Niall 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 at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Born in Glasgow in 1964, Ferguson graduated from Magdalen College with First Class Honors 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 returning to Oxford where he was appointed professor of Political and Financial History in 2000. Two years later he left for the US where he took up the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, before moving to Harvard in 2004. In 1998 Ferguson published 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. Among his books are The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and Civilization: The West and the Rest. Ferguson is also author of a biography of the banker Siegmund Warburg and a multi-volume biography of Henry Kissinger.

Ferguson is a regular contributor to press, television, and radio on both sides of the Atlantic and a prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics. He is a contributing editor for the Financial Times, a regular contributor to Newsweek, and a senior adviser to GLG Partners.