss out on one overriding feature; that its society was based on production carried out by slaves. All the classical empires; Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman were all slave economies, and that is the one over-riding feature that dominates all other aspects of ancient society, and it is the one key feature that eludes most of our bog standard history texts and for that matter, our learned Mr Ferguson. Instead of garnishing an understanding of how these societies produced the daily necessities of life using the labour of their captured slaves, our school history books obsess about centurions, Roman baths, pottery and viaducts. Ask any school child what the central feature of Roman society was and they are almost certain to omit the bit about the forced labour of slaves. This is not accidental because, in ignoring the historical development of slaves and slave owners, it neatly avoids the whole embarrassingly contemporary question of class and power today.

A similar ahistorical approach occurs in the teaching of the feudal epoch, where all the teaching emphasis is on mud huts, barons, lords and kings, and the never-ending cycle of gory battles, but little or no emphasis on exactly how these societies, east and west, produced their means of survival. Although each country, each region and each empire had its own specifics, the essential feature of feudal society was the same across the planet- the lorded ownership of the land and all that was on the land, including the crops, the animals, the ploughs and the peasants. In the same way that all slaves owning societies had a common fundamental characteristic, so too did all feudal societies. But ask any British school child to define the feudal epoch and they will be hopelessly lost.

Ferguson’s own historiography is fundamentally flawed in my opinion. It focuses brilliantly on the froth of history but fails to get to grips with the real substance i.e., which class owned the means of production and how did the socio-economic relations between the contending classes play themselves out. But all this is far too pedestrian, far too Marxist for Ferguson’s finely tuned Oxbridge educated mind. He would far rather busy himself with the intricacies of the rise and decline of individual empires believing that this is the real motor of history.

And so we come to Ferguson’s five hundred years of western supremacy. Here Ferguson asks all the wrong questions. Instead of asking himself why did the feudal relations of production exhaust themselves firstly in Europe and not in Asia or the Americas, he gets bogged down instead with important but ultimately superficial cultural matters like the protestant work ethic and patterns of consumption. Of course, Ferguson is not totally off the mark all the time and he does devote two of his key chapters to that of competition and property rights. But his narrative is confused and lacking a sense of what prompted what. His six killer apps offer the reader no real sense of the momentous change that will start in the city states of northern Europe and eventually embrace the entire planet; that of the new revolutionary mode of production which we now commonly refer to as capitalism.

There are two other glaring omissions to Ferguson’s history and they are closely related but not accidentally so. Firstly, Ferguson offers his readers no hint of what came before class society emerged. No mention of what Marx and Engels teasingly referred to as primitive communism, that long period of tribal, hunting and gathering, a period of human history where property was collectively owned or in some examples, where there was no sense of ownership at all, as was the case of the indigenous peoples of Australia. Better not to mention this, even in passing, dare the reader imagine, even for the briefest of moments, that private property and society divided into hostile classes, may not be the human condition for ever and all time.

Ferguson’s second damning omission lies in his failure to seriously ponder why the question of socialism and the collective ownership of the means of production keeps cropping up on the agenda of human affairs despite the obvious knocks it has had to its reputation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The fact that much of Karl Marx’s analysis of how capitalism would inevitably morph into monopoly capitalism and thus contain the seeds of its own implosion is dismissed by Ferguson in a barrage of personal abuse which the readers can amuse themselves with on page 207 of Ferguson’s towering thesis. In fact, the most pressing item on humanity’s agenda right now is what to do with the global corporations that have grown too big to fail. 21st capitalism is precisely where Marx predicted it would be. Only the emergence of Chinese State regulated capitalism is preventing the entire global edifice from collapsing into a second Great Depression, and we know only too well what the first Great Depression led to.

Two other particularly obnoxious features of Ferguson’s work derive from his unrestrained Euro-centric approach. Yes, Europe did get a step ahead of Asia in terms of science and learning, thanks ironically to the Muslim capture of Constantinople, but a comprehensive world history would emphasise that it was Arabic, Indian and Chinese science as well as ancient Greek that laid the foundations for further human advance. We are, in fact, one human family, not two separate species as Ferguson’s spurious thesis tries to propagate.

Ferguson’s second Eurocentric failing is his whitewashing of the continuous brutality of western civilisation both during its ascendancy, its maturity, and its decline. Western capitalism began with genocide in the Americas where an estimated 90 million indigenous people died at the hands of the European invaders. Further genocide was to be carried out three centuries later in Australia. Africa was to have a different fate. Countless millions were to be traded into slavery, the very basis of capitalist expansion in Europe and the Americas, and the results of that brutal enslavement are still be felt today both in the endemic racism that stubbornly persists in European and North American society and in the deliberate underdevelopment of the African continent at the hands of the European Christian colonialists.

India was to have a double whammy at the hands of western civilisation. Not only were its people to be brutalised and occupied but its embryonic industries were to be systematically destroyed so they would not be able to compete with those of Europe. This deliberate policy of de-industrialisation may, in fact, have been responsible for more poverty and premature death than all the deliberate genocide and slavery put together. India is still coming to terms with the civilizing effects of the British Raj. As for China, they were simply forced into opium addiction as a means of opening up trade routes for European capitalists.

And, should Ferguson give the impression that the worst excesses of western civilisation are all in the deep and murky past, let us recall that the United States of America was still lynching the descendants of African slaves well into the mid 20th century. Ferguson might also care to reflect that the US dropped more bombs on peasants of Vietnam and Cambodia than in the entirety of the Second World War. The bombs are still falling in Iraq, in Afghanistan and, as we speak, in Libya.

Ferguson might also like to remind his readers that western civilisation produced, as capitalism collapsed in the 1930’s, such fascist barbarity, that genocide against gypsies, Jews, socialists and humanists of various hews was very much back in vogue. Asiatic, African and Islamic states clearly have no monopoly on human barbarism. European civilisation is doing just fine in this department.

Instead of creating this false dichotomy between the West and the rest, what is urgently required by historians is the production of readable, accessible and unified accounts of the human story as we humans have collectively moved through four distinct historical epochs. And now, as we stand at the crossroads of human affairs and stare into the economic and environmental abyss, there is one certainty that is more obvious than at any time in our short history; all our problems are global in dimension and all the possible solutions must also, by extension, be global. A global economy requires global governance. It doesn’t take a high-flying Oxbridge scholar to work that out. As for Niall Ferguson’s divisive and limited Euro-centric style of story-telling, it is, I suspect, history.