Niall Ferguson

Early life and education

Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964 to James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher. Ferguson grew up in the Ibrox area of Glasgow in a home close to the Ibrox Park football stadium. He attended The Glasgow Academy. He was brought up as an atheist, although he has encouraged his children to study religion and attends church occasionally. In a 2023 interview with Jordan Peterson, Ferguson declared: "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."

Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side. His maternal grandfather, a journalist, encouraged him to write. He has described his parents as "both very much products of the Scottish Enlightenment". Ferguson ascribes his decision to read history at university instead of English literature to two main factors: Leo Tolstoy's reflections on history at the end of War and Peace, which he read as a schoolboy, and his admiration of historian A. J. P. Taylor, with Max Hastings quoting Ferguson as saying that he "wanted to be the AJP Taylor de nos jours".

Oxford

Ferguson received a demyship (highest scholarship) from Magdalen College, Oxford. While 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. In 1985, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history and was awarded an MA from Oxford. Ferguson studied as a Hanseatic Scholar at the University of Hamburg from 1986 until 1988. He received his DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 1989. His dissertation was titled "Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924".

Career

Academic career

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. In 2021 he joined Bari Weiss, the Shakespeare scholar Pano Kanelos and the entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale to found the University of Austin. At the time, Ferguson said he was starting the college because "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, Michael Gove, UK education secretary, asked Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus, to be titled "history as a connected narrative", for schools in England and Wales. In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

In 2018 at Stanford, emails were released to the public and university administrators which documented Ferguson's attempts to discredit a progressive activist student at Stanford University who had been critical of Ferguson's choices of speakers invited to the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative. He teamed with a Republican Party student group to find information that might discredit the student. Ferguson resigned from leadership of the program once university administrators became aware of his actions.

Ferguson responded in his column saying, "Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone. 'A famous victory', I wrote the morning after the Murray event. 'Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.' Then I added: 'Some opposition research on Mr O might also be worthwhile'—a reference to the leader of the protests. None of this happened. The meetings of the student committee were repeatedly postponed. No one ever did any digging on 'Mr O'. The spring vacation arrived. The only thing that came of the emails was that their circulation led to my stepping down."

Business

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

Politics and Society

Ferguson was an advisor to the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign and supported the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign.

Ferguson serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the World.minds Foundation.

Commentary, documentaries and broadcasting

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. In the summer of 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 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, Ferguson has written a weekly column for The Sunday Times and The Boston Globe, which also appears in numerous papers around the world. Ferguson's television series, The Ascent of Money, won the 2009 International Emmy award for Best Documentary. In 2011, his film company Chimerica Media released its first feature-length documentary, Kissinger, which won the New York Film Festival's prize for Best Documentary. In an interview with Peter Robinson, Ferguson recounted the "humiliation" his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, endured at being disinvited from giving the commencement address at Brandeis University in 2014. Observing this to being a recurring phenomena as "a curious illiberal turn" for universities, including Harvard where he was teaching, and that this made him a critic of cancel culture. Prospect has since described him as one of the most prominent supporters of anti cancel-culture. Ferguson has said "Wokeism has gone from being a fringe fashion to be the dominant ideology of the universities."

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

American Colossus (2004)

The War of the World (2006)

The Ascent of Money (2008)

Civilization: Is the West History? (2011)

Kissinger (2011)

China: Triumph and Turmoil (2012)

The Pity of War (2014)

Books

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.

In his 2003 book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Ferguson conducts a provocative reinterpretation of the British Empire, casting it as one of the world's great modernising forces. The Empire produced durable changes and globalisation with steampower, telegraphs, and engineers. Bernard Porter, famous for expressing his views during the Porter–MacKenzie debate on the British Empire, attacked Empire in The London Review of Books as a "panegyric to British colonialism". In response to this, Ferguson drew Porter's attention to the conclusion of the book, where he writes: "No one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the 'ethnic cleansing' of indigenous peoples." Despite this, Ferguson argues that the British Empire was still preferable to German and Japanese rule at the time:

The 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century too the empire more than justified its own existence. For the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly—and they admitted it themselves—far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.

The book was the subject for a documentary series on British television network Channel 4.

In his 2005 book, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Ferguson proposes that the United States aspires to globalize free markets, the rule of law, and representative government but shies away from the long-term commitments of manpower and money that are indispensable in taking a more active role in resolving conflict arising from the failure of states. The United States is an empire in denial, not acknowledging the scale of global responsibilities. The American writer Michael Lind, responding to Ferguson's advocation of an enlarged American military through conscription, accused Ferguson of engaging in apocalyptic alarmism about the possibility of a world without the United States as the dominant power and of a casual disregard for the value of human life.

Opinions, views and research

Ferguson has been referred to as a conservative historian by some commentators and fellow historians. Ferguson himself stated in a 2018 interview on the Rubin Report that his views align to classical liberalism, and has referred to himself as a "classic Scottish enlightenment liberal" on other occasions. Some of his research and conclusions have been criticised by commentators on the political left. In a 2011 interview, Ferguson said elements of the left "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 endorsed Kemi Badenoch's campaign during the July 2022 Conservative Party leadership election.

World War I

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. 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 attacked a number of ideas that he called "myths" in the book. They are listed here (with his counter-arguments in parentheses):

That Germany was a highly militarist country before 1914 (Ferguson claims Germany was Europe's most anti-militarist country).

That naval challenges mounted by Germany drove Britain into informal alliances with France and Russia before 1914 (Ferguson claims the British chose alliances with France and Russia as a form of appeasement due to the strength of those nations, and an Anglo-German alliance failed to materialize due to German weakness).

Rothschilds

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 books were widely acclaimed by historians, although they received some criticism. John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War-era historian, praised Ferguson's "unrivaled range, productivity and visibility", while criticising the book as unpersuasive and containing contradictory claims. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had praised Ferguson as an excellent historian but criticised him as a "nostalgist for empire". In a mixed review of a later book by Ferguson, The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, a reviewer for The Economist described how many regard Ferguson's two books on the Rothschilds "as one of the finest studies of its kind". Jeremy Wormell wrote that while The World's Banker: A History of the House of Rothschild had its virtues, it contained "many errors" which meant it was "unsafe to use it as a source for the debt markets".

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Robert Skidelsky praised Ferguson, stating: "Taken together, Ferguson's two volumes are a stupendous achievement, a triumph of historical research and imagination. No serious historian can write about the connection between the politics, diplomacy, and economics of the nineteenth century in the same way again. And, as any good work of history should do, it constantly prompts us to ask questions about our own age, when once again we have embarked on the grand experiment of a world economy without a world government."

Counterfactual history

Ferguson sometimes uses 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: "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."

Henry Kissinger

In 2003, former American 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. The thesis of this first volume was that Kissinger was greatly influenced in his academic and political development by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and especially by an interpretation of Kant that he learned from a mentor at Harvard University, William Yandell Elliott.

British Empire

Ferguson has defended the British Empire, stating, "I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home." Ferguson is critical of what he calls the "self-flagellation" that he says characterises modern European thought.

The moral simplification urge is an extraordinarily powerful one, especially in this country, where imperial guilt can lead to self-flagellation. ... And it leads to very simplistic judgments. The rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources. Did Senegal ultimately benefit from French rule? Yes, it's clear. And the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all.

Historians and commentators have considered his views on this issue and expressed their critical evaluation in various terms, from "audacious" yet "wrong", "informative", "ambitious" and "troubling", to "false and dangerous" apologia. Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London, has stated that it was correct of Seumas Milne to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to 'rehabilitate empire' in the service of contemporary great power interests". In November 2011, Pankaj Mishra reviewed Civilisation: The West and the Rest unfavourably in the London Review of Books. Ferguson demanded an apology and threatened to sue Mishra on charges of libel due to allegations of racism.

Jon Wilson, a professor of the Department of History at King's College London, is the author of India Conquered, a 2016 book intended to rebut Ferguson's arguments in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, who catalogues the negative elements of the British Raj, and describes the Empire TV program (2003) as "false and dangerous". Wilson agrees with Ferguson's point that the British innovations brought to India civil services, education, and railways, and had beneficial side effects, but faults them for being done in a spirit of self-interest rather than altruism.

About Ferguson's claim that Britain "made the modern world" by spreading democracy, free trade, capitalism, the rule of law, Protestantism, and the English language, Wilson charged that Ferguson never explained precisely how this was done, arguing that the reason was the lack of interest in the history of the people ruled by the British on Ferguson's part, who therefore could not perceive that the interaction between the colonisers and the colonised in places like India, where the population embraced aspects of British culture and rule that were appealing to them while rejecting others that were unappealing. Wilson argues that this interaction between the rulers and the ruled is more complex, and contradicts Ferguson's one-sided picture of the British "transforming" India that portrays the British as active and the Indians as passive. Wilson charged that Ferguson failed to look at the empire via non-British eyes because to do so would be to challenge his claim that Britain "made the modern world" by imposing its values on "the Other", and that the history of the empire was far more complicated than the simplistic version that Ferguson is trying to present.

Islam and "Eurabia"

Ferguson has endorsed the work of Bat Ye'or and her Eurabia conspiracy theory, providing a cover comment for her 2005 Eurabia book, in which he stated that "no writer has done more than Bat Ye'or to draw attention to the menacing character of Islamic extremism. Future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term 'Eurabia' as prophetic." Matthew Carr wrote in Race & Class that "Niall Ferguson, the conservative English 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?"

Ferguson struck a similarly Spenglerian note, conjuring the term "impire" to depict a process in which a 'political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes—when the energies come from outside into that entity'. In Ferguson's opinion, this process was already under way in a decadent 'post-Christian' Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam.

Ferguson deplored the November 2015 Paris attacks committed by Islamic State terrorists but stated he was not going to "stand" with the French as he argued that France was a lost cause, a declining state faced with an unstoppable Islamic wave that would sweep away everything that tried to oppose it. Ferguson compared the modern European Union to the Western Roman Empire, describing modern Europe as not that different from the world depicted by Edward Gibbon in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ferguson wrote:

Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union today... Let us be clear about what is happening. Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.

Iraq War

Ferguson supported the Iraq War and described himself a month after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as 'a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang' and he is on record as being not necessarily opposed to future Western incursions around the world.

It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

Donald Trump

Ferguson was initially skeptical of Donald Trump's bid for the 2016 United States presidential election. During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, Ferguson was quoted in early 2016: "If you bother to read some of the serious analysis of Trump's support, you realize that it's a very fragile thing and highly unlikely to deliver what he needs in the crucial first phase of the primaries ... By the time we get to March–April, it's all over. I think there's going to be a wonderful catharsis, I'm really looking forward to it: Trump's humiliation. Bring it on." Trump eventually won the nomination. After Brexit, Ferguson stated that Trump could win via the Electoral College if certain demographics turned out to vote in key swing states. Three weeks before the 2016 presidential election, after the Access Hollywood tape scandal, Ferguson stated in an interview that it "was over for Donald Trump", that "Trump had flamed out in all three Presidential debates", that "I don't think there can be any last minute surprise to rescue him [Trump]", and that there was no hope of Trump winning Independent voters and that Trump was "gone as a candidate", adding that "it seems to me clear that she [Hillary Clinton] is going to be the first female President of the United States. The only question is how bad does his [Trump's] flaming out affect candidates for the Senate, candidates for the House, further down on the ballot."

In 2018, Ferguson argued that a Clinton presidency would have been more disruptive to the United States, and that Clinton would have been "immediately" impeached as Trump supporters would have likely believed that the election was rigged. Ferguson stated that he regarded himself "in the middle ground" in a generally polarized public and media opinion on Trump's presidency. He elaborated that while he found Trump's personality "pretty hard to take", he cited several positive achievements undertaken by his administration, including America's stronger economic performance and noted that he found Trump's foreign policy stances on China, North Korea, and the Middle East an improvement over that of the Obama administration. He further opined that the media was more focused on Trump's behaviour on social media than the "competent job" being done by members of his administration. In 2019, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that the China–United States trade war was the beginning of a Second Cold War between the United States and China, and that despite the risks of the showdown the introduction of an external enemy similar to the Soviet Union could prove beneficial by reducing political polarization in the United States.

During the 2020 United States presidential election, Ferguson observed that contrary to arguments from Trump's opponents that he only appealed to older White men, statistics showed his support among Black and Latino voters had risen. He opined that Joe Biden was likely to win the presidency but that the Democratic Party would not see a "blue wave" of support as it had tried to turn the election into "a referendum on Trump's handling of COVID-19" when there "hasn't been anything exceptionally bad about American performance", and that the Democrats had misjudged the mood of voters concerned about law and order following the Black Lives Matter protests. After the election was concluded, Ferguson stated that both Trump and the "far-left of the Democratic Party" had lost. Ferguson condemned the 2021 United States Capitol attack committed by supporters of Trump, arguing on Twitter that the participants should be prosecuted and Trump's behaviour had cost the Republicans the Senate. He also argued that politicians who refused to condemn the event were unsuited for office. He argued that Trumpism was likely to remain a force within American politics and likened it to Jacobite Pretenders who sought to revolt in order to restore the House of Stuart to the British royal throne after the Glorious Revolution.

Trump's "New World Order"

In an article from November 2016 in The Boston Globe, Ferguson advised that Trump should support the efforts of the prime minister Theresa May to have the United Kingdom leave the European Union as the best way of breaking up the European Union, and sign a free trade agreement with the United Kingdom once Brexit is complete. To stabilise international relations, Ferguson speculated that Trump could give recognition to Russia as a great power, and work with Russian president Vladimir Putin by giving Russia a sphere of influence in Eurasia. In the same column, Ferguson advised Trump not to engage in a trade war with China, and seek a policy of co-evolution with General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping. Ferguson argued that Trump and Putin could work for the victory of Marine Le Pen (an advocate of Frexit) and the National Front in the 2017 French presidential election, arguing that Le Pen was the French politician most congenial to the Trump administration. Ferguson argued that a quintumvirate of Trump, Putin, Xi, May, and Le Pen could then result in a stable "world order" that would reduce the likelihood of international conflict.

Economic policy

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:

Replacing the personal income tax, corporate income tax, Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA), estate tax, and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, amounting to the amount of FRST that a household with similar demographics would pay if its income were at the poverty line, similar to the FairTax proposal.

Replacing the old age benefits paid under Social Security with a Personal Security System, consisting of private retirement accounts for all citizens, plus a government benefit payable to those whose savings were insufficient to afford a minimum retirement income

Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a universal Medical Security System that would provide health insurance vouchers to all citizens, the value of which would be determined by one's health

Cutting federal discretionary spending by 20%

In February 2010, during the Greek government-debt crisis, Ferguson appeared on the Glenn Beck Program predicting that if interest rates rose in the United States, it could experience a similar sovereign default and mass civil disorder to what was occurring in Greece. He also praised the Tea Party movement. Later in the year, he called for the Federal Reserve under chairman Ben Bernanke to end its second round of quantitative easing. In November 2012, Ferguson stated in a video with CNN that the U.S. has enough energy resources to move towards energy independence and could possibly enter a new economic golden age due to the related socio-economic growth—coming out of the post-world economic recession doldrums. Ferguson was an attendee of the 2012 Bilderberg Group meeting, where he was a speaker on economic policy. Ferguson was highly critical of the results of the 2016 European Union referendum, warning that "the economic consequences will be dire". Later, after backing the Remain campaign during the referendum, Ferguson changed his mind and came out in support of Britain's exit from the European Union.

Cryptocurrency

Ferguson was an early skeptic of cryptocurrencies, famously dismissing his teenage son's recommendation to buy Bitcoin in 2014. By 2017, he had changed his mind on Bitcoin's utility, saying it had established itself as a form of "digital gold: a store of value for wealthy investors, especially those located in countries with weak rule of law and high political risk". In February 2019, Ferguson became an advisor for digital asset protocol firm Ampleforth Protocol, saying he was attracted by the firm's plan to "reinvent money in a way that protects individual freedom and to create a payments system that treats everyone equally". In March 2019, Ferguson spoke at an Australian Financial Review Business Summit, where he admitted to being "wrong to think there was no ... use for a form of currency based on blockchain technology... I don't think this will turn out to be a complete delusion."

Scottish nationalism and the British Union

Ferguson has stated that he identified as a Scottish nationalist as a teenager but moderated his views after moving to England to study history. He has argued that Scottish nationalism is sometimes fueled by a distorted view that Scots have always been oppressed by the English and is misconceived by people from outside of the United Kingdom as the choice between being Scottish or English. Ferguson states that in contrast to the subjugations of Wales and Ireland, Scotland was united as an "equal" country to England during the Act of Union of 1707, and cites events such as King James VI of Scotland inheriting the English crown, the failed Darien scheme to colonize Panama, which prompted Scottish political elites to support the Union and that Scots were an integral part of the East India Company to question the narrative that Scotland was oppressed. Ferguson has also argued (citing Walter Scott's novel Waverley) that Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion remained a land divided by warring clans and religious factions, and that the Union helped to quell some of the conflicts.

During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Ferguson supported Scotland remaining within the United Kingdom, citing potential economic consequences of Scottish independence but argued that the opposition campaign needed to focus on Scotland's history of cosmopolitanism, as well as economic points to save the Union. In 2021, ahead of the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, Ferguson argued that the Labour Party administration under Tony Blair had made a mistake in believing devolution would stem Scottish nationalism but instead enabled the Scottish National Party (SNP) to assume regional power and criticised the SNP government of Nicola Sturgeon for its management of the Scottish economy, education and freedom of speech. Ferguson furthermore states that the best way for the British government to thwart independence and the SNP's separationist demands was not by "unthinkingly accepting the SNP's argument that it has a moral right to a referendum on secession every time it wins a parliamentary election" and allowing a slim majority vote in favour to decide the outcome but instead by following the example of Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien and minister Stephane Dion's who handled the Parti Quebecois's calls for Quebec secessionism by taking the matter to the Canadian Supreme Court and introducing the Clarity Act rather than letting it solely be up to "a slim majority of the voters of Quebec if Canada broke up".

European Union

In 2011, Ferguson predicted that Grexit (the notion of Greece leaving the euro currency) was unlikely to happen but that Britain would leave the European Union (EU) in the near future as it would be easier for Britain to leave the EU owing to the fact it was not part of the eurozone and that returning to a national currency would be harder for countries who had signed up to a single currency. In 2012, he described the Eurozone as a "disaster waiting to happen".

During the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Ferguson was initially critical of the idea of Britain leaving the EU despite his criticisms of the latter, warning that "the economic consequences will be dire", and endorsed a Remain vote. After backing the Remain campaign (Britain Stronger in Europe), Ferguson changed his stance and came out in support of Brexit, admitting that his support to stay in had been motivated in part on a personal level by not wanting the government of David Cameron (with whom he had a friendship) to collapse and in turn risk Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister. Ferguson elaborated that while Brexit would still have some economic consequences, the EU had been a "disaster" on its monetary, immigration, national security, and radical Islam policies. He also added that "one has to recognise that the European elite's performances over the last decade entirely justified the revolt of provincial England".

In 2020, Ferguson predicted that the EU was destined to become "moribund" and was at risk of collapse in the near future and that the single currency had only benefited Northern Europe and Germany in particular while causing economic havoc in Southern Europe. He also argued the "real disintegration of Europe" will happen over the EU's migration policies that he says have both exacerbated and failed to provide solutions to illegal immigration to the European continent from North Africa and the Middle East. Ferguson stated that high levels of illegal immigration from Muslim-majority nations would in turn further the rise of populist and Eurosceptic movements committed to rolling back or leaving the EU. Ferguson also predicted that in a decade's time Britain would question why there had been fuss, outcry, or debates over the manner of how to leave the EU over Brexit because "we'll have left something that was essentially disintegrating", and that "it would be a little bit like getting a divorce and then your ex drops dead, and you spent all that money on the divorce courts, if only you'd known how sick the ex was. The European Union is sick, and people don't really want to admit that, least of all in Brussels." When commenting on the ethnic diversity of the candidates for the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, Ferguson disputed that racism or nostalgia for the British Empire had played a significant role in the vote for Brexit.

COVID-19 pandemic

Ferguson, drawing on his research of the 1881–1896 cholera pandemic and the Spanish flu, began predicting that the COVID-19 pandemic would have a severe impact on the world in January 2020. He later criticized both the British and U.S. federal government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as inadequate, calling them "both, in their different ways, intelligible only as colossal failures by governments to make adequate preparations for a disaster they always knew to be a likely contingency". He also dismissed the idea that right-wing populism had been responsible for failure of government responses to the pandemic, accusing liberal politicians such as the then Belgian prime minister Sophie Wilmès and United States president Joe Biden of making similar mistakes to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

In April 2020, he published an op-ed alleging that Chinese authorities deliberately allowed international flights to continue departing Wuhan after the city was placed under quarantine. The claim was subsequently cited by several public figures, including Donald Trump. This allegation was later retracted.

He reflected in a 2021 podcast interview with Lex Fridman that many of the failures in the United States had been systemic rather than the personal fault of Trump, and that Trump was unfairly blamed because of the Trump administration's messaging. He alleged that Barack Obama's handling of the U.S. opioid epidemic had been similarly costly but more obscure. Ferguson also praised Operation Warp Speed, and argued that part of the reason for the failure of the U.S. government to effectively respond to the pandemic was the absence of a similar program for COVID-19 testing.

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

On 22 March 2022, around a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ferguson wrote: "I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft Stingers, antitank Javelins and explosive Switchblade drones. ... It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. ... Prolonging the war runs the risk not just of leaving tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead and millions homeless, but also of handing Putin something that he can plausibly present at home as victory." He also criticized the 2022 Moscow rally for justifying the invasion and described it as "fascistic".

Israel–Palestinian conflict

In wake of the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Ferguson said, "I think it is clear that Israel can no longer co-exist with Hamas in control of Gaza. If anybody doubted that, then surely those doubts were dispelled on October the 7th with the most hideous scenes of violence against Jews since the Holocaust". He added that "The issue is can Hamas be destroyed, as it should be, at an acceptable cost". Ferguson has also sharply criticized the accusations of genocide in Gaza, describing such claims as "utterly divorced from strategic reality".

Ferguson rejects plans to recognize a Palestinian state insisting that "nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future." He argues that the Palestinian Authority is widely despised and lacks real authority, while Hamas continues to command significant support, even in the West Bank, and remains fundamentally committed to violence. In Ferguson's view, the October 7 attacks should be seen as a decisive moral and political failure: "an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it." He adds that the enduring support for Hamas among Palestinians, and claims due to supposed widespread denial of the October 7 attacks, erodes any claim to statehood.

Personal life

Ferguson met journalist Sue Douglas in 1987, when she was his editor at The Sunday Times. They married in 1994, and went on to have three children. In February 2010, Ferguson separated from Douglas and thereafter started dating Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ferguson and Douglas divorced in 2011. Ferguson married Hirsi Ali on 10 September 2011; she gave birth to their son three months later. Upset about the media coverage of his relationship with Hirsi Ali, which implied that he had begun dating her before his first marriage had unraveled, Ferguson stated: "I don't care about the sex lives of celebrities, so I was a little unprepared for having my private life all over the country."

Ferguson dedicated his book Civilization to "Ayaan". In an interview with The Guardian, Ferguson spoke about his love for Ali who, he writes in the preface, "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world". The couple have two sons. In a 2024 interview with Greg Sheridan, Ferguson said that he, Hirsi Ali, and their two sons were baptised in September 2023.

Ferguson's self-confessed workaholism has placed strains on his personal relations in the past. In 2011, Ferguson commented:

[F]rom 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 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 who then goes on to become a television historian. Irwin, writes David Smith of The Observer, gives the impression that "an entire career can be built on the trick of contrariness".

In 2018, Ferguson became naturalised as a United States citizen. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE) in the disciplines of language, literature and history in 2020. On 14 June 2024, Ferguson was awarded a knighthood in the birthday honours list of King Charles III.

Selected bibliography

Ferguson, Niall (1995). Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47016-1.

— (1999). The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1849–1999. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-88794-3.

— (1998). The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81539-3.

— (1998). The House of Rothschild. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-85768-8.

— (1999) [1998]. The Pity of War. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-05711-X. OCLC 41124439.

— (1999) [1997]. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02322-3.

— (2001). The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9465-7. OCLC 46459770.

— (2003). Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9615-3.

— (2003). Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02328-2. American edition.

— (2004). Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-7139-9770-2.

— (2005). 1914. Pocket Penguins 70s S. London, England: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-102220-5.

— (2006). The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9708-7. American ed. has the title: The War of the World: Twentieth-century Conflict and the Descent of the West. OCLC 70839824 (also a Channel 4 series)