Quotes About Empire

Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.

As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine.

After 1500 not all roads led to Rome

I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants tot he carribean. British were not the first Empire builders. They were IMERIAL IMMITATORS!

The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.

British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.

The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed 'exchanges' of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo's warning: when a multi-ethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting.

The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?

Salvo unas cuantas excepciones, la élite política británica, a diferencia de la élite intelectual mayoritariamente socialista, encontró muy difícil aceptar que el imperio tenía que desaparecer como precio a pagar por la victoria.

In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?

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.'   

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 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim I had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.36 This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research. If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline.

an Empire-less Britain would be just a 'cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes'.

If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people,' he had reminded his Cabinet colleagues in 1878, 'the British Empire would not have been made.

La carrera de Morgan ilustra perfectamente el modo como se construyó el imperio, que consistió en la transición de la piratería al poder político, hecho que cambiaría el mundo para siempre.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson

We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire. Fighting as the British are at present in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation

The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian 'coolies'. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian PoWs – as well as Dutch prisoners and conscripted Indian labour – to construct 250 miles of railway through the mountainous jungle on the Thai-Burmese border.

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.

In the early 1950s, Harold Macmillan declared that the choice facing the country was between 'the slide into a shoddy and slushy Socialism (as a second-rate power), or the march to the third British Empire'. After Suez only the first option seemed to remain.

the Victorian revolution in global communications achieved 'the annihilation of distance'. But it also made possible long-distance annihilation. In time of war, distance simply had to be overcome – for the simple reason that Britain's principal source of military power now lay on the other side of the world.