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 Honours 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. His latest book is The War of the World, a global history
of the Second World War, which was published to critical acclaim in September
2006. He is currently completing a biography of Siegmund Warburg and has
recently begun researching a 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 weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times. In 2004 Time magazine named him
as one of the world's hundred most influential people.
He and his wife Susan have three children. They divide their time between
the United States and the United Kingdom.
Globalization: Past, Present and Possible Futures
Is the United States an Empire? Should it be?
Are Capitalism and Democracy Bound to Win?
Political Risk and the Global Business Environment
High Liquidity and Low Volatility in Historical Perspective
To Have and Have Not: Commodities in the Long Run
Business Empires: How Big Companies Rise and Fall
