Adam Tooze

Author, "Shutdown" and "Crashed" | Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and Director of the European Institute, Columbia University
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Prize-winning historian, writer, and economic commentator Adam Tooze combines deep historical expertise with up-to-date economic analysis to answer questions about current and future political and economic shifts that help to navigate our dynamic contemporary world.

Named one of the world’s top thinkers by both Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine, he has authored many critically acclaimed books that have been translated into 11 languages. His latest, Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy weaves finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything. His next release, Carbon, is a history of the climate crisis.

Tooze’s book, Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, was called a “monumental narrative history” of the financial crisis of 2008 and its global aftermath by Financial Times. The Observer declared it the most significant effort to date to comprehensively analyze the impact of the financial crisis, not just in the United States and Europe, but in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Asia as well. Crashed is the fourth in a quartet of books exploring trans-Atlantic economics and power over the course of the American century. Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge explored how economic experts laid the foundations of our current macroeconomic knowledge and assisted in the management of Hitler’s war machine.

He is the host of the weekly Foreign Policy economics podcast Ones and Tooze, where he and co-host Cameron Abadi attempt to explain the world, one episode at a time. Each episode revolves around two data points — one pulled from the week’s headlines and the other a fascinating tangent — offering an in-depth look at current events and placing them into historical context.

Formerly a professor at both the University of Cambridge and Yale University, and a visiting professor of military history at West Point, Tooze currently teaches at Columbia University where he is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and the Director of the European Institute. Adam previously taught at the University of Cambridge and at Yale University, where he was the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and the Director of International Security Studies. Adam served as Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point. He teaches and researches widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary history with a special focus on the history of economics and a range of themes in political, intellectual, and military history, across a canvas stretching from Europe to the Atlantic.

He has written for Financial Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, Telegraph, The Observer, Prospect Magazine, TLS, the London Review of Books, New Left Review, Dissent, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, Die Zeit, Spiegel, TAZ, and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. In 2009, Tooze was appointed to the academic panel charged by the Bundesfinanzministerium (Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance) with writing the Ministry’s history in the period of the Third Reich. He penned the volume on public debt.

Adam won the Leverhulme Prize fellowship, the H-Soz-Kult Historisches Buch Prize, the Longman History Today Prize, the Wolfson Prize, and the LA Times History Prize for his books on history and economy.

He is bilingual in English and German and has functional French.

Topics

This Time is Different: What Do We Learn from History?

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The History & Future of Armed Conflict and How It Has Shaped the World

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The Future of Europe

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Financial Crises: Their History and Future

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Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World Copy

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was perhaps the most dangerous moment not just in the history of the US economy, but in the history of the Western world. Ten years later we can still feel its reverberations. Historian Adam Tooze will discuss the causes of the crisis and its political, economic and financial legacy for the present and future of the US and world economy.

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Videos

What is going on in the world? | VISION
Adam Tooze
The 2008 Global Crisis: Approaches to a Future History
Adam Tooze
Impact of Trade Wars on Financial Markets | Davos 2019
Adam Tooze

Articles

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Why Egypt Has the Most to Lose From Houthi Strikes on Merchant Ships
Foreign Policy
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The Davos Paradox
Foreign Policy
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Best Episodes of Ones and Tooze in 2023
Foreign Policy
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Is the United Nations Worth the Price?
Foreign Policy
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Why Interest Rates Hikes Won't Necessarily Tame Inflation
Fpreigh Policy
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Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage
Foreign Policy
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Getting Inflation to 2% Comes With Risks
CNN Business
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Washington isn't listening to business on China any more
Financial Times
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Washington isn't listening to business on China any more
Financial Times
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America Has Dictated Its Economic Peace Terms to China
Foreign Policy
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Europe's Energy Crisis That Isn't
Foreign Policy

Podcasts

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Economics
History
Geopolitics & Globalization
US Politics
World Economy
Moderators
European Economies
Presidential Series
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