Quotes About History

The impact of European conquerors on Africa, for good and evil, was relatively brief as history is measured-about three generations, as compared to the centuries in which the Romans ruled Britain or imperial China ruled parts of southeast Asia or the Moors ruled Spain.

Over the centuries, African nations rose and fell, like nations elsewhere around the world, the strong conquering the weak and either subjugating or enslaving those unable to resist.

Iron was smelted in what is now Nigeria five centuries before Christ.

The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7'Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74

Most of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were purchased, rather than captured, by Europeans.

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, The world has never been a level playing field.

Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65

Perhaps an even more remarkable contribution of Britain to the growth of freedom in the world was its leading role in the destruction of the international slave trade, and then of slavery itself.

for centuries much of the world's international trade was carried in ships that sailed past West Africa on their way between Europe and Asia around the southern tip of the continent.

One third of all Scots in the mid-nineteenth century moved from one county to another

After the American civil war, the U. S. Navy also joined the anti-slave patrols in the Atlantic.

How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?

1914, the coal mines in Wales employed more than a quarter of a million people and supplied approximately one third of the world's coal exports.

The most spectacular-and embittering-of the British suppressions of the Irish was Oliver Cromwell's punitive expedition of 1649

What the British had earlier than many other peoples was a framework of law and government that facilitated economic transactions.

When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others.

23 Two centuries later, the task appears less simple and such expressions as "brain-washing" and "reeducation" camps have chilling overtones in the light of history, though that has not stopped indoctrination efforts in American schools and colleges, led by those who still have the vision of the anointed today.

If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.

by 1891, nearly two-fifths of all living people born in Ireland were living outside Ireland.

The success of politicians does not depend on their learning their lessons about history or politics, but depends much more on having the ability to act on what is widely believed by the public and the media, which may include theories conspiracies or the belief that the higher prices are due to deception or greed.

It was these elite families which produced such notable Americans of Scotch-Irish ancestry as Patrick Henry. Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Sam Houston. and others.

the idea of separated powers and of rules governing all the contenders for power became imbedded in British tradition over the centuries.

Hundreds of families throughout New England responded to appeals to donate either 12 shillings per family or a peck of grain to help support the fledgling little college established near the Charles River, early in the colony's history, by John Harvard.:`°

building and patronizing churches and schools, both of which were outstanding by the standards of the times.