Tooze was born on 5 July 1967[10] to British parents who met atCambridge. His maternal grandparents were the social researchersArthur and Margaret Wynn, who together wrote a study of the financial connections of theConservative Party establishment.[11] Arthur was also a civil servant and recruiter of Soviet spies atOxford. Tooze considers his grandfather “a tough, tough, mean son of a bitch” and his 2006 book,The Wages of Destruction, is dedicated to them.[12][2]Tooze's father was a molecular biologist who worked in Heidelberg,West Germany, where Tooze spent much of his childhood. He had an early interest in engineering and an aspiration to design engines for race cars. A precocious student, at secondary school he was permitted to teach a class onKeynesian modelling.[4]
In 2002 Tooze was awarded aPhilip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History following the publication of his first book,Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge.[16] He first came to prominence for his economic study of theThird Reich,The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the 2006Wolfson History Prize,[17] and a broad-based history of theFirst World War withThe Deluge, published in 2014. He then widened his scope to study the financial crash of 2008 and its economic and geopolitical consequences withCrashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, published in 2018, for which he won the 2019Lionel Gelber Prize.[18] In 2021, Tooze publishedShutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, analyzing theeconomic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its fiscal policy responses.[19]
Since September 2021, Tooze hosts the podcast,Ones and Tooze, together with Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor atForeign Policy.[27] Episodes typically last 30-60 minutes and are published weekly on Fridays.
He has been twice married and has an adult daughter in the US. He became an American citizen in early 2025, because he was concerned about his precarious position as a green card holder.[2]
Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London: Allen Lane and New York: Viking, August 2018.[31]ISBN9781846140365 Translated in German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian and Greek.
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, Allen Lane, Sep 7 2021.[32]
As editor
Cambridge History of World War II. Volume 3 withMichael Geyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.[33]
Normalität und Fragilität: Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg with Tim B. Müller,[34] Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2015.[35]
Additional, ongoing series of original articles written on his website after the publication ofCrashed, entitledFraming Crashed.[39]
"Whose century?",London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 15 (30 July 2020), pp. 9–13. Tooze closes (p. 13): "Can [the US] fashion a domestic political bargain to enable the US to become what it currently is not: a competent and co-operative partner in the management of the collective risks of theAnthropocene. This is what theGreen New Deal promised. After the shock ofCOVID-19 it is more urgent than ever."
^Mentioned inCrashed, Acknowledgments, pp. 9–10 "... debts I owe to two teachers ... Wynne Godley was a mentor and teacher of a very different kind. Spontaneously warm and generous in spirit, he took me under his cape in my first year at King’s and introduced me, and a group of my contemporaries, to what, at the time, was a highly idiosyncratic brand of economics."
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