Crashed is a book about a crisis of capitalism. It is centrally preoccupied with the relationship between democracy, government and economics. But, as some reviewers have noticed, it is not a Marxist account. The politics of Crashed are…

The Turkish financial crisis has shot into the headlines in recent weeks. It has been a long-time coming. The entire time I was writing Crashed, the “Middle East” was threatening to bleed into a crisis narrative that I was trying to…

Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher conspiring. In this long series of slides I trace the role of German soldiers from the stabilization of the Weimar Republic in 1923 to the Nazi seizure of power and rearmament. 1918 was in large…

I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” That was Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, in October 2005. Two years later, in the autumn of 2007, Alan…

Trump’s visit to Europe has led to uproar on both sides of the Atlantic.Trump is singular. But tensions within the trans-Atlantic relationship have been mounting for some time. Trump, after all, is not the first Republican president that…

In economic and geopolitical terms, the defining development of our era is the rise of China. Spend a week or two reading the Western media and you accumulate a series of snapshots all of which document and reiterate this world historic…

In 1916 the total output of the continental United States overtook that of the British Empire, marking a decisive moment in the shifting global balance of power. At least this is what Angus Maddison’s data for purchasing power parity…

The economy is one of those things that is obvious until you think about it. As soon as you do think about it, the questions rapidly multiply. Why are such a diverse array of processes of production, distribution and consumption lumped…

The War in Germany series reaches the aftermath of World War I. I must admit that I find the familiar arguments about Versailles profoundly unsatisfying. To try and give the discussion a more adequate framing I recur in this lecture to the…

I joined Alex Doherty of the Politics Theory Other podcast to discuss my book ‘The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy‘. The podcast is here. We discussed the entwinement of Nazi ideology and…

“The trade conflict between the U.S. and China is … a consequence of China’s internal class conflict. Tariffs will not fix anything as long as China’s elites remain committed to extracting as much as they can from Chinese workers.”…

China apocalypse! Alongside the damage that may be done to capitalist accumulation by a trade war, the greatest threat to what we call the world economy is still a major China meltdown. Why? Because China’s credit bubble is enormous.The…

The battles of material on the Western Front in 1916 raised the economic component in modern warfare to a new intensity. The mode of war-making was undergoing a decisive shift. Backed up by their global empires and the supply chains from…

Did inequality really surge in the US from the 1970s? Did earnings for the majority really flatline from the bicentennial? Recently, there has been a fair amount of pushback on these two cornerstones of the new inequality narrative. The…

Paralysis in the West v. the free wheeling struggle in the East. Both are decisive to understanding Germany’s experience of WWI. Bringing back the War in Germany course for the summer session, with slides on the first phase of WWI:…

How have Germany and Germans changed? In a recent piece in the Economist Jeremy Cliffe painted a fascinating picture of an increasingly pluralistic society that is both more open and more fragmented.This is a result of complex, economic,…

As 1932 began, middle age was catching up with Pablo Picasso.Born 1881, once the bad boy of the Paris art scene, he was now into his 50s, famous and rich. But he was unhappy in his marriage and worried that he was yesterday’s man.…

The formation of a much-dreaded 5Star and Northern League government in Rome has been blocked by President Mattarella. As interim Prime Minister he has appointed a former IMF technocrat Carlo Cottarelli, a quintessential exponent of…

How to read the current Italian crisis? Is it the latest manifestations of entrenched Italian national problems dating back decades? Is it another case of generic populist backlash? Is Italy collateral damage of the eurozone crisis? In a…

On 24 August 1857 the Ohio State Life and Trust Company failed. Within months over 1400 banks had collapsed across America and the shockwave spread outwards to Liverpool and London. By the end of the year it had reached continental…

POLICING THE CRISIS MUGGING, THE STATE, AND LAW AND ORDER By the Birmingham school collective of Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts came out forty years ago.It is one of the texts that Columbia’s…

How Germany and Austria triggered the war in 1914. Other states launched smaller European wars before 1914. After 1916 Russia and France might have had an interest in escalating one of the many minor conflicts in the European state system…

War in Germany reaches the critical decades in the aftermath of the Wars of Unification: Imperial Germany as a political regime founded on the military, the tensions of militarism articulated from above and below, the impasse of…

After a tactical delay, the War in Germany series resumes with installment 11 on the Franco-Prussian war: Lessons learned from 1866; how Bismarck (and Napoleon III) isolated France; the escalating violence of battle; the politics of war…

How is inequality in America produced and reproduced? How do class, race and gender interact? How do educational opportunities and disadvantages, family structure and incarceration combine to produce the massively unequal society that we…

In which I attempt a Clausewitzian analysis of the power play both inside Prussia and in Germany between 1848 and 1866, adopting Showalter’s highly contingent approach to Prussian success in the Austro-Prussian war. Done with help of…

The refusal of the Trump administration to engage with the question of climate change not only causes consternation worldwide. It also causes tension within the apparatus of the American state. How are you to govern if you cannot…

How did Metternich contain the revolutionary threat? Would Germany have been more peaceful if liberalism had triumphed in 1848? Marx, Engels and the promise of revolutionary war. Lecture slides here: Tooze WinG2018 Lecture 9 1815-1850

Since it appeared in 2017 Yannis Varoufakis’s Adults in the Room has attracted a number of thoughtful reviews. Broadly, these fall into three camps. The camp to which my own effort in the New York Review of Books belongs, takes Varoufakis…

Better off Americans go to College. Poor Americans don’t.It’s obvious. We all know it. But when plotted, the relationship is stark.In fact the relationship is linear. 75 percent of kids with poor parents don’t go to…

Reading Clausewitz against the backdrop of the Prussian crisis of 1806-1815. The latest installment of the War in Germany series. How did a radical Prussian reformer become a global icon for military intellectuals? How did history enter…

“Am Anfang war Napoleon” – In the beginning was Napoleon. That was the way that Thomas Nipperdey began his famous 1980s history of nineteenth-century Germany. It was a deliberate provocation to the societal historians of…

Under really extreme time pressure, I’ve thrown together an essay reflecting on the place of historical thinking in the current discussion of a crisis of democracy. Hedwig Richter and Tim Müller have been shepherding the essay along,…

The Fall of Fortress Kolberg 1761 A. Kotsebu (1815-1889), 1852. War in Germany 2018 reached and crossed the 18th century this week with a lecture on Frederick the Great and a lecture on how 18th-century Franco-German thinkers digested the…

Lectures 2 and 3 in the War and Germany series deal with the 17th and early 18th century. They offer sketch introductions to the Thirty Years War, the Treaties of Westphalia and their aftermath. The aim of the lectures is to make good on…

Across much of America (and many other countries) the concentration of monopoly power in the hands of a handful of employers in local labour markets, gives them huge bargaining power in relation to workers, even when labour is scarce…