Niall Ferguson

Biography

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, Lessons for Global Power, and The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. His book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, is an international bestseller and the basis for a multipart television documentary.

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.

A public intellectual whose work impacts finance, government, and academia, Ferguson 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 of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

A prolific commentator on contemporary economics and politics for the American and British press (as well as an experienced radio and television presenter), his work regularly appears in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books and many other publications. He is a regular contributor to The Financial Times.

Publications

Civilization: The West and the Rest

If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople.

By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe - Aragon, Castile, France, Portugal and Scotland - would have seemed little better. As for fifteenth-century North America, it was an anarchic wilderness compared with the realms of the Aztecs and Incas. The idea that the West would come to dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. And yet it happened.

What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications" that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If so, Ferguson warns, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy.

Civilization takes readers on their own extraordinary journey around the world - from the Grand Canal at Nanjing to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; from Machu Picchu in the Andes to Shark Island, Namibia; from the proud towers of Prague to the secret churches of Wenzhou. It is the story of sailboats, missiles, land deeds, vaccines, blue jeans and Chinese Bibles."

Titles

Those With Guns and Those Who Dig: The World Economy After the Crisis

The Ascent and Descent of Money: What Went Wrong with Western Finance?

Rebuilding Capitalism after the Global Financial Crisis

Globalization: Past, Present and Possible Futures

Political Risk and the Global Business Environment

Business Empires: How Big Companies Rise and Fall

Is This the Chinese Century?