Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is one of the world's leading historians of the global economy and author of such internationally-acclaimed works as The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and The Lessons for Global Power, the award-winning History of the House of Rothschild and Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. The New York Times Book Review named Ferguson’s 2006 work, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, one of the 100 Notable Books of 2006. His best-selling book, The Ascent of Money, delves into the history and evolution of finance. Ferguson’s latest book, High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg was published in June 2010.

Controversial, expansive, and eloquent, Ferguson has been called “the most talented British historian of his generation”. But the ambitious themes he explores in his work have urgent relevance to the present as well as the past: the costs and benefits of economic globalization; the interface between finance and politics; the lessons to be learned from the British experience of empire; and most recently, the strengths and limitation of American global power.

Named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Ferguson is a public intellectual whose work impacts industry, finance, government, and academia.

Ferguson is both a public intellectual and an acclaimed academic. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Professor of International History at Harvard University.

• Geopolitics of the Credit Crunch

• Business Empires: How Companies Rise and Fall

• Globalization in the Long Run: Some Lessons from History

• Political Risk and Moral Hazard: The Limits of Liquidity in a Dangerous World

• Political Risk and the Global Business Environment

• Is the United States an Empire? Should it be?

• To Have and Have Not: Commodities in the Long Run

• High Liquidity and Low Volatility in Historical Perspective

• The Next War of the World? Assessing Geopolitical Risk

• Why was the Twentieth Century so Violent?

• The Decline of the Dollar: The Rise and Fall of a Reserve Currency

• The Great Reconvergence? What Asian Economic Growth means for the West

• The Coming Fiscal Crisis of the Welfare State

• It's the Economy, Stupid – Or is it? Elections and the Business Cycle

• Whatever Happened to Inflation? From Commodity to Asset Price Inflation

• The Widening Atlantic: How Europe is Moving Away from America

• Are Capitalism and Democracy Bound to Win?

• 'Anglobalization': Lessons for the United States from the British Empire

• The End of Europe: The Economic, Social and Political Decline of an Idea

• Is the United States an Empire? Should it be?

• Sinking Globalization: What Could Go Wrong?

• Niall Ferguson's keynote speech at our annual conference in Montreux on the likelihood of a return to the gold standard, was both entertaining and informative. Delegates gave him the highest rating of all the speakers on their feedback forms.
  London Bullion Market Association
• Niall is a historian with a good grasp of economics, and a willingness to challenge head-on, conventional beliefs. He is highly articulate, engages the audience directly, and seems able to speak easily on a wide range of topics. He's one of the most capable and stimulating speakers I've ever seen.
  First Quadrant
• Niall Ferguson was a great draw to our conference and lived up to all our expectations as a guest speaker. He understood perfectly what we were hoping for and our audience was captivated by his highly intelligent but easy to understand address.
  GAM
• Not only is he a brilliant speaker with a vast array of financial and historical anecdotes at his finger tips, he's also a down to earth, approachable guy. He will energize the audience with his engaging analysis of geopolitics, history and finance.
  Drobny Capital

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  November 2011

  Civilization: The West and the Rest

  In Civilization: The West and the Rest, bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. These were the "killer applications" that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic. Civilization shows just how fewer than a dozen Western empires came to control more than half of humanity and four fifths of the world economy.

  
  
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  June 2010

  High Financier

  In this groundbreaking new biography, based on more than 10,000 hitherto unavailable letters and diary entries, Niall Ferguson returns to his roots as a financial historian to tell the story of Siegmund Warburg, an extraordinary man whose philosophy of finance was the antithesis of the debt-fuelled, algorithm-driven banking of our own time. In High Financier, Ferguson reveals Warburg's idiosyncracies: the love-hate relationships, the feline intuitions, the mercurial temper-tantrums. But above all he recaptures the meticulous business methods and strict ethical code that set Warburg apart from the mere speculators and traders who inhabit today's financial world.

  
  
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  November 2008

  The Ascent Of Money

  Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance. Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.

  
  
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  October 2007

  The War of the World

  Astonishing in its scope and erudition, this is the magnum opus that Niall Ferguson's numerous acclaimed works have been leading up to. In it, he grapples with perhaps the most challenging questions of modern history: Why was the twentieth century history's bloodiest by far? Why did unprecedented material progress go hand in hand with total war and genocide? His quest for new answers takes him from the walls of Nanjing to the bloody beaches of Normandy, from the economics of ethnic cleansing to the politics of imperial decline and fall. The result, as brilliantly written as it is vital, is a great historian's masterwork.

  
  
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  February 2002

  The Cash Nexus: Economics and Politics From the Age of Warfare Through the Age of Welfare, 1700-2000

  Conventional wisdom has long claimed that economic change is the prime mover of political change, whether in the age of industry or Internet. But is it? Ferguson thinks it is high time we re-examined the link-the nexus, in Thomas Carlyle's phrase-between economics and politics. His central argument is that the conflicting impulses of sex, violence, and power are together more powerful than money. Among Ferguson's startling claims are: · Nothing has done more to transform the world economy than war, yet wars themselves do not have primarily economic causes.

  
  
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  September 2000

  The House of Rothschild

  This second volume of Niall Ferguson's acclaimed, landmark history of the legendary Rothschild banking dynasty concludes his myth-breaking portrait of one of the most powerful and fascinating families of modern times. With all the depth, clarity and drama with which he traced the Rothschild's ascent, Ferguson shows how their power waned as conflicts from Crimea to the Second World War repeatedly threatened the stability of their worldwide empire, and how their failure to establish themselves successfully in the United States would prove fateful. At once a classic family saga and a major work of economic, social and political history, this is the definitive biography of some of the most powerful financiers of recent times.

  
  
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  March 2000

  The Pity of War: Explaining World War I

  In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson makes a simple and provocative argument: that the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. Britain, according to Ferguson, entered into war based on naïve assumptions of German aims and England's entry into the war transformed a Continental conflict into a world war, which they then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces.That the war was wicked, horrific, inhuman,is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics.