Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard University and Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has written numerous books, including his most recent, Civilization: The West and the Rest, which is also a PBS/Channel 4 documentary series. His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK best-seller. In 1998, he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War I and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly- Wingate Literary Prize and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001, after a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, Niall published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall is a weekly columnist for Newsweek and a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV.