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…

When I arrived at Yale back in 2009 I was deeply impressed/shocked by the degree to which the assumption of “forever war” had become entrenched there. I sat in on courses at the law school where the only interest was in jus in…

One spectacular global news story catches your eye. Then another. You can’t really get either of them out of your head. But, at first, they form two distinct impressions. Then over the following days you widen your reading by one or two…

Yesterday was the last day of serious work on the manuscript of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.  Only proof reading to come. I like the cover design. I hope you do too.  The book is now “in…

Early in the morning of June 29 2012, after agreement was reached at the European Council both about banking union, a growth pact and a mechanism for bond market stabilization, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti could be heard…

Highly recommend two insightful reviews of Müller-Doohm’s new Habermas biography one by Peter Osborne in the latest edition of New Left Review the other by Matthew Specter in the latest issue of Modern Intellectual History.…

Since 1986 US administrations have been required to issue a statement of their National Security Strategy . The savvy take is that these documents are strategic boilerplate. In the case of the Trump administration it is not even obvious…

Pressed by a New York Times reporter yesterday for evidence that immigration hurts American workers, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller said: “I think the most recent study I would point to is the study from George Borjas that he…

No robots please, we’re British. A stunning chart from the OECD survey of the UK.   Alarming UK-Germany productivity comparison. Who remembers the “pinsetters” and the elevators operators? False alarmism about tech. The…

Recommended Reading: Wednesday, November 29, 2017 How health care has held down US inflation Coal – the dirty secret of Europe’s energy policy. On the intangible economy by Martin Wolf Stop worrying about public debt. Worry about public…

When did America’s soft power become American? Against the backdrop of the “global condition” this is not as paradoxical a question as it might seem. David Hockney, whose travelling show you should see at the Met if you have not had the…

“Is it not crazy, asks e.g. (or at least something similar) Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? But this is exactly the…

On 19 November 2017 the FDP walked away from the coalition talks in Berlin, declaring that the four-way discussions between the CSU, CDU, FDP and Greens had failed to develop a “common vision for the modernization of our country and above…

One of the urgent challenges for the Western historical imagination is to come to terms as best we can with how different the twentieth and twenty-first centuries appear when viewed from the “Asian” perspective. And we have to start by…

Two pieces by Kate Allen in the FT today bring home the extraordinarily easy conditions of borrowing faced by sovereigns today, which was the subject of a recent post. Despite the chaos of Brexit politics the market for UK Treasuries…

If you compare the commonly used English translation of Marx’s 18th Brumaire with the German original there is one glaring difference. In the English we read the familiar and cherished phrase: “Men make their own history, but…

Yesterday, for reasons that are somewhat obscure, I found myself in a rather tense exchange about the historiography of 1914 with, of all people, Branko Milanovic. Some weeks ago I shared with Branko a copy of a paper I contributed to a…

The political economy of the late twentieth century was marked by a striking juxtaposition. From the mid 1970s an unprecedented peacetime surge in public debt coincided with the liberalization of international capital transactions. In 1970…

In the 1970s America embarked on a ghastly experiment in mass incarceration. This is part of a wider process of criminalization, driven by shifting race relations, the “War on drugs” and local law enforcement politics. It is anomalous in…