Kindle Notes & Highlights
In fact, an alliance between force and modernization can spell heady profits for companies with the right political connections.
Indirect rule became a breeding ground for autocracy, discontent, and instability.
as Frederick the Great reminds us, “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.”
Therefore, while in 1900 Morocco was still nominally independent, it was independent as a mouse surrounded by several hungry cats warily disputing who would carry off the dinner.
“My nostrils were assailed by a stench so powerful and nauseating as almost to be possessed of beauty,
It transpired that the new “consul,” who called himself Abdul Kerim Bey, was in fact an Austrian named Geyling. But it took some time to convince the Moroccans, whose ignorance of the outside world was virtually total, that neither Araucania-Patagonia nor its King Orelie-Antoine actually existed.
After eight or ten days on a diet of couscous and sweetmeats saturated in butter and honey, the visitors’ digestive functions were so upset that they required another week to recover sufficiently to transact business:
As Napoleon was the only European that these men had heard of, it was advisable to claim his acquaintance if one wanted to be thought important.
Only by expressing a hope that “his family may be scattered and his great-great-grandfather committed to the flames” could one goad a surly muleteer into action or bridle the greed of a shopkeeper who feared that these calamities might actually come to pass.
A: God damn your father, O naked one! B: God damn your father, O lousy fellow! A: O itchy fellow! B: O leper! A: O pimp! B: O husband of a whore! A: O one who has grown up in the market place! [i.e., feels no shame] B: O boy prostitute! A: O seller of charcoal! B: O seller of sour milk! A: May God give you fever! B: May God give you fever without perspiration!
