Niall Ferguson

Explore about the Famous Teacher Niall Ferguson, who was born in United Kingdom on April 18, 1964. Analyze Niall Ferguson’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Niall Ferguson dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Niall Ferguson?

Niall Ferguson Biography

Known for his works on economics, global history, and imperialism, he penned such titles as The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. He taught history at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Oxford, New York University, and the London School of Economics.

He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in History from Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently began his teaching career at the University of Cambridge.

He wrote for such current events publications as The Financial Times, The Sunday Telegraph, and Newsweek.

He was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, by a physician father and a science teacher mother. His marriage to journalist and editor Susan Douglas, from 1994 to 2011, resulted in three children. He then married Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

He served as a political adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign of Republican candidate John McCain.

Ferguson wrote two volumes about the prominent Rothschild family: The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money’s Prophets: 1798–1848 and The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World’s Banker: 1849–1999. These books were the result of original archival research. The books won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and were also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.

The American historian Gerhard Weinberg in a review of The Pity of War strongly criticized Ferguson for advancing the thesis that it was idiotic for Britain to have fought a Germany that posed no danger. Weinberg accused Ferguson of completely ignoring the chief foreign policy aim of Wilhelm II from 1897 onwards, namely Weltpolitik (“World Politics”) and argued it was absurd for Ferguson to claim that allowing Germany to defeat France and Russia would have posed no danger to Britain. Weinberg wrote that Ferguson was wrong to claim that Germany’s interests were limited only to Europe, and maintained that if the Reich did defeat France in 1914, then Germany would have taken over the French colonies in Asia and Africa which would have definitely affected the balance of power all over the world, not just in Europe. Finally, Weinberg attacked Ferguson for claiming that the Tirpitz Plan was not a danger to Britain and that Britain had no reason to fear Germany’s naval ambitions, sarcastically asking if that was really the case, then why did the British redeploy so much of their fleet from around the world to the North Sea and spend so much money building warships in the Anglo-German naval arms race? Weinberg accused Ferguson of distorting both German and British history and ignoring any evidence that did not fit with his thesis that Britain should never have fought Germany, stating that The Pity of War was interesting as a historical provocation, but was not persuasive as history.

Another controversial aspect of The Pity of War is Ferguson’s use of counterfactual history also known as “speculative” or “hypothetical” history. In the book, Ferguson presents a hypothetical version of Europe being, under Imperial German domination, a peaceful, prosperous, democratic continent, without ideologies like communism or fascism. In Ferguson’s view, had Germany won World War I, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire as well as the world’s dominant financial power.

On the contrary, Ferguson maintained that Germany waged a preventive war in 1914, a war largely forced on the Germans by reckless and irresponsible British diplomacy. In particular, Ferguson accused the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey of maintaining an ambiguous attitude to the question of whether Britain would enter the war or not, and thus confusing Berlin over just what was the British attitude towards the question of intervention in the war. Ferguson accused London of unnecessarily allowing a regional war in Europe to escalate into a world war. Moreover, Ferguson denied that the origins of National Socialism could be traced back to Imperial Germany; instead Ferguson asserted the origins of Nazism could only be traced back to the First World War and its aftermath.

Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964 to James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher. He attended The Glasgow Academy. He was brought up as, and remains, an atheist, though he has encouraged his children to study religion and attends church occasionally.

Niall Campbell Ferguson (/ˈ n iː l / ; born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish-born historian. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University and New York University, visiting professor at New College of the Humanities and senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

In an interview, Ferguson described his relationship with the left: “No, they love being provoked by me! Honestly, it makes them feel so much better about their lives to think that I’m a reactionary; it’s a substitute for thought. ‘Imperialist scumbag’ and all that. Oh dear, we’re back in a 1980s student union debate.”

Ferguson has written regularly for British newspapers and magazines since the mid 1980s. At that time, he was lead writer for The Daily Telegraph, and a regular book reviewer for The Daily Mail.

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 married journalist Susan Douglas, whom he met in 1987 when she was his editor at The Sunday Times. They have three children: Felix, Freya, and Lachlan.

Ferguson studied as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin in 1987 and 1988. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1989: his dissertation was titled “Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924”.

In the summer on 1989, while travelling in Berlin, he wrote an article for a British newspaper with the provisional headline “The Berlin Wall is Crumbling,” but it was not published.

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 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. From 2010 to 2011, Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics. In 2016 Ferguson left Harvard to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005.

Ferguson sometimes champions counterfactual history, also known as “speculative” or “hypothetical” history, and edited a collection of essays, titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), exploring the subject. Ferguson likes to imagine alternative outcomes as a way of stressing the contingent aspects of history. For Ferguson, great forces don’t make history; individuals do, and nothing is predetermined. Thus, for Ferguson, there are no paths in history that will determine how things will work out. The world is neither progressing nor regressing; only the actions of individuals determine whether we will live in a better or worse world. His championing of the method has been controversial within the field. In a 2011 review of Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest, Noel Malcolm (Senior Research Fellow in History at All Souls College at Oxford University) stated that: “Students may find this an intriguing introduction to a wide range of human history; but they will get an odd idea of how historical argument is to be conducted, if they learn it from this book.”

In 1998, Ferguson published The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months. This is an analytic account of what Ferguson considered to be the ten great myths of the Great War. The book generated much controversy, particularly Ferguson’s suggestion that it might have proved more beneficial for Europe if Britain had stayed out of the First World War in 1914, thereby allowing Germany to win. Ferguson has argued that the British decision to intervene was what stopped a German victory in 1914–15. Furthermore, Ferguson expressed disagreement with the Sonderweg interpretation of German history championed by some German historians such as Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, who argued that the German Empire deliberately started an aggressive war in 1914. Likewise, Ferguson has often attacked the work of the German historian Michael Stürmer, who argued that it was Germany’s geographical situation in Central Europe that determined the course of German history.

In the early 2000s he wrote a weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph and Los Angeles Times, leaving in 2007 to become a contributing editor to the Financial Times. Between 2008 and 2012 he wrote regularly for Newsweek. Since 2015 he has written a weekly column for The Sunday Times and The Boston Globe, which also appears in numerous papers around the world.

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

In his 2001 book, The Cash Nexus, which he wrote following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, Ferguson argues that the popular saying, “money makes the world go ’round”, is wrong; instead he presented a case for human actions in history motivated by far more than just economic concerns.

…from 2002, the combination of making TV programmes and teaching at Harvard took me away from my children too much. You don’t get those years back. You have to ask yourself: “Was it a smart decision to do those things?” I think the success I have enjoyed since then has been bought at a significant price. In hindsight, there would have been a bunch of things that I would have said no to.

Ferguson supported the 2003 Iraq War, and he is on record as being not necessarily opposed to future western incursions around the world.

In the related TV documentary of 2003, Empire, which professor Dr Jon Wilson of the Department of History at KCL described as “false and dangerous” apologia, Ferguson argued that the mantle of the British Empire as the world’s foremost power was passed on to the United States during the Second World War, which led to Ferguson favorably reciting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden”—written in 1898 to praise the United States for becoming an imperial power by conquering the Philippines from Spain—as just as relevant today as it was in 1898. Ferguson argues that the United States should celebrate being an imperial power comparable to Britain, conquering other people’s countries for what Ferguson insists is their own good, and complains that far too often Americans refuse to accept that nation has an imperialist role to play in the modern world.

In 2003, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries, letters, and archives for what Ferguson calls a “warts-and-all biography” of Kissinger. In 2015, he published the first volume in a two-part biography titled Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist from Penguin Press.

Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic and financial history and British and American imperialism. He is known for his contrarian views and his defence of the British empire. He once ironically called himself “a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang” following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Ferguson was the inspiration for Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys (2004), particularly the character of Irwin, a history teacher who urges his pupils to find a counterintuitive angle, and goes on to become a television historian. Bennett’s character “Irwin”, writes David Smith of The Observer, gives the impression that “an entire career can be built on the trick of contrariness.”

Matthew Carr wrote in Race & Class that “Niall Ferguson, the conservative English [sic] historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled ‘Eurabia?’, in which he laments the ‘de-Christianization of Europe’ and the secularism of the continent that leaves it ‘weak in the face of fanaticism’.” Carr adds that “Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his (Oxford college) as another symptom of ‘the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom’,” and in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled ‘The End of Europe?’,

In its edition of 15 August 2005, The New Republic published “The New New Deal”, an essay by Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government’s fiscal and income security policies:

In its edition of 15 August 2005, The New Republic published “The New New Deal”, an essay by Ferguson and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. The two scholars called for the following changes to the American government’s fiscal and income security policies:

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. GLG is a UK-based hedge fund management firm headed by Noam Gottesman. Ferguson was also an adviser to Morgan Stanley, the investment bank.

Published in 2008, The Ascent of Money examines the history of money, credit, and banking. In it Ferguson predicts a financial crisis as a result of the world economy and in particular the United States using too much credit. He cites the China–United States dynamic which he refers to as Chimerica where an Asian “savings glut” helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money. While researching this book, in early 2007, Ferguson attended a session at a conference in Las Vegas at which a hedge fund manager stated there would never be another recession. Ferguson challenged this, and later the two agreed on a $14,000, 7 to 1 bet, that there would be a recession within five years. Ferguson collected $98,000.

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