From Silk to Silicon Quotes

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see,” which I interpret to mean that looking way back into the past provides much better perspective into the enduring patterns of history. I’d”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising put down at gunpoint.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“Companies such as Intel, IBM, General Electric, Apple, and Microsoft have also expanded their research operations abroad to countries including India, China, Singapore, and Israel in order to be nearer customers and technological talent. In fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated that 94 percent of all global companies now do some research and development outside their home countries.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“is a little-known fact that nearly 95 percent of communications traffic between continents—including e-mail, phone calls, videos, and financial transfers—travels not by air or through space but via underwater fiber-optic cable—close to one million miles of it. And the demand is growing.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“The telegraph not only linked the world in real time but became a bridge to subsequent international communications breakthroughs—the radio in the 1920s, the telephone in the 1950s, the Internet in the 1990s. Even the magic of the wireless Internet rests on a solid foundation of wire cables, just like the magic of the telegraph.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“A healthy global financial system is essential to meeting the aspirations of billions of people entering the middle class; to fund the growth of cities; to build the global networks of roads, airports, ports, and telecommunications the world needs; to underwrite the expansion of health care, education, and other vital social services; and to raise the trillions of dollars that will be necessary to deal with climate change. The centrality of finance and the search for more and different kinds of funding and credit—the kind of innovation and expansion epitomized by the House of Rothschild—remain pivotal to our interconnected and expanding world economy. And if we look for the most important historical models for effective, enlightened global bankers, Mayer Amschel Rothschild is at the top of the list.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“Of course, the topography of global finance has changed dramatically since the heyday of the House of Rothschild. Today there are no family-owned global institutions of any significance. Huge publicly listed banks, asset managers, private equity firms, hedge funds, and insurance companies dominate and operate around the globe. Regulators are powerful and ubiquitous. But some things remain constant. Global finance is not for the fainthearted; it is too complex, too volatile, too dependent on uncontrollable political events within and among countries. Global finance also relies heavily on trust between the suppliers and consumers of money. Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his sons were the essence of trustworthiness. Garnering trust has many dimensions, one of which is accountability. If a banker is held responsible for his mistakes, then his customer has more confidence in him. The Rothschilds could not hide behind public corporations that today essentially shield top individuals from the legal liability of big mistakes, as we have seen in the failure of prosecutors to charge and convict senior financial officials in the global crisis of 2008–9. Unfortunately, few institutions today can command the confidence that the Rothschilds engendered and that is essential to a healthy global economy. Other”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“Finance is the circulatory system of any country, as well as of the global economy. A smoothly functioning system is central to national growth and prosperity, to international trade, international economic growth and development, and to fewer global crashes than otherwise would take place. But few financial systems can operate in a vacuum; given porous borders, they are always linked to, and influenced by, other national systems. Thus, they are truly borderless. They are therefore the very definition of globalization. The global financial system allows the world to grow faster because it channels savings—excess money—into places where the money is needed, to facilitate trade, for example, or to build roads, ports, bridges, or new companies. Global finance is also precarious because problems in one part of the world can spread like a contagious disease. Mayer Amschel Rothschild was one of the great pioneers of figuring out how to expand the possibilities of global finance and also how to deal with the consequences of the periodic crises that it spawns. The”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“Indeed, it was the British Empire that, in tandem with the American democratic capitalist system, created the global economy as we know it, based as it is on consumer-driven markets, rule of law, and the ideal—at least in North America, Europe, and a growing number of emerging nations—of free and open societies. Especially”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“The closest modern equivalents to the Company, however, are the giant state-owned companies of China, such as the Sinopec Group, the petroleum behemoth. As Beijing extends its influence across East Asia and works to secure supplies of oil and other raw materials from Africa to Latin America, its large state firms are and will continue to be critical vehicles of this expansion.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“Furthermore, the East India Company showed how government and commercial enterprises of the same nation can make common cause in expanding commerce and culture across borders. Indeed, it demonstrated that when it comes to globalization, the line between the state and its companies can be thin or invisible.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“In all these pursuits we can see the patterns set by Prince Henry—the relentless quest for new information, the systemic approach to building on the lessons of the last mission, the exhilaration that human beings experience by breaking through new geographical barriers, and the relentless drive to go farther and farther even when the payoff is uncertain. Without such efforts, globalization would have never become as wide and as deep as it is today. And with ongoing attempts to push the boundaries of knowledge and experience, we can be sure that our world will continue to get smaller and more interconnected for as long as human beings survive.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“On the morning of August 8, 1444, the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, were delivered to the Portuguese port of Lagos. Historians say this is when modern slavery began.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“globalization is about connecting on multiple levels and breaking down many of the walls that separate populations of various origins, customs, and beliefs. Globalization also entails developing systems of government that centralize administration and enforce common standards of behavior.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“It illustrates the force that military conquest has played in furthering the connections among disparate societies. It shows how commerce follows conquest, how commerce and culture intersect, and how transport and communications networks become so important.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“Indifferent to controlling matters of religion or culture, the Mongols focused on building commerce and the physical, administrative, and legal infrastructure to help it flow freely.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

“The big advantage that the Mongols had over previous empire builders is that they themselves had nothing in the way of deeply ingrained ideas of politics, economics, or culture to spread abroad.”
― Jeffrey E. Garten, From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives