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Niall Ferguson
72 quotes
“The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (1998).
“Even small numbers of evangelical missionaries can achieve a good deal, furnished as they are with substantial funds from congregations at home.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire. Penguin (2004). Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines
“For much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the 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. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the ‘imperialism of fair trade’.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The difficulty with the achievements of the empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of the empire.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For better, for worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The struggle for world mastery between Britain and France would rage on with only brief respite until 1815. But the Seven Years War decided one thing irrevocably. India would be British, not French. And that gave Britain what for nearly two hundred years would be both a huge market for British trade and an inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower. India was much more than the ‘jewel in the crown’. Literally and metaphorically, it was a whole diamond mine.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once pirates, then traders, the British were now the rulers of millions of people overseas – and not just in India. Thanks to a combination of naval and financial muscle they had become the winners in the European race for empire.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later Great Britain had acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This, then, was the combination that made New England flourish: Puritanism plus the profit motive.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Amazing Grace’ is the supreme hymn of Evangelical redemption….It is therefore tempting to imagine John Newton suddenly seeing the light about slavery and turning away from his wicked profession to dedicate himself to God. But the timing of Newton’s conversion is all wrong. In fact, it was after his religious awakening that Newton became the first mate and then the captain of a succession of slave ships, and only much later that he began to question the morality of buying and selling his fellow men and women.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the moment when the British ideal of liberty bit back. It was the moment when the British Empire began to tear itself apart. On the village green of Lexington, Massachusetts, British redcoats exchanged fire for the first time with armed American colonists. It was 19 April 1775.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna – the eucalyptus trees and kangaroos – Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars. This helps explain why the first official response to the discovery of New South Wales by Captain Cook in 1770 was to identify it as the ideal dumping ground for criminals.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like the non-governmental aid organizations of today, Victorian missionaries believed they knew what was best for Africa.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is one of the less easily intelligible characteristics of the early missionaries that they attached more importance to the souls of others than to the lives of their own children.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To Livingstone, the search for a way to open up Africa to Christianity and civilization was made still more urgent by the discovery that slavery was still thriving. Though the slave trade in the west of the continent had supposedly been suppressed following the British abolition law, slaves continue to be exported from Central and East Africa to Arabia, Persia and India. Perhaps as many as two million Africans fell victim to this eastward traffic in the course of the nineteenth century.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reality did not take long to intrude.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This was the unspoken truth about British India; and that was why, as Machonochie himself put it, it did not really feel like ‘a conquered country’. Only the Indian rulers had been supplanted or subjugated by the British; most Indians carried on much as before – indeed, for an important class of them British rule was an opportunity for self-advancement.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.… As a source of entertainment – of sheer psychological gratification – the Empire’s importance can never be exaggerated.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The familiar rationale of white rule in Africa was that it conferred the benefits of civilization. The war made a mockery of that claim.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before 1914, the benefits of Empire had seemed to most people, on balance, to outweigh the costs. After the war the costs suddenly, inescapably, outweighed the benefits.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The creeping crisis of confidence in Empire had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for its victory over Germany in the First World War. The death toll for the British Isles alone was around three-quarters of a million, one in sixteen of all adult males between the ages fifteen and fifty. The economic cost was harder to calculate.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1918 Britain had won the war on the Western Front by a huge feat of military modernization. In the 1920s nearly everything that had been learned was forgotten in the name of economy. The stark reality was that, despite the victory and the territory it had brought, the First World War had left the Empire more vulnerable than ever before. War had acted as a forcing house for a host of new military technologies – the tank, the submarine, the armed aeroplane. To secure its post-war future, the Empire needed to invest in all of these. It did nothing of the kind.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the Cold War entered its hottest phase in the 1960s, United States and the Soviet Union vied with one another to win the support of independence movements in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. What Harold Macmillan called ‘the winds of change’ when he toured Africa in 1960 blew not from Windhoek or Malawi but from Washington and Moscow. Tragically, they often blew away colonial rule only to replace it with Civil War.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A country’s economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and human action (history, for short): this is economic history’s version of the nature-nurture debate.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a point worth emphasizing that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign effect. According to the work of political scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset, countries that were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving enduring democratization after independence than those ruled by other countries. Indeed, nearly every country with a population of at least a million has emerged from the colonial era without succumbing to dictatorship is a former British colony.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally, although Anglophone economic and political liberalism remains the most alluring of the world’s cultures, it continues to face, as it has since the Iranian revolution, a serious threat from Islamic fundamentalism.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The empire that rules the world today is both more and less than its British begetter. It has a much bigger economy, many more people, a much larger arsenal. But it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions that 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 (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The NS Interview: Niall Ferguson", New Statesman (July 23, 2010).
“The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: TED Talks: Niall Ferguson", TED (2011).
“The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: TED Talks: Niall Ferguson", TED (2011).
“Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On being called a racist", The Spectator (December 17, 2011).
“The rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources. Did ultimately benefit from French rule? Yes, it's clear. And the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home. It certainly doesn't work for north America, that's for sure. I mean, I'm sure the Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don't know what they were because they didn't write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don't think we'd have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we've had in north America.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the West today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a better chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleon than the decentralized United States? We cannot be sure. But it is not unreasonable to ask how long the US constitution would have lasted if the United States had suffered the same military and economic strains that swept away the French constitution of 1791.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone Israeli inventors applied to register 9591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was 50 and for all majority Muslim countries in the world with 5657.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The consumer society is so all-pervasive today that it is easy to assume it has always existed. Yet in reality it is one of the more recent innovations that propelled the West ahead of the Rest. Its most striking characteristic is its seemingly irresistible appeal... The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt it merely by holding elections. In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.”
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“Because of the central importance in Luther’s thought of individual reading of the Bible, Protestantism encouraged literacy, not to mention printing, and these two things unquestionably encouraged economic development (the accumulation of ‘human capital’) as well as scientific study. This proposition holds good not only in Prussia but also all over the world. Wherever Protestant missionaries went, they promoted literacy, with measurable long-term benefits to the societies they sought to educate; the same cannot be said of Catholic missionaries prior to Vatican II.”
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“Protestantism made the West not only work, but also save and read. The Industrial Revolution was indeed a product of technological innovation and consumption. But it also required an increase in the intensity and duration of work, combined with the accumulation of capital through saving and investment. Above all, it depended on the accumulation of human capital. The literacy that Protestantism promoted was vital to all of this. On reflection, we would do better to talk about the Protestant word ethic.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like the Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defenses to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Paris and the fall of Rome", The Boston Globe (November 16, 2015).
“Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Xi whiz", The Boston Globe (October 30, 2017).
“A century ago it was the West’s great blunder to think it would not matter if Lenin and his confederates took over the Russian Empire. Incredible as it may seem, I believe we are capable of repeating that catastrophic error. I fear that, one day, we shall wake with a start to discover that the Islamists have repeated the Bolshevik achievement, which was to acquire the resources and capability to threaten our very existence.”
Niall Ferguson (born 1964) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The cautionary tale of the Bolshevik revolution", The Boston Globe (November 13, 2017).