ABOUT NIALL FERGUSON
My day job is as the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. I am also a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where I served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History.
I’ve written sixteen books. The first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays I edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 I published The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. 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, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, I published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000.
In 2003, I wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, 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, and prompted TIME magazine to name me one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Two years later I published The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, a television adaptation of which was screened by PBS in 2007. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, followed in 2008; it too was a PBS series, winning the International Emmy award for Best Documentary, as well as the Handelszeitung Economics Book Prize. In 2011 he published Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a Channel 4/PBS documentary series. A year later came the three-part television series “China: Triumph and Turmoil.” The book based on my 2012 BBC Reith lectures, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, was a New York Times bestseller within a week of its publication.
I turned to biography in recent years, publishing High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg in 2010. I am currently writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which was published in 2015 as Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. The book won the 2016 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. In 2011, my film company Chimerica Media released its first feature-length documentary, “Kissinger,” which won the New York Film Festival’s prize for Best Documentary.
My 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and was also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson’s Networld. My most recent book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published in 2021 by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize.
I was the Philippe Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in 2010-11. I was also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, from 2016 until 2021. I am currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. I am also a member of the board of trustees the London-based Centre for Policy Studies and the newly founded University of Austin.
Prizes and awards include the GetAbstract International Book Award (2009), the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013), the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize (2013), the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education (2016); and Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards. I have received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham (UK), Macquarie University (Australia), and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile).
In addition to writing a regular column for the Free Press, I am the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, an advisory firm, and a board member of Ualá, a Latin American bank.
I am married to the author and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and have been blessed with five children.
Why subscribe?
In addition to my regular columns for the Free Press and journalism elsewhere, I intend to publish here all the writing and talking I do that belongs under the heading of applied history.
Applied history is a term I first began to use nearly ten years ago to distinguish my work from a great deal of what passes for history nowadays. I do not claim to have originated it. The first use of “applied history” of which I am aware was as the title of an obscure Iowa journal in 1912. And I have been only one of several scholars—including Graham Allison at Harvard and the founders of the new Journal of Applied History—who have sought to promote the idea more recently.
Put simply, the point of applied history is to illuminate contemporary problems with past experience derived from serious study. But the fun of applied history is quite simply time travel itself.
When I was a boy, there was only one superhero I revered, and that was Doctor Who, the Time Lord. The heroes of the American Marvel comics were creatures of implausible muscularity in gawdy body stockings. But the Doctor used only his powerful brain (and his sonic screwdriver) to overcome his adversaries. Endearingly, he also dressed like a rather eccentric Oxford don. More importantly, thanks to the Tardis—a marvelous spaceship disguised to look like one of the old police telephone boxes that used to exist in England—Doctor Who had the power to travel through time as well as space. This superpower always fascinated me in a way that the abilities to make giant spiderwebs or morph into an enraged green giant did not. I now realize this early fascination with time travel was one of the reasons I became an historian. For the only way to travel backwards through time—and, I would say, also forwards—is to immerse oneself in the study of the past. (A Ukrainian friend likes to say that one achieves a similar result by drinking wine—the older the vintage, the further back one goes. The two methods are compatible.)
Most of what I post here, aside from columns written for The Free Press, will be free to subscribers. However, as Samuel Johnson famously told James Boswell, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I shall therefore quite deliberately make some (especially interesting) material accessible only to paying subscribers. They will also be given preferential access to video and audio content.
The spirit of this enterprise is encapsulated by a painting by Titian, his Allegory of Prudence, which he completed at some point between 1550 and 1565.
Look closely and you can see that there in an inscription. It reads:
EX PRÆTE/RITO // PRÆSENS PRVDEN/TER AGIT // NI FVTVRA / ACTIONĒ DE/TVRPET
This translates as: “Learning from Yesterday, Today acts prudently lest by his action he spoil Tomorrow.”
A reproduction of the Allegory of Prudence hung in the original offices of Greenmantle in Harvard Square between 2011 and 2016. It was there that I first started to practice applied history, as I and my first employees sought to use our historical knowledge to illuminate the questions then perplexing investors and asset managers. Though Greenmantle’s research remains exclusively available to our clients, I nevertheless think a time has arrived when it is right to share at least some aspects of our methodology with a wider audience.
Financial markets are themselves a kind of time machine. Stock and bond markets exists so that informed traders can collectively estimate the net present value of the future earnings of a company’s stock, or the probability that a corporation or government may continue punctually and fully to pay the interest and principal due on its bonds in a currency not debased by inflation. A futures market allows participants to speculate on the future prices of commodities and securities. Unlike most historians, I have spent part of my career interpreting financial data as a source of evidence about contemporaries’ expectations of the future. And I have spent another part of my career seeking to anticipate these markets’ movements on the basis of historical insight.
The great lesson we learn from such work is that a very substantial proportion of future events lie in the domain of uncertainty. One simply cannot predict them, or even attach meaningful probabilities to them, on the basis of any reliable regularities, much less grand cycles of history.
One of the most important lessons of applied history is that the historical process is too complex to model, much less to prophesy, and that one must be prepared to be wrong sometimes. If one is wrong half the time, of course, one risks being replaced by the tossing of a coin. Over the years, however, I have been increasingly impressed by the performance of Greenmantle research, the predictive statements of which tend to be right roughly two thirds of the time—and more often than that on the epochal events of our time.
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