The history game

"History books make the mistake of teaching about old men, often with a beard," Niall Ferguson told The Guardian. "Most of history is made by young people. I'm an old guy by historical standards, at 46. Child soldiers in Africa? There were lots of child soldiers in the Napoleonic wars. It's all about making history young."

The Harvard professor says he hopes to explain to British schoolchildren how western European nations became the world's dominant powers for centuries. But he wants to do so in a way that does not say the West is best.

Ferguson's critics, however, are unhappy with his view of the British Empire. The Scottish academic claims it's based more on cooperation than dominance. "Anybody who thinks empire is based on white people ruling non-white people is mistaken," Ferguson says. "The Raj was based on collaboration between a tiny British elite and Indian elites."

Conservative education secretary Michael Gove, who invited Ferguson to design the new history curriculum, praised him for approaching "the legacy of the British Empire with a balanced mind, accepting its manifold evils, but also ready to acknowledge its progressive side".

Ferguson has worked with a US company to create a World War II video game for use in classrooms. He believes software could help students understand the forces that change the world. "History is more like a game than it is a novel, because you don't know, when you're in it, what the end is going to be.