A bizarre attack against me

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/23/a-bizarre-attack-niall-ferguson

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In his article "Teaching Niall Ferguson a (Colombian) history lesson" (20 December), David Hill launches a bizarre attack against me. The accusation relates to the single paragraph in my book The Ascent of Money that refers to the Amazonian Nukak people. According to Hill, what I wrote was inaccurate because I did not refer to a book about the Nukak edited by two Colombian anthropologists, Dany Mahecha and Carlos Franky. Nor did I refer to Franky's PhD thesis.

This would indeed have been negligent of me – but for the fact that my book was published in 2008 and their work was published three years later, in 2011.

Does the Guardian now expect clairvoyance of historians? The book by Mahecha and Franky sounds important and worthy of your readers' attention. The same can hardly be said for the fact that I was unable to divine its findings before they had written it.

In any case, nothing that Hill writes invalidates my point that traditional Nukak society had no use for money. The irony will not be lost on your readers that my source for the paragraph in question was Juan Forero, the Washington Post's Colombian correspondent.<br /><strong>Niall Ferguson</strong><br /><em>Harvard University</em>

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