Adam Tooze

British historian and Professor of History at Columbia University, best known for a trilogy of large-scale economic histories: The Wages of Destruction (2006), a revisionist account of the Nazi economy that challenged assumptions of German industrial dominance; The Deluge (2014), which reframed the First World War settlement as a crisis of American liberal hegemony; and Crashed (2018), a comprehensive study of the 2008 financial crisis and its political aftermath.

Tooze trained in Cambridge and Berlin, and spent years advising BP executives on corporate historical responsibility before becoming a prolific public intellectual — his Substack Chartbook and his Twitter commentary are, by his own account, as central to his thinking as his academic writing. He approaches macroeconomics and financial history as a literary discipline: the argument is never separable from who is making it and what political stakes they are navigating.

Core positions

Financial history is perpetual improvisation. Against accounts that identify clean regime changes — the gold standard era, Bretton Woods, the post-1971 float — Tooze reads international monetary history as ‘a sort of continuous re-improvised makeshift.’ This scepticism of tidy periodisation extends to the Weimar Republic (viable in the 1920s precisely because of US financial engagement; doomed once that engagement collapsed), the Versailles settlement (Keynes was right about the political preconditions of market economies, wrong about German fiscal incapacity), and the eurozone (de facto Italian debt mutualisation through ECB balance sheet expansion is politically sustainable only if left unspoken — which German constitutional politics make difficult).

On Nazi political economy, his core revision is that the Third Reich operated against an economic backdrop of genuine inferiority: Germany in the 1930s was no industrial powerhouse relative to Britain or the United States, and understanding that gap is essential for explaining both the logic of Lebensraum and the ideological, rather than material, character of Hitler’s decision to go to war.

In the wiki

• Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 95: COVID recovery, emerging market fragility, Keynes and Versailles, Nazi macroeconomics, and the limits of technocratic eurozone fixes