Sir Niall Ferguson, born in 1964, is a British and American historian and one of the most visible public intellectuals of his generation. He is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, after a career that has taken in professorships at Harvard, the London School of Economics and New York University, along with a senior research fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. He was knighted in 2024 for services to literature.
Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism – and he is not a neutral guide, holding openly positive views of the British Empire and calling himself a supporter of Reagan and Thatcher. Readers can weigh that as they see fit; it has done nothing to dent his reach. Time named him among the world’s 100 most influential people in 2004, and his television series The Ascent of Money won an International Emmy in 2009.
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