Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James Rogers and this week we've got the international man of history that is Professor Neil Ferguson

you know him from his innumerable TV shows and his best-selling books on Henry Kissinger, The Pity of War and Now Doom, the

politics of catastrophe. Inspired by COVID, but by no means a COVID book, Neil takes us masterfully through the history of economics, the history of war,

politics and networks, science, to provide us with a history and also a general theory of disaster. His take on the First World War and the Spanish

influenza is especially mind-blowing. So here he is, Neil Ferguson on the

history of Doom. Hi Neil, good to see you, how you doing? Well, as well as can be expected in the final phase of a plague, I think is the answer to that.

The plague year is always longer than a year, and anybody who's studied the history of pandemics

knows that they come and waves and they play surprise tricks on you,

but I would say that to have been a historian at this time and one able to work from home easily and to inhabit a relatively

spacious home has made the experience a very bearable one for me in fact I'm almost at the point of

confessing my guilty secret I've quite enjoyed the

pandemic which is a terrible thing to say about catastrophe that's killed more than 3 million people

may be much more than 3 million people depending on what you think of the statistics but it has been an opportunity

for me to spend a lot more time with my family and not be traveling and I have to admit that has been pretty good.

Do you not miss the hustle and bustle of an academic conference? No, but then I've never been that sociable. I'm actually a repressed

misanthroat who's happiest in his study with a pile of books. I think that's why people become historians,

they're sort of sociopaths who would rather hang out with the dead reading their

old letters than be at parties.

I was speaking to a colleague the other day and they said that they think that we've all got a military history complex and I'm not entirely sure it's curable.

Well military history is a sort of endangered discipline in the United States

outside of the various military institutions. There are very few posts for military historians in the

major US universities and very few courses on offer.

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