Niall Ferguson

His dissertation was titled "Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924".

Niall Campbell Ferguson FRSE (born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish–American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism.

He holds positive views concerning the British Empire.

Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964 to James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher.

Ferguson grew up in the Ibrox area of Glasgow in a home close to the Ibrox Park football stadium.

He attended The Glasgow Academy.

He was brought up as—and remains (as of the last version of this article) —an atheist, though he has encouraged his children to study religion and attends church occasionally.

In a 2023 interview, however, Ferguson declares: "I'm a lapsed atheist... I go to church every Sunday, precisely because having been brought up as an atheist, I came to realise in my career as a historian that not only is atheism a disastrous basis for a society... but also because I don't think it can be a basis for individual ethical decision making".

Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side.

His maternal grandfather, a journalist, encouraged him to write.

He has described his parents as "both very much products of the Scottish Enlightenment."

Ferguson ascribes his decision to read history at university instead of English literature to two main factors: Leo Tolstoy's reflections on history at the end of War and Peace (which he read at the age of fifteen), and his admiration of historian A. J. P. Taylor.

Ferguson received a demyship (highest scholarship) from Magdalen College, Oxford.

Whilst a student there, he wrote a 90-minute student film The Labours of Hercules Sprote, played double bass in a jazz band "Night in Tunisia", edited the student magazine Tributary, and befriended Andrew Sullivan, who shared his interest in right-wing politics and punk music.

He had become a Thatcherite by 1982.

He graduated with a first-class honours degree in history in 1985.

Ferguson studied as a Hanseatic Scholar at the University of Hamburg from 1986 until 1988.

He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1989.

In 1989, Ferguson worked as a research fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge.

From 1990 to 1992 he was an official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

He then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 2000 he was named a professor of political and financial history.

In 2000 Ferguson was a founding director of Boxmind, an Oxford-based educational technology company.

In 2002 Ferguson became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University Stern School of Business, and in 2004 he became the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

In 2004, he was one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

In 2006 he set up Chimerica Media Ltd., a London-based television production company.

In 2007 Ferguson was appointed as an investment management consultant by GLG Partners, to advise on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions.

Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009.

Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek.

From 2010 to 2011, Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics.

In May 2010, Michael Gove, education secretary, asked Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus, to be entitled "history as a connected narrative", for schools in England and Wales.

In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

In the same year emails were released to the public and university administrators which documented Ferguson's attempts to discredit a progressive activist student at Stanford University who had been critical of Ferguson's choices of speakers invited to the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative.

He teamed with a Republican student group to find information that might discredit the student.

Ferguson resigned from leadership of the program once university administrators became aware of his actions.

Ferguson responded in his column saying, "Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone. "A famous victory," I wrote the morning after the Murray event. 'Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.' Then I added: 'Some opposition research on Mr O might also be worthwhile'—a reference to the leader of the protests. None of this happened. The meetings of the student committee were repeatedly postponed. No one ever did any digging on "Mr O". The spring vacation arrived. The only thing that came of the emails was that their circulation led to my stepping down."

In 2016 Ferguson left Harvard to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005.

Ferguson has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham, Macquarie University (Australia) and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile).

He began writing a semi-monthly column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020.