Quotes from Niall Ferguson

a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'.

Can it really be that England became the first industrial nation mainly because bad sanitation and disease kept life exceptionally short for the majority of people, giving the rich and enterprising minority a better chance to pass on their genes?

Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.

The striking thing is that the transatlantic divergence in working patterns has coincided almost exactly with a comparable convergence in religiosity. Europeans not only work less; they also pray less – and believe less.

The sequence is clear: first the Glorious Revolution, then agricultural improvement, then imperial expansion, then industrial revolution.

Rising to his feet he said, 'If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, well, first of all we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn't concern us in the least.'…

no man prepar'd for it; no man consider'd it would come like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of death.'74

Even today, you can still see the empty lots that the riots left in their wake.

official irony, was said to be "in charge" of [a] seething, whining, weakly hive, impotent to help itself, but strong in its power to cripple, thwart, and annoy'.

Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?

In particular, it lacked the skills to carry out pacification effectively—or as Kissinger politely put it, "the special qualities developed in a decade or more of combat training do not include discriminating political judgment in volatile and complex circumstances.

Japan. So successful was the Japanese 'welfare superpower' that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world's oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65.

technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures Ã¢â'¬â€œ but that the consequences of that change will be determined by the structures, emergent properties and interactions of these networks.

it was said to be 'hardly in the power of liquor to affect Dr Webster's understanding or his limbs'. Yet no one was more sober when it came to calculations of life expectancy.

autocríticos y demasiado blandos hacia los pueblos que habían subyugado: Hay ingleses que se reprochan haber gobernado mal el país. ¿Por qué? Porque los indios no muestran entusiasmo por su dominio. Afirmo que los ingleses han gobernado la India muy bien, pero que su error ha sido esperar entusiasmo del pueblo que gobiernan.

United States failed to match its greatly enhanced economic importance with a commensurate geopolitical role.84 Power remained disproportionately in the hands of the victorious European empires, the British and the French, but both were so constrained fiscally and domestically that they could not preserve the fruits of their victory.

Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?

why, when its causes today seem so numerous and so obvious, were contemporaries so oblivious of Armageddon until just days before its advent? One possible answer is that their vision was blurred by a mixture of abundant liquidity and the passage of time.

houses are pretty illiquid assets - which means they are hard to sell quickly when you are in a financial jam. House prices are 'sticky' on the way down because sellers hate to cut the asking price in a downturn; the result is a glut of unsold properties and people who would otherwise move stuck looking at their For Sale signs. That in turn means that home ownership can tend to reduce labour mobility, thereby slowing down recovery.

Los profesores que otrora habían abrazado las doctrinas nazis ahora abrazaban las de la OTAN; la mayoría conservó su trabajo. La primera evidencia importante de cambio cultural fue el surgimiento de una prensa liberal, pero fue tanto obra de los ciudadanos del país ocupado como de los ocupantes, cuyo papel fue permisivo en lo fundamental.

Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from 'rags to riches' in a generation. But today, if you are born to parents in the bottom income quintile, you have just a 5 per cent chance of getting into the top quintile without a college degree. What Charles Murray has called the 'cognitive elite', educated at exclusive private universities, intermarried and congregated in a few

the war should be understood as a kind of backlash against globalization, heralded by rising tariffs and immigration restrictions in the decade before 1914, and welcomed most ardently by Europe's agrarian elites, whose position had been undermined for decades by the decline in agricultural prices and emigration of surplus rural labour to the New World.14

La administración británica de las finanzas egipcias tuvo mucho en común con una misión del Fondo Monetario Internacional, o más bien con el modo en que una misión del FMI operaría si pudiera llamar a la Royal Navy para hacer cumplir sus prescripciones. Evelyn

If there is one educational policy I would like to see adopted throughout the United Kingdom, it would be a policy that aimed to increase significantly the number of private educational institutions Ã¢â'¬â€œ and, at the same time, to establish programmes of vouchers, bursaries and scholarships to allow a substantial number of children from lower-income families to attend them.