Niall Ferguson loves statistics. And, he has a knack for deploying the most damning ones to great effect. At his recent appearance at the Cambridge Union to discuss problems with the way History is taught in British schools, he plied the audience with figure after figure to make his point: only 31 per cent of History students at a leading British university knew the location of the Boer War; only 16 per cent knew who commanded the British forces at Waterloo; only 11 per cent could name a single nineteenth-century Prime Minister. The audience was hooked.

Ferguson’s observations on the teaching of History are a central motivation behind his new book Civilization: The West and the Rest, which has been turned into a sleek new television series on Channel Four. This is Ferguson’s fifth book to be turned into a television series. He was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004, and has regularly been described as one of the world’s leading historians.

The main argument behind Ferguson’s latest book and the series is the idea that the rise of Western civilisation is the most important historical phenomenon of the last 500 years, yet it continues to be ignored when it comes to teaching History in schools.

“In British schools – and this has been brought home to me very forcibly by watching my children go through the British education system – there is no narrative,” he says. “They are taught History in bits, not even in the particularly obvious order.”

It is this oversight that Ferguson hopes to rectify with his compelling new volume. Written with the iPod generation in mind, the book posits that the rise of the West can be explained by six “killer apps”: competition, science, private property rights, medicine, consumer culture, and the work ethic. Ferguson believes that the unique combination of these six characteristics contributed to the extraordinary dominance that Westerners have enjoyed over “Resterners” for the last five centuries.

Part of the reason why Ferguson thinks this narrative has been ignored is the culture of political correctness that shrinks away from anything that might sound Eurocentric.  “There’s been a kind of politically correct impulse to treat all civilizations as if they were historically equal,” he explains. “I’m sure that came from commendable motives, but it’s historically rather questionable.”

This same impulse, Ferguson believes, has led historians to over-emphasise the role of colonialism and imperialism in facilitating the rise of the West. “One thing that has come to the fore in the way that the histories of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are taught is that it’s all about imperial exploitation and that the only way to understand western expansion is as a tale of rape and plunder,” he says.

Comments such as these have made Ferguson a favourite target of liberal commentators, many of whom criticise him for being an apologist for empire. A Guardian columnist recently described him as “the cheerleading historian of western supremacy”, in an apparent reference to his 2003 book Empire, which argued that the British Empire was, on the whole, a positive enterprise.

Ferguson responds that his critics frequently ignore the full complexity of his arguments. “Neither Empire nor this book neglects the intended and unintended consequences of Western expansion,” he says. “But I try at the same time to show that there are positive aspects to that story and that you need to have both to write a nuanced historical account.”

The positive aspects of the West are certainly on ample display in Civilization; indeed, Ferguson makes it clear that the “apps” he has identified are attractive and superior institutions that are worth emulating. However, far from being a cheery-eyed account, the book is often sombre in tone, particularly when Ferguson wonders whether the extraordinary 500-year period of Western dominance might be coming to an end.

Pointing to the growing levels of public debt and rising welfare dependence, Ferguson suggests that the West is at risk of losing the killer app of work ethic. Combined with the astonishing rise of China as an economic powerhouse, Ferguson thinks that the decline might be closer than we think.

“There’s a sense that the era of Western predominance is ending now, in our generation’s time,” he says.

The invoking of a politicised issue like welfare reform makes one wonder if Ferguson may have a political objective in writing this book. However, he is quick to refute the idea that he is playing for a particular side. “I very deliberately do not put a party political rosette on my books,” he says.

“If you track my writings about both the UK and the US, you’ll notice that I actually have been as critical of the right as of the left, though people often forget that” (“especially people who work for The Guardian,” he can’t resist adding). “So, it’s not a party political crusade that I’m on.”

So, if it is not politics, what motivates Niall Ferguson? “My mission is very different,” he explains.  “Just two days ago, somebody came up to me at LSE. He was a young English Asian kid, and he said, ‘I want to thank you because your book got me here.’ I asked, ‘Why?’

“He said, ‘I grew up in a pretty nasty part of West London, and my mum was a single parent. I was about to be excluded from school, after multiple disciplinary offences. I saw a bit of Empire on the telly, and I thought that was interesting, so I got the book. And, that was the moment when I started working at school. Now I’m at the LSE, and I want to thank you for that.’

“That’s what motivates me to do my job,” Ferguson says.