Professor Niall Ferguson. Author of best-selling The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and one of the world’s leading geoeconomic thinkers, Professor Ferguson will speak exclusively for CIS in Sydney when he delivers the Centre’s annual John Bonython lecture on 28 July 2010.
The world is changing: there’s the rise of authoritarian China as a super-power; a Keynesian president leading a weakened United States; the reemergence of democratic India as a great power; the continued decline of Japan; and the probability of continued global economic instability ahead. Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? How does economic profligacy — whether the result of arrogance or naivety — contribute to the downfall of civilisations? Not to be missed, the address will offer a timely review of primacy, leadership, and the complex factors behind the rise and fall of great powers and civilisations.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Ferguson is a regular television, radio and print contributor on both sides of the Atlantic. The author of numerous books including Empire: The Rise and Demise of British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Ferguson is a contributing editor The Financial Times, writes frequently for Newsweek, and was noted by Time magazine in 2004 as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.