NB: Adam Tooze is a brilliant historian, capable of weaving together different elements of global events. including anti-colonial rebellions, ideological impulses of rulers and ruled alike, and the behaviour of financial markets as a means of understanding complex geopolitical phenomena like the rise to preeminence of the American polity during and after the Great War of 1914-1918. Not to mention his excellent analysis of the Nazi economy. It is not surprising Perry Anderson disapproves of Tooze’s scholarship: it is often the (inexplicable) complaint of doctrinaires that the ones they choose to excoriate are not as faithful to the Laws of – or the End of – History etc, as they themselves are.
Tooze may already have read Peter Linebaugh’s entertaining essay on the ideas of the former editor of NLR in the Spring 1986 number of History Workshop. If not, he might enjoy it. We are all always in media res, Adam, even those of us who dream they have seen what lies over the horizon of history. Be that as it may, this is a useful introduction to Tooze’s work for those who may not have come across him. DS
Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered
In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.
It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.
Though he still teaches history, Tooze is also widely acknowledged as an expert on the infrastructure of global finance and the economics of the green-energy transition. He is the rare commentator who can speak credibly about the political economy of Europe, the US and China, and he has been an outspoken advocate on issues ranging from central-bank reform to Palestinian rights. In addition to being the author of five books, he writes regular columns and essays for outlets like the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, hosts podcasts in English and German, and publishes a wildly popular and influential Substack newsletter called Chartbook, which he sends out daily in English to more than 160,000 subscribers, including Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary. Chartbook also goes out in a Chinese-language version that, Tooze estimates, received 30m total impressions last year.
Yet for all that, and despite being motivated occasionally by what he calls “an energy of wanting to put the world to rights”, Tooze is not generally regarded as an eager controversialist. (Last year, Krugman sounded delighted to see “the normally calm Tooze come across as a bit angry” in one of his Chartbook posts.) In person as in his work, Tooze prizes connection and synthesis, a tendency that helps explain why he is equally at home, and equally welcome, talking to activists in South Africa, or senators in Washington, or development economists in the West Bank, or financial executives in London, or Chinese Communist party officials in Beijing, or finance ministers in Berlin.
It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn’t waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had “failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration”. Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order – something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference – had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he’d written a few months earlier, Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming “to ensure by any means necessary” – including strong-arming allies – “that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge”.
“I feel the need to say something,” Tai said, when Tooze was finished. She recalled a parable Martin Sheen had delivered in front of the White House during the 25th anniversary celebration of The West Wing, the haute-liberal political fantasia that remains a touchstone for professional Democrats. Sheen’s story concerned a man who shows up at the gates of heaven and earns an admonishment from St Peter for his lack of scars. “Was there nothing worth fighting for?” St Peter asked the man. Tai turned the question on Tooze: “Where are your scars, Adam? I can show you mine.”
Recalling this exchange several months later, Tooze was still flabbergasted. “I’d be silly if I didn’t admit that it was a bruising encounter,” he told me recently, in one of three long conversations we had over the past year. Nevertheless, he said, “it confirmed my underlying theory about what was going on. These were a group of entirely self-satisfied American liberal elites who were enacting a morality tale in which Sheen and The West Wing and that whole highly sentimental vision of power and politics is a central device. She says this, I think, meaning to sound tough, like, ‘I’m the warrior. Who are you? You’re just some desktop guy.’ Which just shows how little she understands what I’m saying, which is: ‘You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don’t understand that you lost. If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything. Because comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don’t get to come back and show off your wounds.’”….
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Professor Fritz Fischer (1908 – 1999)
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Amarjit Chandan: The Great War & its Impact on Punjabis
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The Flight to Varennes (21–23 June 1791)
Alex Ross: How American Racism Influenced Hitler / The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
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After the truth-shower 