Empires on the Edge of Chaos
Niall Ferguson
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Editorial Note:
The following article
is reproduced from the
North-American magazine
“Foreign Affairs”,
edition dated March
/ April 2010, pp.18-32.
Perhaps
unknowingly, author Niall Ferguson
discusses in the
text the theosophical Law of
Karmic Cycles,
which can be studied in more
details - and
applied to larger periods of time - in
the works of Helena
P. Blavatsky (1831-1891).
(Carlos Cardoso
Aveline)
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
There is no better illustration
of the life cycle of a great power than “The Course of Empire”, a series of
five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole
was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of
nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in “The Course of Empire”, he
beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people
remain in thrall to this day.
Each of the five imagined
scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the
first, “The Savage State”, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of
hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn.
The second picture, “The Arcadian or Pastoral State”, is of an agrarian idyll:
the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant
Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is “The Consummation of
Empire”. Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt,
and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been
replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and
citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes “Destruction”.
The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and
pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over the fifth
painting, “Desolation”. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few
decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.
Conceived in the mid-1830s,
Cole’s great pentaptych has a clear message: all empires, no matter how
magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was
that the young American republic of Cole’s age would be better served by
sticking to its bucolic first principles and resisting the imperial temptations
of commerce, conquest, and colonization.
For centuries, historians,
political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large have tended to
think about empires in such cyclical and gradual terms. “The best instituted
governments”, the British political philosopher Henry St. John, First Viscount
Bolingbroke, wrote in 1738, “carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and,
though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their
dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live”.
Idealists and materialists
alike have shared that assumption. In his book “Scienza nuova”, the Italian
philosopher Giambattista Vico describes all civilizations as passing through
three phases: the divine, the heroic, and the human, finally dissolving into
what Vico called “the barbarism of reflection”. For Hegel and Marx, it was the
dialectic that gave history its unmistakable beat. History was seasonal for
Oswald Spengler, the German historian, who wrote in his 1918-22 book, “The
Decline of the West”, that the nineteenth century had been “the winter of the
West, the victory of materialism and skepticism, of socialism,
parliamentarianism, and money”. The British historian Arnold Toynbee’s
universal theory of civilization proposed a cycle of challenge, response, and
suicide. Each of these models is different, but all share the idea that history
has rhythm.
Although hardly anyone reads
Spengler or Toynbee today, similar strains of thought are visible in contemporary
bestsellers. Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” is another
work of cyclical history - despite its profusion of statistical tables, which
at first sight make it seem the very antithesis of Spenglerian grand theory. In
Kennedy’s model, great powers rise and fall according to the growth rates of
their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to
their GDPs. Just as in Cole’s “The Course of Empire”, imperial expansion
carries the seeds of future decline. As Kennedy writes, “If a state overextends
itself strategically . . . it runs the risk that the potential benefits from
external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all.” This
phenomenon of “imperial overstretch”, Kennedy argues, is common to all great
powers. In 1987, when Kennedy’s book was published, the United States worried
that it might be succumbing to this disease. Just because the Soviet Union fell
first did not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis.
More recently, it is Jared
Diamond, an anthropologist, who has captured the public imagination with a
grand theory of rise and fall. His 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed”, is cyclical history for the so-called Green Age: tales of
past societies, from seventeenth-century Easter Island to twenty-first-century
China, that risked, or now risk, destroying themselves by abusing their natural
environments. Diamond quotes John Lloyd Stevens, the American explorer and
amateur archaeologist who discovered the eerily dead Mayan cities of Mexico: “Here
were the remains of a cultivated, polished, and peculiar people, who had passed
through all the stages incident to the rise and fall of nations, reached their
golden age, and perished.” According to Diamond, the Maya fell into a classic
Malthusian trap as their population grew larger than their fragile and
inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation,
but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought, and soil
exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally,
collapse.
Diamond’s warning is that
today’s world could go the way of the Maya. This is an important message, no
doubt. But in reviving the cyclical theory of history, “Collapse” reproduces an
old conceptual defect. Diamond makes the mistake of focusing on what historians
of the French Annales school called la longue durée, the long
term. No matter whether civilizations commit suicide culturally, economically,
or ecologically, the downfall is very protracted. Just as it takes centuries
for imperial overstretch to undermine a great power, so, too, does it take
centuries to wreck an ecosystem. As Diamond points out, political leaders in
almost any society - primitive or sophisticated - have little incentive to
address problems that are unlikely to manifest themselves for a hundred years
or more.
Did the proconsuls in Cole’s “The
Consummation of Empire” really care if the fate of their
great-great-grandchildren was destruction? No. Would they have accepted a tax
increase that would have financed a preemptive strike against the next
millennium’s barbarian horde? Again, no. As the UN Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen last December made clear, rhetorical pleas to save the planet for
future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic
distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now.
The current economic challenges
facing the United States are also often represented as long-term threats. It is
the slow march of demographics - which is driving up the ratio of retirees to
workers - and not current policy, that condemns the public finances of the
United States to sink deeper into the red. According to the Congressional
Budget Office’s “alternative fiscal scenario”, which takes into account likely
changes in government policy, public debt could rise from 44 percent before the
financial crisis to a staggering 716 percent by 2080. In its “extended-baseline
scenario”, which assumes current policies will remain the same, the figure is
closer to 280 percent. It hardly seems to matter which number is correct. Is
there a single member of Congress who is willing to cut entitlements or
increase taxes in order to avert a crisis that will culminate only when today’s
babies are retirees?
Similarly, when it comes to
the global economy, the wheel of history seems to revolve slowly, like an old
water mill in high summer. Some projections suggest that China’s GDP will
overtake the United States’ GDP in 2027; others say that this will not happen
until 2040. By 2050, India’s economy will supposedly catch up with that of the
United States, too. But to many, these great changes in the balance of economic
power seem very remote compared with the timeframe for the deployment of U.S.
soldiers to Afghanistan and then their withdrawal, for which the unit of
account is months, not years, much less decades.
Yet it is possible that this
whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed. Perhaps Cole’s artistic
representation of imperial birth, growth, and eventual death is a
misrepresentation of the historical process. What if history is not cyclical
and slow moving but arrhythmic - at times almost stationary, but also capable
of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive
over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
When
Good Systems Go Bad
Great powers and empires are,
I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting
components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction
more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere
between order and disorder - on “the edge of chaos”, in the phrase of the
computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate
quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact,
constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems “go critical”.
A very small trigger can set off a “phase transition” from a benign equilibrium
to a crisis - a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a
butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in
southeastern England.
Not long after such crises
happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in
the study of “fat tail” events - the low-frequency, high-impact moments that
inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions,
financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand
complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in
terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb
rightly condemned in “The Black Swan” as “the narrative fallacy”: the
construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post
hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Drawing casual inferences
about causation is an age-old habit. Take World War I. A huge war breaks out in
the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone. Before long,
historians have devised a story line commensurate with the disaster: a treaty
governing the neutrality of Belgium that was signed in 1839, the waning of
Ottoman power in the Balkans dating back to the 1870s, and malevolent Germans
and the navy they began building in 1897. A contemporary version of this
fallacy traces the 9/11 attacks back to the Egyptian government’s 1966
execution of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who inspired the Muslim
Brotherhood. Most recently, the financial crisis that began in 2007 has been
attributed to measures of financial deregulation taken in the United States in
the 1980s.
In reality, the proximate
triggers of a crisis are often sufficient to explain the sudden shift from a
good equilibrium to a bad mess. Thus, World War I was actually caused by a
series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914, the real origins of
9/11 lie in the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and the financial crisis
was principally due to errors in monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve
and to China’s rapid accumulation of dollar reserves after 2001. Most of the
fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and
deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes
the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.
To understand complexity, it
is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the
spontaneous organization of half a million ants or termites, which allows them
to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water
molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a
complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the
central nervous system, or what Charles Sherrington, the pioneering
neuroscientist, called “an enchanted loom”.
The political and economic
structures made by humans share many of the features of complex adaptive
systems. Heterodox economists such as W. Brian Arthur have been arguing along
these lines for decades. To Arthur, a complex economy is characterized by the
interaction of dispersed agents, a lack of central control, multiple levels of
organization, continual adaptation, incessant creation of new market niches,
and the absence of general equilibrium. This conception of economics goes
beyond both Adam Smith’s hallowed idea that an “invisible hand” causes markets
to work through the interactions of profit-maximizing individuals and Friedrich
von Hayek’s critique of economic planning and demand management. In
contradiction to the classic economic prediction that competition causes
diminishing returns, a complex economy makes increasing returns possible. In
this version of economics, Silicon Valley is a complex adaptive system; so is
the Internet itself.
Researchers at the Santa Fe
Institute, a nonprofit center devoted to the study of complex systems, are
currently looking at how such insights can be applied to other aspects of
collective human activity, including international relations. This effort may
recall the futile struggle of Edward Casaubon to find “the key to all
mythologies” in George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch”. But the attempt is
worthwhile, because an understanding of how complex systems function is an
essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.
Whether the canopy of a rain
forest or the trading floor of Wall Street, complex systems share certain
characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often
unanticipated changes - what scientists call “the amplifier effect”. A vaccine,
for example, stimulates the immune system to become resistant to, say, measles
or mumps. But administer too large a dose, and the patient dies. Meanwhile,
causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods
of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are
of little use. Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that
complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to
make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.
When things go wrong in a
complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.
There is no such thing as a typical or average forest fire, for example. To use
the jargon of modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a state of “self-organized
criticality”: it is teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the size of the
breakdown is unknown. Will there be a small fire or a huge one? It is very hard
to say: a forest fire twice as large as last year’s is roughly four or six or
eight times less likely to happen this year. This kind of pattern - known as a “power-law
distribution” - is remarkably common in the natural world. It can be seen not
just in forest fires but also in earthquakes and epidemics. Some researchers
claim that conflicts follow a similar pattern, ranging from local skirmishes to
full-scale world wars.
What matters most is that in
such systems a relatively minor shock can cause a disproportionate - and
sometimes fatal - disruption. As Taleb has argued, by 2007, the global economy
had grown to resemble an over-optimized electrical grid. Defaults on subprime
mortgages produced a relatively small surge in the United States that tipped
the entire world economy into a financial blackout, which, for a moment,
threatened to bring about a complete collapse of international trade. But
blaming such a crash on a policy of deregulation under U.S. President Ronald
Reagan is about as plausible as blaming World War I on the buildup of the
German navy under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
Empire
State of Mind
Regardless of whether it is a
dictatorship or a democracy, any large-scale political unit is a complex
system. Most great empires have a nominal central authority - either a
hereditary emperor or an elected president - but in practice the power of any
individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social, and
political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit
many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems - including the
tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly. But this fact is
rarely recognized because of the collective addiction to cyclical theories of
history.
Perhaps the most famous story
of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome. In “The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire”, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788,
Edward Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history, from 180 to 1590. This
was history over the very long run, in which the causes of decline ranged from
the personality disorders of individual emperors to the power of the Praetorian
Guard and the rise of monotheism. After the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180,
civil war became a recurring problem, as aspiring emperors competed for the
spoils of supreme power. By the fourth century, barbarian invasions or
migrations were well under way and only intensified as the Huns moved west.
Meanwhile, the challenge posed by Sassanid Persia to the Eastern Roman Empire
was steadily growing.
But what if fourth-century
Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with
political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral
features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome’s fall was sudden and
dramatic - just as one would expect when such a system goes critical. As the
Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins have argued, the final
breakdown in the Western Roman Empire began in 406, when Germanic invaders
poured across the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Rome itself was sacked by the
Goths in 410. Co-opted by an enfeebled emperor, the Goths then fought the
Vandals for control of Spain, but this merely shifted the problem south.
Between 429 and 439, Genseric led the Vandals to victory after victory in North
Africa, culminating in the fall of Carthage. Rome lost its southern
Mediterranean breadbasket and, along with it, a huge source of tax revenue.
Roman soldiers were just barely able to defeat Attila’s Huns as they swept west
from the Balkans. By 452, the Western Roman Empire had lost all of Britain,
most of Spain, the richest provinces of North Africa, and southwestern and
southeastern Gaul. Not much was left besides Italy. Basiliscus, brother-in-law
of Emperor Leo I, tried and failed to recapture Carthage in 468. Byzantium
lived on, but the Western Roman Empire was dead. By 476, Rome was the fiefdom
of Odoacer, king of the Goths.
What is most striking about
this history is the speed of the Roman Empire’s collapse. In just five decades,
the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence
from the late fifth century - inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer
coins, smaller cattle - shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished
rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What Ward-Perkins calls “the end of
civilization” came within the span of a single generation.
Other great empires have
suffered comparably swift collapses. The Ming dynasty in China began in 1368,
when the warlord Zhu Yuanzhang renamed himself Emperor Hongwu, the word hongwu
meaning “vast military power”. For most of the next three centuries, Ming
China was the world’s most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure. Then,
in the mid-seventeenth century, political factionalism, fiscal crisis, famine,
and epidemic disease opened the door to rebellion within and incursions from
without. In 1636, the Manchu leader Huang Taiji proclaimed the advent of the
Qing dynasty. Just eight years later, Beijing, the magnificent Ming capital,
fell to the rebel leader Li Zicheng, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself
out of shame. The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little
more than a decade.
In much the same way, the
Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing
rapidity. French intervention on the side of the colonial rebels against
British rule in North America in the 1770s seemed like a good idea at the time
- a chance for revenge after Great Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War a
decade earlier - but it served to tip French finances into a critical state. In
May 1789, the summoning of the Estates-General, France’s long-dormant
representative assembly, unleashed a political chain reaction that led to a
swift collapse of royal legitimacy in France. Only four years later, in January
1793, Louis XVI was decapitated by guillotine.
Although several narrative
fallacies suggest that the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov empires were doomed
for decades before World War I, the disintegration of the dynastic land empires
of eastern Europe came with equal swiftness. What was impressive, in fact, was
how well these ancient empires were able to withstand the test of total war.
Their collapse only began with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. A mere
five years later, Mehmed VI, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, departed
Constantinople aboard a British warship. With that, all three dynasties were
defunct.
The sun set on the British
Empire almost as suddenly. In February 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill
was at Yalta, dividing up the world with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and
Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. As World War II was ending, he was swept from
office in the July 1945 general election. Within a decade, the United Kingdom
had conceded independence to Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Egypt, Eritrea, India,
Iran, Israel, Jordan, Libya, Madagascar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Suez
crisis in 1956 proved that the United Kingdom could not act in defiance of the
United States in the Middle East, setting the seal on the end of empire.
Although it took until the 1960s for independence to reach sub-Saharan Africa
and the remnants of colonial rule east of the Suez, the United Kingdom’s age of
hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over
Germany and Japan.
The most recent and familiar
example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within
the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the
historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the
high oil prices of the 1970s that “averted Armageddon”. But this did not seem
to be the case at the time. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became
general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the CIA estimated the Soviet
economy to be approximately 60 percent the size of the U.S. economy. This
estimate is now known to have been wrong, but the Soviet nuclear arsenal was
genuinely larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then
called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the
Soviets’ favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet less than five years
after Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe
had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an
empire fell off a cliff - rather than gently declining - it was the one founded
by Lenin.
Over
the Edge
If empires are complex systems
that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, rather
than cycling sedately from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon, what are the
implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline
may be a waste of time - it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should
most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are
associated with fiscal crises. All the above cases were marked by sharp imbalances
between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing
public debt. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly, indeed, as
the United States contemplates a deficit for 2009 of more than $1.4 trillion -
about 11.2 percent of GDP, the biggest deficit in 60 years - and another for
2010 that will not be much smaller. Public debt, meanwhile, is set to more than
double in the coming decade, from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in
2019. Within the same timeframe, interest payments on that debt are forecast to
leap from eight percent of federal revenues to 17 percent.
These numbers are bad, but in
the realm of political entities, the role of perception is just as crucial, if
not more so. In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power
that really matter but expectations about future power. The fiscal numbers
cited above cannot erode U.S. strength on their own, but they can work to
weaken a long-assumed faith in the United States’ ability to weather any
crisis. For now, the world still expects the United States to muddle through,
eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the
alternatives have been exhausted. Through this lens, past alarms about the
deficit seem overblown, and 2080 - when the U.S. debt may reach staggering
proportions - seems a long way off, leaving plenty of time to plug the fiscal
hole. But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news - perhaps a negative
report by a rating agency - will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet
news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about
the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to
mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive
system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
Over the last three years, the
complex system of the global economy flipped from boom to bust - all because a
bunch of Americans started to default on their subprime mortgages, thereby
blowing huge holes in the business models of thousands of highly leveraged
financial institutions. The next phase of the current crisis may begin when the
public begins to reassess the credibility of the monetary and fiscal measures
that the Obama administration has taken in response. Neither interest rates at
zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the
United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures
will lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. As Thomas
Sargent, an economist who pioneered the idea of rational expectations,
demonstrated more than 20 years ago, such decisions are self-fulfilling: it is
not the base supply of money that determines inflation but the velocity of its
circulation, which in turn is a function of expectations. In the same way, it
is not the debt-to-GDP ratio that determines government solvency but the
interest rate that investors demand. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations
change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal
crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece
- it happened there at the end of last year, plunging the country into fiscal
and political crisis.
Finally, a shift in expectations
about monetary and fiscal policy could force a reassessment of future U.S.
foreign policy. There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process:
if interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue, military
expenditure is the item most likely to be cut because, unlike mandatory
entitlements, it is discretionary. A U.S. president who says he will deploy
30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and then, in 18 months’ time, start
withdrawing them again already has something of a credibility problem. And what
about the United States’ other strategic challenges? For the United States’
enemies in Iran and Iraq, it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy
today is preprogrammed to reduce the resources available for all overseas
military operations in the years ahead.
Defeat in the mountains of the
Hindu Kush or on the plains of Mesopotamia has long been a harbinger of
imperial fall. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union withdrew from
Afghanistan in the annus mirabilis of 1989. What happened 20 years ago,
like the events of the distant fifth century, is a reminder that empires do not
in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and
predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the
process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining
causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function
in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly,
they collapse. To return to the terminology of Thomas Cole, the painter of “The
Course of Empire”, the shift from consummation to destruction and then to
desolation is not cyclical. It is sudden.
A more appropriate visual
representation of the way complex systems collapse may be the old poster, once
so popular in thousands of college dorm rooms, of a runaway steam train that
has crashed through the wall of a Victorian railway terminus and hit the street
below nose first. A defective brake or a sleeping driver can be all it takes to
go over the edge of chaos.
000
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard
University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is “The Ascent
of Money: A Financial History of the World”.
000
Reproduced from “Foreign
Affairs” magazine ( http://www.foreignaffairs.com ). Copyright © 2002-2010 by the
Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
000
