Is America an empire? Certainly not, according to our government. Despite the conquest of two sovereign states in as many years, despite the presence of more than 750 military installations in two thirds of the world's countries and despite his stated intention "to extend the benefits of freedom...to every corner of the world," George W. Bush maintains that "America has never been an empire." "We don't seek empires," insists Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. "We're not imperialistic."

Nonsense, says Niall Ferguson. In Colossus he argues that in both military and economic terms America is...

What if there had been no American War of Independence? What if Hitler had invaded Britain? What if Kennedy had lived? What if Russia had won the Cold War? Niall Ferguson, author of the highly acclaimed The Pity of War, leads the charge in this historically rigorous series of separate voyages into "imaginary time" and provides far-reaching answers to these intriguing questions.Ferguson's brilliant 90-page introduction doubles as a manifesto on the methodology of counter-factual history. His equally masterful afterword traces the likely historical ripples that would have proceeded from...

In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson makes a simple and provocative argument: that the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. Britain, according to Ferguson, entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims--and England's entry into the war transformed a Continental conflict into a world war, which they then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces.That the...

Few economic events have had the impact of German hyperinflation in 1923, still remembered as a root cause of Hitler's rise to power; yet in recent years historians have defended the inflationary policies adopted after 1918. Niall Ferguson takes a different view. He argues that inflation was an economic and political disaster, and that alternative economic policies could have stabilized the German currency in 1920. To explain why these were not adopted, he points to long-term defects in the political institutions of the Reich from the 1890s. The book therefore not only reveals the Wilhelmine...

Few economic events have had the impact of German hyperinflation in 1923, still remembered as a root cause of Hitler's rise to power; yet in recent years historians have defended the inflationary policies adopted after 1918. Niall Ferguson takes a different view. He argues that inflation was an economic and political disaster, and that alternative economic policies could have stabilized the German currency in 1920. To explain why these were not adopted, he points to long-term defects in the political institutions of the Reich from the 1890s. The book therefore not only reveals the Wilhelmine...

"Prodigiously researched but also splendidly written-clear and vivid and precise." --The Wall Street Journal

Drawing on more than ten thousand hitherto unavailable letters and diary entries, bestselling author Niall Ferguson tells the story of Siegmund Warburg, a complex man who was as much a psychologist, a politician, and an actor-manager as a banker. An obsessive perfectionist with an aversion to excessive risk, Warburg-and the S. G. Warburg firm-adopted a financial philosophy that was the antithesis of the debt-fueled, algorithm-driven banking of our time. In High...

Western civilization's rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries.
How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or "killer applications"--competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic--that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors.
Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded...

Ist die Globalisierung, die Probleme wie Finanz- und Flüchtlingskrisen provoziert hat, über ihr Ziel hinausgeschossen? Wird die freiheitliche Weltordnung, die das internationale Staatensystem unserer Zeit bestimmt, den aufstrebenden Nationalismus und Populismus überleben?