British economic and political historian, currently Director of the European Institute at Columbia, and the leading contemporary historian of the political economy of the modern industrialized world. Tooze trained at Cambridge under Sir Richard Evans, taught for many years at Cambridge and Yale before moving to Columbia, and writes — in books, in essays, and in his widely followed Chartbook newsletter — for both the academic audience and the broader reading public.
Four books frame his project. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) rewrote the economic history of the Third Reich, arguing that Hitler's strategic decisions were driven more by accurate perception of Germany's economic weakness vis-à-vis the Anglo-American-Soviet combination than by ideological drive alone. The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (2014) traced the emergence of the 20th-century international order from the financial and diplomatic settlement of the First World War. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018) — probably his most influential book — is the indispensable history of 2008 and its decade of aftershocks, situating the American subprime crisis inside a trans-Atlantic dollar-funding architecture that most national economic histories had not seen. Shutdown (2021) extended the method to the Covid crisis.
Tooze's central contribution is methodological. He rejects the separation between economic history (a specialist subfield) and political and diplomatic history (the main narrative), insisting that 20th- and 21st-century history simply cannot be told without integrating them. In doing so he has reopened the kind of grand-narrative political-economic history that had largely left the profession with the deaths of the previous generation. His Chartbook newsletter may be the single best continuous public education in contemporary global political economy now available in English.