Niall Ferguson

Sir Niall Campbell Ferguson (born 18 April 1964) is a British-American historian. He holds the Milbank Family Senior Fellowship at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellowship at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. His academic work and lectures cover international, economic, and financial history, as well as the histories of the British Empire and American imperialism. Ferguson holds a favourable view of the British Empire. *Time* magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. He has written and presented several television documentary series, including *The Ascent of Money*, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. In 2024, King Charles III knighted him for services to literature.

Ferguson has worked as a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for *Newsweek*. He began writing a semi-monthly column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020, and has been a regular columnist for *The Spectator* and the *Daily Mail*. In 2021, he co-founded the University of Austin. Since June 2024, he has written a bi-weekly column for *The Free Press*. His articles have appeared in journals such as *Foreign Affairs* and *Foreign Policy*. He is described as a conservative and has called himself a supporter of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964, Ferguson is the son of James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher. He grew up in the Ibrox area, near Ibrox Park football stadium, and attended The Glasgow Academy. Raised an atheist, he now attends church occasionally and encourages his children to study religion. In a 2023 interview with Jordan Peterson, he stated: “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.” He credits his father for instilling self-discipline and a work ethic, his mother for encouraging creativity, and his maternal grandfather, a journalist, for inspiring him to write. He describes his parents as “both very much products of the Scottish Enlightenment.” Ferguson says he chose history over English literature at university because of Leo Tolstoy’s reflections on history in *War and Peace* and his admiration for historian A. J. P. Taylor; Max Hastings quotes Ferguson as saying he “wanted to be the AJP Taylor de nos jours.”

At Oxford, Ferguson received a demyship (highest scholarship) from Magdalen College. As a student, he wrote a 90-minute student film, *The Labours of Hercules Sprote*, played double bass in a jazz band called “Night in Tunisia,” edited the student magazine *Tributary*, and befriended Andrew Sullivan, who shared his interest in right-wing politics and punk music. He became a Thatcherite by 1982. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in history in 1985 and earned an MA from Oxford. From 1986 to 1988, he studied as a Hanseatic Scholar at the University of Hamburg. He received his DPhil from Oxford in 1989, with a dissertation titled “Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924.”

After a research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1989, Ferguson became an official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge from 1990 to 1992. He then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where he was named a professor of political and financial history in 2000. In 2002, he became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University’s Stern School of Business. In 2004, he became the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. From 2010 to 2011, he held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics. In 2016, he left Harvard to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005. In 2021, he co-founded the University of Austin with Bari Weiss, Shakespeare scholar Pano Kanelos, and entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, stating that “higher ed is broken.” The private liberal arts college was approved to grant degrees in late 2023.

Ferguson has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham, Macquarie University (Australia), and Adolfo Ibáñez University (Chile). In May 2010, UK education secretary Michael Gove asked him to advise on developing a new history syllabus for schools in England and Wales, titled “history as a connected narrative.” In June 2011, he joined other academics to establish the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London. In 2018 at Stanford, emails released to the public and university administrators documented Ferguson’s attempts to discredit a progressive activist student who had criticised his choices of speakers for the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative; he teamed with a Republican Party student group to do so.