Timing is everything. In the spring of 2003, Niall Ferguson was known among historians as an astonishingly prolific scholar who had published important books on the German hyperinflation of the 1920s, the House of Rothschild and World War I, and was the impresario of a school of "counterfactual" writers who took seriously the amateur historian's favorite question: What would have happened if ...?
Then his book Empire--originally written to accompany a British TV series--was published in the U.S. The book's central thesis was a defense of the "liberal imperialism" that Britain purported to practice toward the end of its time...
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