J. Adam Tooze, recently appointed as the inaugural Barton M. Biggs Professor of History, focuses his teaching on modern German history, 20th-century economic history, social theory, and the philosophy of history.
He is the co-director of International Security Studies, a senior research fellow of the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies and a core faculty member of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
Tooze received his B.A. in economics from King’s College Cambridge and his Ph.D. in economic history from the London School of Economics. He taught for 13 years at the University of Cambridge before joining the Yale faculty as professor of modern German history in 2009. He convenes the Yale colloquium in Modern European History, the International History seminar and the Theory and History group based in the Whitney Humanities Center.
His 2001 book, “Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge,” was awarded the H-Soz-Kult Prize for Modern History and the Leverhulme Prize. Tooze is also the author of “Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy,” published in 2006. It won both the Longman and Wolfson prizes, was an Economist Book of the Year and has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Bulgarian. In Germany it has been adopted by the Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung.
Tooze’s forthcoming book, titled “Peace without Victory,” is a history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s fateful decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917.
In 2009, Tooze was appointed to the academic panel charged by the Bundesfinanzministerum (Federal Finance Ministry) with writing the ministry’s history in the period of the Third Reich. In 2011, he served as the Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point.
The Barton M. Briggs Chair was funded by Barton’s family members, colleagues, and friends in gratitude for his significant contributions to the investment profession and his dedication to mentoring. In recognition of Barton’s broad interests, his daughters —Wendy Biggs Ratcliffe ’84 and Gretchen Biggs ’85 — asked that either a scholar of the history of economics or of poetry be appointed to the professorship, and that the faculty member be a noted teacher as well.