什么是尼尔·弗格森

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., 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, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honours 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 moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, a post he held until 2000, when he was appointed Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford. Two years later he left for the United States to take up the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, before moving to Harvard in 2004.

His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller and subsequently published in the United States, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim 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. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Basic), following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic), 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. Two years later he published The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, which was also a PBS series. His most recent book is the best-selling Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin, 2008). It aired on PBS this year. He has just completed a biography of the banker Siegmund Warburg and is now working on the life of Henry Kissinger.

A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He is a contributing editor for the Financial Times and a regular contributor to Newsweek. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the world’s hundred most influential people.

Career

Academic career

1987–88 Hanseatic Scholar

1989–90 Research Fellow, Christ’s College, University of Cambridge

1990–92 Official Fellow and Lecturer, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

1992–2000 Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Jesus College, University of Oxford

2000–02 Professor of Political and Financial History, University of Oxford

2002–04 John Herzog Professor in Financial History at Stern School of Business, New York University

2004, continuing. Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School

Ferguson is a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

Business career

In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an Investment Management Consultant by GLG Partners, focusing 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.

Career as commentator

In October 2007, Niall Ferguson left The Sunday Telegraph to join the Financial Times, where he is now a contributing editor.

Ferguson has often disparaged the European Union as a disaster waiting to happen, and has criticised President Vladimir Putin of Russia for authoritarianism. In Ferguson's view, Putin's policies stand to lead Russia to catastrophes equivalent to those that befell Germany during the Nazi era.

Books

Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927

(Cambridge University Press, 1995; shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year award)

(editor) Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals

(Macmillan, 1997; also published in the U.S., Spain, Germany, Poland and Japan)

The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998; winner of the 1998 Wadsworth Prize for Business History and shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award; also published in the U.S. and Germany)

The Pity of War

(Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1998; also published in the U.S. and Germany)

The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000

(Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2001; also published in the U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain and South Korea; forthcoming in Turkey)

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

(Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2003; also published in the U.S. as Empire: The Rise and Fall of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power; translated into Korean)

Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

(London, Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2004; also published in the U.S. as Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, translated into Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish)

The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred

(London: Allen Lane / Penguin Press, 2006; also published in the United States as The War of the World: Twentieth-century Conflict and the Descent of the West; translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish; shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book of The Year Prize)

(with Oliver Wyman) The Evolution of Financial Services

(London / New York: Oliver Wyman, 2007)

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

(New York: Penguin Press, 2008)