Niall Ferguson v Pankaj Mishra: battle of the historians

The two academics are having a spat. Is it time for them to step outside and settle it once and for all?

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Patrick Barkham
Patrick Barkham
guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 November 2011 20.00 GMT
Article history

Mishra v Ferguson
It's Mishra v Ferguson Photograph: Corbis; Christian Sinibalde

It is shaping up to be the tastiest historical scrap since Rob Newman's comedy professor character compared the girlfriend of David Baddiel's don to Peter Beardsley. The warring academics, beloved of 1990s students for their "that's you, that is " repartee, have made way for Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra, after the latter likened Ferguson to Tom Buchanan in the Great Gatsby.

As with all the best academic spats, spectators are advised to equip themselves with a dictionary and a history degree to follow the action.

Mishra, the Indian author and essayist, argued in the London Review of Books that Ferguson was "homo atlanticus redux", a "retailer of emollient tales about the glorious past" whose books "are known less for their original scholarly contribution than for containing some provocative counterfactuals". Summing up Ferguson's latest tome, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, as "gallimaufry", Mishra accused the TV historian and Harvard scholar of ignoring facts that complicate his narrative of Western dominance, such as Muslim contributions to science. Ferguson's acknowledgment of colonial misdeeds was "very selective" and he was "immune ... to humour and irony".

Ferguson responded with a letter to the "notoriously left-leaning" coterie at the LRB, raging that Mishra's critique was "a crude attempt at character assassination" that "mendaciously misrepresents my work but also strongly implies that I am a racist". Mishra, huffed Ferguson, "owes me a public apology" for his "libellous and dishonest article".

It briefly looked as if Mishra would pour cold water on the flames. "Ferguson is no racist," he responded, before laying into his "pathological" instinct to "bow down before the conqueror of the moment" and tendency to say "whatever seems resonant and persuasive at any given hour". Time to settle this in court/the playground/outside?

smudge wrote:Ferguson did a TV show here in the UK (for the BBC or Chan 4) based on his Civilisation book. I taped it. Watched the first two and a half as I remmember. I just could not stop shouting at the TV so I stopped watching it. He just seemed so right wing it was ridiculous. His 'history' was clearly cherry picked to shoehorn in selected points he wished to bang home. As such it was inaccurate (by omission). And his points were feeble and ill thought out anyway.
All in all I thought it was a total pile of crap!

Not familiar with Mishra.

willhud9 wrote:Well historically speaking, the Native Americans were not exactly peaceful, willing to have diplomatic relationships with the white men. Granted, I do not think they deserved genocide, that's never the answer, but I feel our history books make it seem like the trials the Indians went through were completely, 100% white man's fault and the Indians were nature loving hippies who just wanted peace, but became suddenly aggressive and war-like because of the colonists.