Historians could benefit from a moment’s reflection on what happened to Ferguson (before the latest embarrassment happened to him). I never considered teaching Empire, but I did happily read and when possible use The Cash Nexus. It was good fresh work and bears up under the test of subsequent published research. But immediately he had established himself as a presence in economic and trade history, he accepted a post as house historian for the Rothschild papers. In theory a professional historian can balance such moonlighting with responsible historical work, and there are those who feel that Ferguson found that balance; more don’t. It turned out to be the gateway substance to his subsequent stream of products meant to impress one crowd of corner ideologues, the ones who in the twenty-first century control money and access to powerful people (not power itself). He went, as many of us might, from understandable moonlighting by a painfully underpaid British academic to an embarrassing opportunist who pushes historical blather in any direction that attention and money draws him.

Ferguson is a waste of time and money, but what is significant to me is that he correctly perceived exactly how to exploit American media, and the zone of well-compensated “consultants” and “advisors.” The way to do that, c. 2003, was to cheer loud and long for aggressive, pre-emptive war. He was able to add the decorative details of empire –naturalizing the monstrous new patterns of domination by an international, interlocking war-flogging elite as if it had the kind of nineteenth century gentility of, say, the late lamented British empire. Something that was new and very dangerous was claimed to be familiar, venerable, even nostalgia-inspiring –the historical equivalent of steampunk. It is not surprising that this particular line of twaddle draws extraordinary rewards. Well-provisioned think-tanks and even right-wing sugar daddies will fork over top speakers’ fees, and media establishments that feel more secure when staggering to the right will flog your brand till the flail disintegrates.

This became a growth industry after 2002, and it isn’t surprising that Ferguson managed to slither to the top. But the pile is large, and the people laughing the loudest at Ferguson are the ones who want to take his place at the top of the offensive war promotion industry. And their disciplinary backgrounds? Overwhelmingly, historians. Not political scientists, not economists. Historians eager (consciously or unconsciously) to bury some facts and twist others, tilt interpretations, and force square pegs into round holes in search of the next invitation to Washington or the next column in some right-wing rag. And as in the case of Ferguson, they won’t be publicly called to account by other historians.

Perhaps things have not changed that much 300 years.

And I think that once we see his current behavior, it’s impossible to resist seeing his earlier stuff in a similar light, even if the earlier books possessed a much more scholarly aspect. I’m not disagreeing with you, but I think that what’s going on with Ferguson is retrospective, and properly so. If at least one aspect of a historian’s reputation is dependent on subsequent events, and how her analyses stand up in the present, why not adjust our retrospective view of Ferguson and his earlier work?

So I don’t know how anyone could look at Ferguson’s initial work on the Rothschilds and detect behind it a character who would be as recklessly uninterested in scholarly practice as he is now. It’s a really strong work of economic and institutional history. I think his introduction to Virtual History is fully scholarly, even if I think he’s trying far too hard to make counterfactual history the anvil upon which all social history shall be broken. I think The Pity of War is a provocatively interesting scholarly work, even if the Procrustean temptations that have been evident in Ferguson’s more recent oeuvre begin to become visible.

Now if I’d been Ferguson’s colleague at the beginning, maybe none of what has come to pass would surprise me. But I’d hate to start trying to use my X-ray vision and see the “real person” beneath each and every work that is otherwise creditable, and make my judgments from that.

I agree with much of this, but isn’t this taking the unobjectionable principle of “interpretive charity” too far, as an intellectual value in its own right? In other words, we need to be charitable, unprejudiced, open-minded etc. etc. readers so that we can take in information and points of view we might not easily find otherwise. But once we find Ferguson cynically informing us that, no, he didn’t make mistakes, but was just actively misleading us, why should we continue to engage with him, except skeptically and symptomatically? And clearly we’re dealing with someone who has no interest in such intellectual generosity, or even curiosity, himself. So my answer would be that Ferguson was never a fellow “peer” or professional in scholarly or intellectual discourse, it just took a while for him to fully reveal his character.