20 quotes
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)
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 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 difficulty with the achievements of the empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of the empire.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
The British Empire was the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government. Yet its mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Reality did not take long to intrude.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s 'finest hour'.
Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.… As a source of entertainment – of sheer psychological gratification – the Empire’s importance can never be exaggerated.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
Once pirates, then traders, the British were now the rulers of millions of people overseas – and not just in India. Thanks to a combination of naval and financial muscle they had become the winners in the European race for empire.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
In 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later Great Britain had acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)
The creeping crisis of confidence in Empire had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for its victory over Germany in the First World War. The death toll for the British Isles alone was around three-quarters of a million, one in sixteen of all adult males between the ages fifteen and fifty. The economic cost was harder to calculate.
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)