Quotes About History

Between a half and two-thirds of all Europeans who migrated to North America between 1650 and 1780 did so under contracts of indentured servitude;

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression Fuck off.'   

Desde que en 1579 se hubieron sacudido del dominio español, los holandeses habían estado a la vanguardia del capitalismo europeo. Habían creado un sistema de deuda pública que permitía al gobierno tomar empréstitos de sus ciudadanos a un tipo de interés bajo. Habían fundado una institución parecida a un banco central moderno. Su moneda era sólida. Su sistema impositivo basado en los impuestos internos era simple y eficaz.

En la práctica el dinero invertido en una colonia de iure como la India (o en una colonia en todo sentido, excepto el nombre como Egipto) era mucho más seguro que invertir en una colonia de facto como Argentina.

También explica por qué Gran Bretaña pudo superar a sus rivales ibéricos: precisamente porque, por ser una recién llegada a la carrera imperial, tuvo que dedicarse a colonizar los pocos prometedores páramos de Virginia y Nueva Inglaterra, antes que las ciudades de México y Perú, donde el saqueo estaba a la orden del día.

In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant.

The facile, if not tautological, answer to the question is that the West dominated the Rest because of imperialism.

The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe's monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14

the way the money was spent ensured that Spain's newfound wealth provided the entire continent with a monetary stimulus.

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?

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

Niall Ferguson

En ambas economías el caos fiscal se aunaba con la inflación rampante, que en Alemania evocaba la hiperinflación de 1923.Y ¿no había sido Hitler el «hijo adoptivo de la inflación»?88

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.

Niall Ferguson

Another Russian unit ordered the Jews of a shtetl near Wolkowisk to strip naked, dance with one another, and then ride on pigs; they then proceeded to shoot every tenth person.

The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic.

globalization. Only one era in history remotely resembles our own in terms of the degree of international economic and social integration, and that is the period from around 1875 to 1914. World trade grew to an unprecedented volume. Capital flowed across borders as never before.

the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907.

Por la lengua, la religión, la tenencia de la tierra y la estructura social, Irlanda era otro mundo.

Only by historical methods can we explain why, over the past thirty years, so many countries created forms of debt that, by design, cannot be inflated away; and why, as a result, the next generation will be saddled for life with liabilities incurred by their parents and grandparents.

Gibbon's breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire's devastating mockery of Leibniz's claim that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'.m

The reality, as we shall see, is that history is a process too complex to be modeled, even in the informal ways favored by Turchin and Dalio. Moreover, the more systematic modeling is done of historical phenomena—notably pandemics, but also climate change or environmental degradation—the easier it becomes to go "from being roughly right towards being precisely wrong.