Niall Ferguson

Born 18 April 1964

From Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom · Nationality: United States, United Kingdom · Writes nonfiction

Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.

Quotes

“The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”
1998-2004
“The empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar.”
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Chapter 1
“Reality did not take long to intrude.”
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Chapter 3
“The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.”
2010-2011
“The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.”
2010-2011

Books by Niall Ferguson in order

Books by Niall Ferguson in the order they were published, from Paper and Iron (1995) to Doom (2021).

Authors readers of Niall Ferguson often like, from our AI-written notes

Paul KennedyWrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a long comparative history of great power competition and economic change, which readers of Ferguson's work on empire often find relevant.
Margaret MacMillanWrote The War That Ended Peace, a widely read account of the causes of World War I, useful alongside The Pity of War.
Adam ToozeWrote Crashed, a history of the 2008 financial crisis and its global effects, a close match for readers of The Ascent of Money.
Jared DiamondWrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, which tries to explain global inequalities of power through geography and environment, a comparison point for Civilization.
Charles KindlebergerWrote Manias, Panics, and Crashes, a classic study of financial crises that readers interested in the history of finance often pair with Ferguson's books.
Simon SchamaWrote A History of Britain and other narrative histories, appealing to readers who enjoy Ferguson's broad, storytelling approach to British and imperial history.