Niall Ferguson books

Allen Lane History Reading Order

Anthologies

Empire Reading Order

Government Reading Order

History Reading Order

Niall Ferguson Biographies Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Rothschild Reading Order

The Munk Debates Reading Order

Niall Ferguson is a British-American historian who holds the Milbank Family Senior Fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Born in Glasgow in 1964, he studied at Oxford and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, NYU, and Harvard. His work focuses on financial history, the rise and fall of empires, and the role of networks in shaping political power.

Ferguson’s best-known books include The Ascent of Money (2008), which traced the history of finance from ancient Mesopotamia to the 2008 financial crisis, and Civilization (2011), which asked why Western societies came to dominate the world after 1500. Both were adapted into television documentary series. His two-volume history of the Rothschild banking dynasty, published in 1998, established his reputation as a financial historian, and his biography of Henry Kissinger (the first volume appeared in 2015) won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize.

Beyond his own books, Ferguson has edited several anthologies on economics and globalization, contributed to the Allen Lane History imprint at Penguin, and participated in the Munk Debates, a Canadian public policy debate series. His writing style is known for its willingness to provoke argument, and his work on counterfactual history (Virtual History, 1997) remains widely discussed.