Adam Tooze
Based on Wikipedia: Adam Tooze
The Historian Who Wanted to Build Race Car Engines
Before Adam Tooze became one of the most influential economic historians of our time, he wanted to design engines for race cars. This early fascination with how complex systems work—the interplay of fuel, combustion, timing, and power—would eventually find a different expression. Instead of building engines, Tooze would spend his career taking apart the machinery of global economics and showing us how it runs, breaks down, and occasionally explodes.
There's something fitting about this origin story. Race car engineering is about understanding systems under extreme stress. What happens at the limits? When do things fail? These are precisely the questions that would define Tooze's major works, from the economic collapse of Nazi Germany to the global financial crisis of 2008.
A Child of the Cold War's Strange Shadows
Tooze's family background reads like something from a John le Carré novel. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Wynn, was a British civil servant with a secret life: he recruited Soviet spies at Oxford University during one of the most dramatic periods of Cold War espionage. Arthur and his wife Margaret were also serious social researchers who studied the financial networks connecting Britain's Conservative Party establishment. Tooze would later dedicate his breakthrough book, "The Wages of Destruction," to these grandparents.
Born in 1967 to British parents who had met at Cambridge, young Adam grew up largely in Heidelberg, West Germany, where his father worked as a molecular biologist. This childhood in Germany would prove formative. Heidelberg sits in the southwestern corner of what was then West Germany, a country still reckoning with its Nazi past, still divided by the Iron Curtain, still living in the shadow of the catastrophe that Tooze would later make his scholarly specialty.
By the time Tooze reached secondary school, his intellectual precocity had become undeniable. His teachers made an unusual decision: they allowed this teenager to teach a class on Keynesian modeling to his fellow students. John Maynard Keynes, for those unfamiliar, was the British economist whose ideas about government intervention during economic downturns became the foundation of modern macroeconomic policy. That a secondary school student was deemed capable of explaining these concepts says something about the trajectory that was already taking shape.
From Race Cars to the Third Reich
Tooze's formal education traced a path through some of Britain and Germany's most distinguished institutions. He studied at Highgate School in London, then earned his bachelor's degree in economics from King's College, Cambridge in 1989. The timing matters: that was the year the Berlin Wall fell, the year the Cold War that had shaped his childhood began its rapid unwinding.
From Cambridge, he moved to the Free University of Berlin—free in name because it was established in 1948 as a Western alternative to the Communist-controlled Humboldt University in East Berlin. He then completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics, working under the supervision of Alan Milward, a historian known for his influential work on European economic integration.
His first book, published in 2001, bore the wonderfully specific title "Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge." This might sound dry. It is not. Tooze was examining something crucial: how did the German state come to understand its own economy? How did bureaucracies learn to count, measure, and ultimately try to control the flow of goods, labor, and money? This is the foundation upon which all economic history rests—the question of what we actually know and how we came to know it.
The book won him a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2002, one of the most prestigious early-career awards in British academia. But it was his next project that would establish him as a major voice in historical scholarship.
Dismantling the Myth of Nazi Economic Competence
"The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy," published in 2006, transformed how historians understand the Third Reich. The book won the Wolfson History Prize, Britain's most prestigious award for historical writing, and has since been translated into seven languages including German, French, Russian, and Polish.
What made this book so significant? Tooze demolished a persistent myth: that whatever else one might say about the Nazis, at least they ran an efficient economy. The reality, as Tooze meticulously demonstrated, was far messier. The Nazi war machine was built on fundamental economic contradictions. Germany was a middle-sized European power attempting to conquer a continent while fighting a global war against enemies with vastly greater industrial capacity. The economic foundations were precarious from the start.
This wasn't just academic revisionism. Understanding how Nazi Germany actually functioned—or failed to function—matters for understanding how authoritarian regimes operate more broadly. They often appear stronger than they are. Their apparent efficiency frequently masks chaos, improvisation, and brutal exploitation.
Expanding the Aperture
Tooze's career has followed an unusual arc: with each major book, he has widened his historical lens. After focusing tightly on Germany in his first two works, he stepped back to examine the First World War and its aftermath in "The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931," published in 2014.
This book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and offered a sweeping reinterpretation of how World War One reshaped global power. The key argument: the war marked the emergence of the United States as the dominant global force, though America's reluctance to embrace this role created decades of instability. The old European powers were exhausted and indebted. The new American colossus was economically supreme but politically ambivalent about using its power.
Sound familiar? This tension between American economic dominance and political ambivalence about global leadership remains central to international relations today.
Crashed: Making Sense of the 2008 Crisis
Then came "Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World" in 2018, the book that brought Tooze to a much broader audience. Here he tackled the global financial crisis of 2008 and its long aftermath—events that many readers had lived through but few understood in their full complexity.
What set "Crashed" apart from other books on the financial crisis was its scope. Tooze didn't just explain what happened in American mortgage markets or what went wrong at Lehman Brothers. He traced the global interconnections: how the crisis rippled through European banking, how it destabilized the eurozone, how it reshaped political movements from the Tea Party to Syriza. The financial crisis, he showed, was not a discrete event but the beginning of a new historical era.
The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize, one of the world's leading awards for nonfiction addressing global issues. It established Tooze as something rare: an academic historian who could speak directly to contemporary debates about economics, politics, and the fragility of the international order.
The Pandemic and the Public Intellectual
When COVID-19 struck in 2020, Tooze responded with remarkable speed. His book "Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy," published in September 2021, analyzed the economic dimensions of the pandemic—the unprecedented government interventions, the supply chain disruptions, the strange coexistence of economic catastrophe for some and unexpected prosperity for others.
But Tooze's influence in recent years extends well beyond his books. Since 2020, he has published "Chartbook," a newsletter on Substack that combines data analysis with historical perspective. The newsletter's format—mixing charts, commentary, and links to relevant reading—has made him a distinctive voice in the crowded world of public intellectual commentary. He explains complex economic phenomena by situating them in historical context, showing how present crises echo or diverge from past ones.
Since September 2021, he has also hosted a weekly podcast called "Ones and Tooze" with Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy magazine. Each episode runs between thirty and sixty minutes, providing extended analysis of current events with the same historical depth that characterizes his writing.
The Institutional Perch
Tooze's academic trajectory has taken him to some of the world's most prominent universities. After his early career at Cambridge, where he served as Reader in Twentieth-Century History and a Fellow at Jesus College, he moved to Yale University in 2009. There he held the position of Professor of Modern German History and directed Yale's International Security Studies program, succeeding the distinguished historian Paul Kennedy.
Since then, he has been based at Columbia University in New York, where he serves as Director of the European Institute. He also holds a position as a nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based think tank focused on European affairs.
This institutional positioning matters. It places Tooze at the intersection of academic research and policy influence, allowing him to contribute to scholarly debates while also shaping how policymakers and the broader public understand economic history.
Writing for the World
Beyond his books and newsletter, Tooze writes prolifically for major publications on both sides of the Atlantic: the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, the London Review of Books, the New Left Review, and the German newspaper Die Zeit, among others. This range is notable—he writes for outlets across the political spectrum, for specialist and generalist audiences alike.
His essays often address the largest questions: Is this the end of the American century? Can democracies manage the collective challenges of the Anthropocene—the geological era defined by human impact on the planet? What does it mean that the global financial system remains so fragile, so prone to crisis, so dependent on extraordinary interventions by central banks?
The Bigger Picture
What makes Tooze distinctive among contemporary historians is his insistence that economics cannot be understood apart from politics, and neither can be understood apart from the specific historical moments in which they unfold. Markets are not natural phenomena operating according to timeless laws. They are human creations, shaped by power, ideology, and historical accident.
This might seem obvious, but it runs against the grain of much economic thinking, which tends to treat economic phenomena as if they existed in a vacuum, divorced from their political and historical context. Tooze constantly reconnects what others separate.
Since 2022, he has served on the board of the ZOE Institute for Future-fit Economies, a think tank focused on reimagining economic systems for an era of climate crisis and ecological constraint. This engagement suggests where his interests may be heading: toward the question of whether our current economic arrangements can survive the environmental pressures bearing down on them.
From Statistics to Systems
Looking back over Tooze's career, a pattern emerges. He began with a highly technical study of how states gather economic knowledge through statistics. He then used that foundation to reexamine how the Nazi economy actually functioned. He widened his view to the First World War and the remaking of global order. He addressed the 2008 financial crisis and its continuing reverberations. He analyzed the economic shock of the pandemic.
Each step has been larger in scope but grounded in the same fundamental insight: to understand how economic systems work, you have to understand how power operates, how knowledge is produced, and how historical circumstances shape what seems possible or impossible at any given moment.
The boy who wanted to design race car engines ended up doing something parallel after all. He takes apart the engines of global capitalism, shows us how the parts fit together, identifies the stress points where failure becomes likely, and helps us understand what happens when systems built for one set of conditions encounter circumstances their designers never anticipated.
In an era when economic crises seem to arrive with increasing frequency and intensity, this kind of understanding has never been more valuable.