Niall Ferguson:

«[Historians] are not engaged in model-building. We're not trying to simplify the world of human beings into some kind of mathematical model. Historians live and breathe the complexity of the past. And we accept that there really is a sample size of one. There's only one human history, and we can't re-run it in any laboratory.»

And:

«At the heart of [the historians] enterprise is imagination.»

The combination of understanding complexity and engaging in re-imagination of past thought, argues Ferguson, makes historians particularly skilled to understand «the futures».

Here's the whole thing.