Britain could have stayed out of World War I and lived with a German victory in the conflict, a leading historian has said, describing British intervention as "the biggest error in modern history."
Niall Ferguson said there had been no immediate threat to Britain. It could have faced Germany at a later date on its own terms, rather than rushing in unprepared, which led to catastrophic costs, he said.
"Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914," he said in an interview with BBC History Magazine.
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He wondered why Britain intervened on land so early, when it was quite unprepared for the fighting.
"Creating an army more or less from scratch and then sending it into combat against the Germans was a recipe for disastrous losses," he said.
Wondering whether this was the best way for Britain to deal with the challenge posed by imperial Germany, Ferguson said: "My answer is no."
Even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a massive challenge to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms, he noted.
Given the resources that Britain had in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when it could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its greater naval and financial capability, he added.
Ferguson, the Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard University, rejected the argument that Britain was forced to act in 1914 to secure its borders and Channel ports.
"This argument, which is very seductive, has one massive flaw in it, which is that Britain tolerated exactly that situation happening when Napoleon overran the European continent, and did not immediately send land forces to Europe," he remarked.
"It wasn't until the peninsular war that Britain actually deployed ground forces against Napoleon. So strategically, if Britain had not gone to war in 1914, it would still have had the option to intervene later, just as it had the option to intervene after the revolutionary wars had been under way for some time."
Ferguson's comments came after Education Secretary Michael Gove criticised leftwing academics for their take on Britain's role in the conflict and doubting if UK's role in the war should be seen as heroic courage or monumental error.
