|
9850b81
|
In particular, it lacked the skills to carry out pacification effectively--or as Kissinger politely put it, "the special qualities developed in a decade or more of combat training do not include discriminating political judgment in volatile and complex circumstances."
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
f266a51
|
democracy', we are in fact referring to a number of different interlocking institutions. People sticking pieces of paper into ballot boxes, yes. Their elected representatives making speeches and voting in a large assembly hall, yes. But those things alone do not automatically give you democracy. Outwardly, the legislators of countries like Russia and Venezuela are elected, but neither qualifies as a true democracy in the eyes of impartial o..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
13b67d7
|
parties - that nominate candidates for election. Just as important as the parties are the officials - civil servants, judges or ombudsmen - whose responsibility it is to ensure that the elections are fair. And then it matters hugely how the legislature itself actually operates. A body of elected representatives can be anything from a wholly sovereign entity, as the British Parliament was until European law began to encroach on it, to an imp..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
c7f1797
|
vested interests that financed their election campaigns. In August 2011, as Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya was falling apart, a BBC correspondent in Benghazi spotted some remarkable graffiti on a wall. On the left side of the wall there was a classically straightforward revolutionary message: 'The tyrant should fall, he's a monster.' Direct and to the point. But on the right side, the message was anything but simple. It read: 'We want co..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
aa767b8
|
Marx era una persona odiosa. Vividor desalinado y polemista virtulento le gustaba alardear que su espora era, por nacimiento, <>(...). En consecuencia, durante casi toda su vida hubo de depender de los donativos de Engels, para quien el socialismo era una mera aficion (...)
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
f78fc17
|
Hemos olvidado profundamente en todas partes que el Pago Monetario no es la unica relacion entre seres humanos... No es el unico nexo del hombre con el hombre' --Thomas Carlyle
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
7885544
|
political transition lies in the detail of the constitution, not to mention the rules governing the constituent assembly that designs it. How does the legislature stand relative to the executive and the judiciary? Most constitutions spell that out. But how do the organs of civilian government relate to the military, a question of burning importance in Egypt? Nor can one stop there. Modern nation-states have developed a whole range of instit..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
2581aa7
|
En lugar de coaligarse en una masa empobrecida, el proletariado se subdividio entre unas <> cualificadas y un lumopenproletariado vicioso. Las primeras prefirieron las huelgas y la negociacion colectiva a la revolucion (...), el segundo prefirio la ginebra.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
7b63f19
|
welfare state is not part of democracy as the ancient Athenians conceived of it. In bee terms, the welfare state seems to create an ever increasing number of dependent drones whom the worker-bees have to support. It also employs a great many bees simply to transfer resources from the workers to the drones. And it seeks to finance itself by accumulating claims on future bees, in the form of public debt. In Chapter 1, I will consider this and..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
1a8aa1d
|
El Japon en el que Hiro-Hito alcanzo la edad adulta era un pais que admiraba a Occidente por su modernidad al tiempo que se hallaba resentido contra el por su arrogancia. Parecia que, para ser tratado como un igual, Japon tendria que adquirir tambien el ultimo de los accesorios occidentales: un imperio.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
62f07fc
|
The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. --WILLIAM JAMES1
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
fd096de
|
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it is the sinews of war; to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour. But what exactly is money? Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought? Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice? How did we
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
5051845
|
These days, nearly everyone claims to be democratic. I have even heard it claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is democratic. 'Capitalist', by contrast, is a word too often used as a term of abuse to be much heard in polite company. How do the institutions of the democratic state and those of the market economy relate to one another? Do corporations play an active part in politics, through lobbyists and campaign contributions? Do govern..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
640be4c
|
Known to the Chinese as 'Iron-Headed Old Rat
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
3a6768b
|
The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history's most successful narco-state: the British Empire.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
27a2104
|
Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
d04bb69
|
between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
06577c0
|
Let's face up to the question of who we support; let's defend the bastards and reform them later.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
47e4f90
|
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 |
|
571e6d7
|
Hitler had no doubt that it was rival empires, not native nationalism, which posed the real challenge to British rule.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
174e9ab
|
En 1863, en Newcastle, el doctor James Hunt habia dejado consternada a la audiencia de una reunion de la British Association for the Advancement of Science, al afirmar que los <> eran una especie separada de seres humanos, a medio camino entre el mono y el <>.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
5288648
|
do you think that I believe that you will protect us? I said, yes. He said, I no longer believe that you will protect us. Your actions over recent years have made clear that to you detente is more important than anything else. I do not believe that any American president will risk nuclear war for Berlin; the only thing that is saving us is that the Soviets cannot be sure of this.72
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
4bc4b11
|
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;
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
d2a8eff
|
The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
5b2cf67
|
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 |
|
f5e906a
|
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.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
3068f2f
|
La carrera de Morgan ilustra perfectamente el modo como se construyo el imperio, que consistio en la transicion de la pirateria al poder politico, hecho que cambiaria el mundo para siempre.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
d719b7f
|
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 |
|
2d871a5
|
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 |
|
1785b09
|
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 |
|
08ed731
|
Only general officers were entitled to know our true rank. To all others our standard reply to the inevitable question, "What is your rank?" was simply a firm, "My rank is confidential, but at this moment I am not outranked."39"
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
086a297
|
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 |
|
cb24ca6
|
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 |
|
f2acd51
|
It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, "Give in, or I'll beat you some more."
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
77f915a
|
Just as Hitler had predicted, it was rival empires more than indigenous nationalists who propelled the process of decolonization forward.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
780b6c5
|
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 |
|
9ae5ab6
|
Let every nation know," declared Kennedy in his inaugural address, "that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." --
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
339e5cc
|
there could be no planning because no one had time for it
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
1e1394a
|
rumours can go viral without sophisticated information technology.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
a513c1f
|
The performance of the American stock market is perhaps best measured by comparing the total returns on stocks, assuming the reinvestment of all dividends, with the total returns on other financial assets such as government bonds and commercial or Treasury bills, the last of which can be taken as a proxy for any short-term instrument like a money market fund or a demand deposit at a bank. The start date, 1964, is the year of the author's bi..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
2ac4c23
|
It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds - by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
b5941cc
|
Above all, the Trump campaign, like the British Vote Leave campaign, made full use of Facebook's ad-testing capability, trying tens of thousands of variants to establish what worked best on the voters being targeted.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
1f96c38
|
It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds - by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.9 This can scarcely surprise us. Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depreciation, many governments have..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
ebe2b34
|
the Dutch had improved on the Italian system of public debt (introducing, among other things, lottery loans which allowed people to gamble as they invested their savings in government debt). They had also reformed their currency by creating what was arguably the world's first central bank, the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank), which solved the problem of debased coinage by creating a reliable form of bank money (see Chapter 1). But perh..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |