Niall Ferguson holds an MA in History from Oxford. He began his academic career in Hamburg, followed by Cambridge and Oxford. In 2002, he accepted a Chair in the History of Finance at New York University, before becoming Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and Economics at Harvard. He was also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

He became famous in 1998 for his book “The Pity of War”, in which he presents what he considers to be the ten great myths about the First World War. Using counterfactual history, he argues that Europe would have had much to gain if Britain had stayed out of the conflict and allowed Germany to win. In his view, Europe under German rule would have been peaceful, prosperous, democratic and free of ideologies such as fascism and communism.

From 2002 onwards, Niall Ferguson diversified to pursue parallel careers as a university lecturer, author and documentary writer for television. In 2011, he wrote the series “Civilization” for British public television Channel 4, the title of which bears the same name as the series created in 1969 by Kenneth Clark. The ideas expressed in the series were expanded on in his book “Civilization, the West and the Rest”. He sought to explain the rise of Western civilisation and the global domination of Western countries. His books, which deal with all kinds of disasters – natural, pandemic, famine – as well as his talks, are often controversial. The star historian offers an unvarnished, iconoclastic and gritty view of today’s major issues.