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404900d
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The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called kulaks, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom it suited the Bolsheviks to demonize. 'How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.
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Niall Ferguson |
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1937263
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suppose they began to worry about the health of the Japanese currency, the yen, in which bonds are denominated and in which the interest is paid. In such circumstances, the price of the bond would drop as nervous investors sold off their holdings. Buyers would only be found at a price low enough to compensate them for the increased risk of a Japanese default or currency depreciation.
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Niall Ferguson |
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76548ae
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splenetic
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Niall Ferguson |
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a3e1567
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Bringing an 'emerging market' under the aegis of the British Empire was the surest way to remove political risk from investors' concerns.51 Even those outside the Empire risked a visit from a gunboat if they defaulted, as Venezuela discovered in 1902, when a joint naval expedition by Britain, Germany and Italy temporarily blockaded the country's ports. The United States was especially energetic (and effective) in protecting bondholders' int..
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Niall Ferguson |
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ef0eaea
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The Bolshevik newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta declared: 'Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin...let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie - more blood, as much as possible.
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Niall Ferguson |
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abbd92f
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coruscating
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Niall Ferguson |
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bcfb4d2
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an unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - Stalin ('man of steel'),
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Niall Ferguson |
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f466aba
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South Slav (Yugoslav)
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Niall Ferguson |
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24431f5
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Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them.
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Niall Ferguson |
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1dca2ee
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John [Ivan] the Terrible,
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Niall Ferguson |
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e2c2be2
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The finances of the Confederacy are one of the great might-have-beens of American history.39 For, in the final analysis, it was as much a lack of hard cash as a lack of industrial capacity or manpower that undercut what was, in military terms, an impressive effort by the Southern states.
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Niall Ferguson |
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a6bfdd5
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The Bolsheviks promised their supporters 'Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets'. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation.
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Niall Ferguson |
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4405d5e
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least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the 'Spanish Lady'.
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Niall Ferguson |
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9635df3
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Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.
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Niall Ferguson |
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d5edc3f
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how far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight.
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Niall Ferguson |
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f05b1fb
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The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.
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Niall Ferguson |
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7d5f79f
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Rothschild houses had capital in excess of PS35 million on the eve of the First World War, all of it family money; it was the job of the partners to manage this huge portfolio. A large part of it they held in the form of European government bonds, the most secure form of investment and also the kind of security the Rothschilds knew best, since they had long been the principal underwriters for new bond issues on the London market. They, more..
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Niall Ferguson |
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baa315d
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The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. 'We must put an end once and for all', he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, 'to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.
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Niall Ferguson |
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b4a91d3
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sanguine.
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Niall Ferguson |
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ebea111
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inchoate,
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Niall Ferguson |
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2916aec
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What became known in Russia as 'pogroms' - literally 'after thunder' - had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.
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Niall Ferguson |
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fa58f37
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there was an orgy of vandalism and looting,
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Niall Ferguson |
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9503e03
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propounded
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Niall Ferguson |
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d6c6e23
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investors tended to infer future changes in fiscal and monetary policy from political events, which were regularly reported in private correspondence, in newspapers and by telegraph agencies. Among the most influential bases for their inferences were three assumptions: that any war would disrupt trade and hence lower tax revenues for all governments; that direct involvement in war would increase a state's expenditure as well as reducing its..
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Niall Ferguson |
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47e1842
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an increase in the supply of paper money, and hence a decrease in the purchasing power of the currencies in which most bonds were denominated. A rational investor who anticipated a major war would sell bonds in anticipation of these effects.
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Niall Ferguson |
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c508b1e
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MISCEGENATION
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Niall Ferguson |
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2034080
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financial markets saw the war of 1914-18 coming, we should expect to see declines in bond prices or rises in bond yields (since the yield is essentially the interest paid on a bond divided by its market price).
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Niall Ferguson |
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eb05314
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elide
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Niall Ferguson |
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388ab5e
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World War I saw the birth of total war, in the sense that it was fought between societies as much as armies.
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Niall Ferguson |
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077ff69
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The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic.
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Niall Ferguson |
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6ddd741
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globalization. Only one era in history remotely resembles our own in terms of the degree of international economic and social integration, and that is the period from around 1875 to 1914. World trade grew to an unprecedented volume. Capital flowed across borders as never before.
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Niall Ferguson |
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f3207d2
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the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907.
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Niall Ferguson |
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5e9d436
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the unexpectedness of war
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Niall Ferguson |
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2e773f0
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recondite.
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Niall Ferguson |
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c0a76bc
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confabulations
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Niall Ferguson |
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5c2b243
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Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
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institutional
rules
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Niall Ferguson |
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4ad4890
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The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible.
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instant-gratification
excitement
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Niall Ferguson |
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c35aa28
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spurious
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Niall Ferguson |
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c7f5050
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The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
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location
job
purpose
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Niall Ferguson |
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7035b83
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cognate
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Niall Ferguson |
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58117e2
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meme
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Niall Ferguson |
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f94ce66
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Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West's winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?
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Niall Ferguson |
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72458a3
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The striking thing is that the transatlantic divergence in working patterns has coincided almost exactly with a comparable convergence in religiosity. Europeans not only work less; they also pray less - and believe less.
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faith-and-culture
work-ethic
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Niall Ferguson |
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a79be8b
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Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?
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materialsm
prosperity
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Niall Ferguson |