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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1dca2ee | John [Ivan] the Terrible, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| e2c2be2 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| a6bfdd5 | The Bolsheviks promised their supporters 'Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets'. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4405d5e | 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'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9635df3 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d5edc3f | how far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f05b1fb | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7d5f79f | 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.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| baa315d | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| b4a91d3 | sanguine. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| ebea111 | inchoate, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2916aec | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fa58f37 | there was an orgy of vandalism and looting, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9503e03 | propounded | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d6c6e23 | 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.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 47e1842 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c508b1e | MISCEGENATION | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2034080 | 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). | Niall Ferguson | ||
| eb05314 | elide | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 388ab5e | World War I saw the birth of total war, in the sense that it was fought between societies as much as armies. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 077ff69 | The majority of books about World War I represent its causes as diplomatic, its course as military and its consequences as economic. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6ddd741 | 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. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f3207d2 | the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5e9d436 | the unexpectedness of war | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2e773f0 | recondite. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c0a76bc | confabulations | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5c2b243 | Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms. | institutional rules | Niall Ferguson | |
| 4ad4890 | 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. | excitement instant-gratification | Niall Ferguson | |
| c35aa28 | spurious | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c7f5050 | 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. | job location purpose | Niall Ferguson | |
| 7035b83 | cognate | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 58117e2 | meme | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f94ce66 | 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? | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 72458a3 | 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. | faith-and-culture work-ethic | Niall Ferguson | |
| a79be8b | 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? | materialsm prosperity | Niall Ferguson | |
| 5a31274 | If there is one educational policy I would like to see adopted throughout the United Kingdom, it would be a policy that aimed to increase significantly the number of private educational institutions - and, at the same time, to establish programmes of vouchers, bursaries and scholarships to allow a substantial number of children from lower-income families to attend them. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 841acd8 | I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead. | perspective | Niall Ferguson | |
| a3f9d17 | The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highly optimized system crashed in what was, without doubt, the biggest financial collapse of all time. (Unlike in 1929 or in 2008, the world's major stock markets were forced to suspend trading for no less than five months.) | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f65da12 | Hohenzollerns, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 59d166f | Habsburgs, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fcba096 | crisis seemed to vindicate the Soviet model. For, if Marxism-Leninism stood for anything, it was the prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Now it seemed to be doing precisely that. Understandably, the more the American dream turned to nightmare, the more people were attracted to the Russian alternative of a planned economy - insulated from the vagaries of the market, yet capable of feats of co.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4126cde | Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one." | perspective | Niall Ferguson | |
| db49c74 | People born in other countries accounted for 14.6 per cent of the population in 1910 compared with 12.9 per cent at the 2010 census. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 8e9bb07 | A project such as this depends heavily on the expertise and toil of archivists and librarians. | Niall Ferguson |