Adam Tooze

John Adam Tooze (born 5 July 1967) is an English historian who is a professor at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe.

Previously, he was Reader in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Cambridge and Gurnee Hart Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Tooze was born on 5 July 1967 to British parents who met at Cambridge.

His maternal grandparents were the social researchers Arthur and Margaret Wynn, who together wrote a study of the financial connections of the Conservative Party establishment.

Arthur was also a civil servant and recruiter of Soviet spies at Oxford.

Tooze's father was a molecular biologist who worked in Heidelberg, West Germany, where Tooze spent much of his childhood.

He had an early interest in engineering and an aspiration to design engines for race cars.

A precocious student, at secondary school he was permitted to teach a class on Keynesian modelling.

After studying at Highgate School from 1983 to 1985, Tooze graduated with a BA in economics from King's College, Cambridge in 1989.

He then studied at the Free University of Berlin before moving to the London School of Economics for a doctorate in economic history under the supervision of Alan Milward.

In 2002 Tooze was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History following the publication of his first book, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge.

He first came to prominence for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the 2006 Wolfson History Prize, and a broad-based history of the First World War with The Deluge, published in 2014.

Tooze's 2006 book, The Wages of Destruction, is dedicated to them.

He then widened his scope to study the financial crash of 2008 and its economic and geopolitical consequences with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, published in 2018, for which he won the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize.

Tooze writes for numerous publications, including the Financial Times, London Review of Books, New Left Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Die Zeit.

Since 2022 he sits on the board of the ZOE Institute for Future-fit economies.

Tooze is a grandson of the British civil servant and Soviet spy, Arthur Wynn and his wife, Peggy Moxon.

After leaving Cambridge in 2009, he spent six years at Yale University as Professor of Modern German History and Director of International Security Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, succeeding Paul Kennedy.

Through his books (such as Crashed) and his online newsletter (Chartbook), he reaches a varied audience of historians, investors, administrators, and others.