Niall Ferguson
NIALL FERGUSON is one of our most influential commentators on Geopolitics and the Global Economy. The wide range of his expertise underscores his ongoing importance as a keynote speaker.
A Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, he has published fourteen books, including The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration, is currently writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which—Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist—has been published to critical acclaim.
He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His many other prizes and awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).
In addition to writing a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and the Boston Globe, he is the founder and Managing Director of Greenmantle LLC, a Cambridge-based advisory firm.
TOPICS
- Populism and Globalization: Politics in the Age of Trump
- Networks versus Hierarchies: Silicon Valley in Historical Perspective
- The Descent of Money: Are We Stuck with Economic Stagnation or Can We Bounce Back?
- The Geopolitical Taper: Can American Power Make a Comeback?
- The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
- Civilization: The West and the Rest
- Business Empires: How Big Companies Rise and Fall
- Is This the Chinese Century?
- Are Humans Redundant?
Full Biography
Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honors in 1985. After two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, he took up a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1989, subsequently moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, a post he held until 2000, when he was appointed Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford. Two years later he left for the United States to take up the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, before moving to Harvard in 2004.
His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897- 1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller and subsequently published in the United States, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.
In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books) and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Penguin). The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Basic), following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.
He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic), was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin. Two years later he published The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, which
was also a PBS series. His most recent book is the best-selling Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin, 2008). It aired on PBS this year. He has just completed a biography of the banker Siegmund Warburg and is now working on the life of Henry Kissinger.
A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He is a contributing editor for the Financial Times and a regular contributor to Newsweek. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the world’s hundred most influential people.
