Background and career
Sir Niall Campbell Ferguson ( NEEL; born 18 April 1964) is a British and American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics for the 2023/2024 academic year and at Tsinghua University in China from 2019 to 2020. Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history, and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism. He holds positive views concerning the British Empire. In 2004, he was one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. In 2024, he was knighted by King Charles III for services to literature. Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He began writing a semi-monthly column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020 and has also been a regular columnist at The Spectator and the Daily Mail. In 2021, he became a joint-founder of the new University of Austin. Since June 2024, he is a bi-weekly columnist at The Free Press. Ferguson has also contributed articles to many journals including Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has been described as a conservative and called himself a supporter of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
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".
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".
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."
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.
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.
