Niall is a hot property on BBC channels of late--he's young and good lookin' and he's got that Estuary accent down pat.

For myself, I've enjoyed watching a couple of his shows via YouTube. I like the scope & depth he brings to his shows. He talks about the topics that I'm interested in. But if you're a maxihistorian, rather than a specialist, you necessarily have to leave out some details when you give your narratives. What details a narrative leaves out tells us what biases a given historian has. So it's not so much that I disagree with what he says--for instance when he lumps the two world wars and the cold war all into one jumbo conflict and says the principal motivating factor for conflict in the 20th century was race. Rather, it's what he leaves out.

Historians come from all sorts of biases--any historical interpretation is going to carry some sort of slant to it if it's gonna be more than a recitation of events. As a high school teacher, I tend to stress deep causalities to historical events and movements: education levels, new technologies, over-crowding, empowering ideologies, and manipulations of information flow to historical actors. When I deviate from the state-mandated curriculum, I tend to wander into a geographic bias-set: the struggle for control of resources, the battle for geographic chokepoints, the realpolitick drive for counterbalancing alliances--stuff like that. This leads me to make outrageous statements like Russia and China will never be real democracies (they're just too damn big) or Mexico will probably rival the US as a superpower in the late 21st century.

Ferguson tends to leave out geographic and economic biases, that is: the background causalities of civilizational conflict. He looks to race hatreds, to the immediate passions that are prevalent in conflicts. These are complex questions and they're interesting to look at, but they don't quite explain enough. For instance he focused in one chapter on the Russian conflict against Japan in 1904-1905, in what was almost a dress rehearsal for WW1. But if you don't examine the competition for resources and the need for a more southern Pacific port, you can't really understand why Russia fought Japan instead of starting another war with China or Persia. If you don't look at Realpolitick, you can't see why Britain & the US favored Japan in that war. Race probably played a part in Teddy Roosevelt doing favors for Russia at the negotiation table the following year, but it doesn't tell us enough to understand all the dimensions of the conflict.

Still, he spins a hell of a yarn. So I keep on watching his YouTubery.