Michael Fry: Empire rethink would do us a power of good

The land of Ferguson's fathers is not wholly absent from his work. In his book on the British Empire he was happy to recount how some blood relations of his had gone to live in a log cabin in the Canadian West as part of the great wave of Scottish emigration before the First World War.

They baked in the summer and froze in the winter but, even in their lack of all home comforts, were still objects of envy when they sent news of their progress back. For progress did come. The initial privations of the prairies turned into eventual prosperity beyond the dreams of the Fergusons who had stayed behind in Glasgow's tenements. At any rate no other members of the clan did half so well.

Or at least none did before young Niall arrived on the scene. Perhaps it was this ancestral saga that eventually led him to try his luck in the New World too. There, as the ultimate tele-don and intercontinental star, he has no doubt grown richer than all other Fergusons put together.

Yet to him his family's collective achievement is but a small illustration in a greater narrative of universal history. It has not tempted him to any closer inquiry into its Scottish strand. The future according to Ferguson belongs to the Chinese, among many others, not the Scots.

Indeed he pours scorn on the notions occasionally floated over here that we can in the twenty-first century do some sort of rerun of the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment. Scotland is just not the same as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: it lacks the men (I do not think Niall worries much about the women) and it lacks the ideas. This is a clapped-out backwater, and probably doomed to remain as such.

Perhaps I am putting a few words in Ferguson's mouth but a man who paints history with such a broad brush will not, I hope, mind too much. He has after all aroused ire at Westminster too, where this week a Labour peer, Lord Clinton-Davies, rose to protest at the government's prospective employment of the hard man from Harvard, along with his slightly feyer fellow historian Andrew Reynolds, to reshape the national curriculum in England.

"Are not these particular appointments a blatant attempt to revive imperialist concepts?" his lordship asked.

"Why is it thought by this government that right-wingers such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Reynolds, however articulate they may be, with their outdated views of empire can make a useful contribution to the modern history syllabus?"

It is a protest in the same category as, for example, the one we sometimes hear in Scotland that on no account can there be any questioning of the Highland Clearances as a straightforward story of vicious oppression wrought on the hapless peasants by their cruel landlords.

The fact that by far the greater part of Scottish emigration was voluntary has to be airbrushed out of the picture so that a favourite myth of the victim-nation can be preserved.

According to the orthodoxy of the Left, there is nothing to be proud of in the greater history of the British Empire either: all it did was conquer and crush. The real offence of Ferguson and Reynolds is to point out that the tale is rather more complicated than that.

Nobody would nowadays deny the Empire did conquer and crush. But it had other interests or intentions as well: progress and civilisation, science and education, rights and justice. Empire might not have represented these ideals perfectly, but the whole of human history is both black and white, right and wrong, good and bad.

It would be foolish to expect Empire could ever have been an exception - just as socialism never could have been an exception either, before it, too, died the death that history brings to everything, and makes it one with Nineveh and Tyre.

To my mind the maturity and relevance of Ferguson and Reynolds as historians lie precisely in the fact that they recognise the Empire is over, so that there is no point in trying to revive it (whatever that might mean). On the contrary, since the body of imperial facts is complete and merely awaiting thorough research, the task for today is to think and talk about them objectively.

People on the Right might want to pick out the good points, but they will only be setting them against the bad points getting hammered home by the Left. Sometimes the result will give no special comfort to either side: for example, without an Empire how could we ever have developed the multicultural society of modern Britain?

On the particular bit of it called Scotland, I differ from Ferguson (not so much from Reynolds, who takes a kindlier view). I think Scotland did have an effect on the Empire which modified its - of course - dominant English character. The Scots brought to it the perspective of a small nation, vulnerable to the oppressions of a big one and having to work hard to preserve its identity.

That gave Scots a certain sympathy with the victims of imperialism. It was manifested in, among other things, the preference for trading outposts (such as Hong Kong and Singapore, both Scottish foundations) over territorial occupation.

Again, it was manifested in tremendous commitment to the missionary movement, with its huge influence on the emergence of nationalism in Africa.

At the same time the Empire exerted an unacknowledged influence on Scotland that is only coming to light now. This is a small nation but the Empire allowed it to act as if it were a big nation, with the highest aspirations for making the world a better place through egalitarian education and equal economic opportunities.

I doubt if, without all that, Scotland could ever have conceived the aspirations of at least a part of its own people today - that is, to take its place in the world once again as an independent nation with a special contribution to make.

So I think that some attempt to "revive imperialist concepts" (Lord Clinton-Davies's words, not mine) would do us good too and make us see the country's situation more clearly.zz