About Niall Ferguson
Born in Glasgow in 1964, Niall Ferguson has become a leading specialist in financial and economic history, as well as of the history of the British empire.
Academic career
After graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1985, he became a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin before taking up a research fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge. Since then he has held a variety of academic posts in both the UK and the United States.
He is now Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts; senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford; and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
Writing
Following his first book Paper and Iron, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, he has written a number of acclaimed books of history, including The House of Rothschild: The world's banker, 1849-1998, The Pity of War 1914-1918 and The Cash Nexus: Money and politics in modern history, 1700-2000.
He has also written four books to accompany Channel 4 Television series: Empire: How Britain made the modern world (read an extract), Colossus: The rise and fall of the American empire (read an extract), War of the World: History's age of hatred (read an extract) and, his latest, The Ascent of Money: A financial history of the world.
He is completing a biography of Siegmund Warburg, founder of London-based bank S G Warburg & Co., and researching the life of diplomat and one-time US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He is also contributing editor for the Financial Times.
