Empire Quotes

“American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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!”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“There are two disadvantages to this political fragmentation. Small countries are often formed as a result of civil war within an earlier multi-ethnic polity – the most common form of conflict since 1945. That in itself is economically disruptive. In addition, they can be economically inefficient even in peacetime, too small to justify all the paraphernalia of statehood”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“How on earth did 900 British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers manage to govern upwards of 250 million Indians?”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

“A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

“Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“official irony, was said to be “in charge” of [a] seething, whining, weakly hive, impotent to help itself, but strong in its power to cripple, thwart, and annoy’.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Despite Lawrence’s wartime promises to the Arabs, it was agreed to give Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine the status of British ‘mandates’ – the euphemism for colonies – while the French got Syria and the Lebanon.* The former German colonies of Togoland, Cameroon and East Africa were added to the British possessions”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Franklin had admitted that the colonies had different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners. Their jealousy of each other is so great that however necessary an union of the colonies has long been, for their common defence and security against their enemies, and how sensible soever each colony has been of that necessity, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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".'   ”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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?”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“At around the same time, the coffee house owner Thomas Garraway published a broadsheet entitled ‘An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf TEA’, in which he claimed that it could cure ‘Headache, Stone, Gravel, Dropsy, Liptitude Distillations, Scurvy, Sleepiness, Loss of Memory, Looseness or Griping of the Guts, Heavy Dreams and Collick proceeding from Wind’.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Considerations on Representative Government (1861) – that they enjoy the benefits of her uniquely advanced culture: first, a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent ... tenure of land. Secondly, improvement of the public intelligence; the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with the effective implementation of industry; and the growth of mental activity, making the people alive to new objects of desire. Thirdly, the introduction of foreign arts ... and the introduction of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves, while it places before them a stimulating example.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

“The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s ‘finest hour’. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. 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?”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Just as Hitler had predicted, it was rival empires more than indigenous nationalists who propelled the process of decolonization forward.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Only after Eden agreed to leave Egypt unconditionally did Eisenhower arrange a billion-dollar rescue package from the IMF and the Export-Import Bank.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Hitler had no doubt that it was rival empires, not native nationalism, which posed the real challenge to British rule.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“Though we hear much less about it, India had made a bigger contribution to the imperial war than Australia in terms of both finance and manpower.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“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’.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

“It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as ‘der Weltkrieg’, the world war; the British preferred the ‘European War’ or, later, the ‘Great War’.”
― Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World