31 quotes
Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings.
Even small numbers of evangelical missionaries can achieve a good deal, furnished as they are with substantial funds from congregations at home.
Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire. Penguin (2004)
For better, for worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
The empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Like the non-governmental aid organizations of today, Victorian missionaries believed they knew what was best for Africa.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
It is one of the less easily intelligible characteristics of the early missionaries that they attached more importance to the souls of others than to the lives of their own children.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
This, then, was the combination that made New England flourish: Puritanism plus the profit motive.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
The Nazi death machine worked economically, scientifically and euphemistically. In a word, it was very, very modern.
The familiar rationale of white rule in Africa was that it conferred the benefits of civilization. The war made a mockery of that claim.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
A country’s economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and human action (history, for short): this is economic history’s version of the nature-nurture debate.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Before 1914, the benefits of Empire had seemed to most people, on balance, to outweigh the costs. After the war the costs suddenly, inescapably, outweighed the benefits.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Finally, although Anglophone economic and political liberalism remains the most alluring of the world’s cultures, it continues to face, as it has since the Iranian revolution, a serious threat from Islamic fundamentalism.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.
The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (1998)
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)