SOURCE: A review of Paper and Iron, in Social History, Vol. 21, No. 3, October, 1996, pp. 386-7.

In the following review, Tooze analyzes the methodology of Paper and Iron, which he describes as “unconvincing and distasteful,” though the book's themes are “of considerable interest.”

In recent years the Oxford historian, Niall Ferguson, has made a name for himself as a right-wing pundit in the pages of the British press. Paper and Iron is Ferguson’s first scholarly monograph and, true to form, it is a highly ambitious, politically charged and intellectually provocative work.

Ferguson’s topic is the history of inflation in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. His main focus is, naturally, on the hyperinflation which scarred the Weimar Republic in its youth. However, as Ferguson points out, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s was merely the most dramatic episode in a half-century of inflation which...