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Quote by Niall Ferguson

“Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?”

Quote by Niall Ferguson

Author

Niall Ferguson is a prominent historian specializing in the history of the British Empire, financial history, and global history since 1800. He has authored numerous books and held academic positions at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. more

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“The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.”

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“The wisest fool in Christendom.”

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“Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense - far from it. For most of their early modern and modern history, they have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation - it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise.”

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Book:Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

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“At one level Great Britain at the beginning of the 18th century was like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, both three and one, and altogether something of a mystery.”

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“From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish.”

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Book:Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

Source: Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

“A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.”

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Book:Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

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“Jacobitism involved much more than a debate about the merits of a particular dynasty. Men and women were well aware that its success was almost certain to involved them in civil war. And the more politically educated knew that the Stuart Pretender was a pawn in a worldwide struggle for commercial and imperial primacy between Britain and France.”

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Book:Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

Source: Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

“When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences - the first person - with what the measurements show - the third person.”

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“The pre-war empire had been sufficiently informal and sufficiently cheap for Parliament to claim authority over it without having to concern itself too much about what this authority entailed. The post-war empire necessitated a much greater investment in administrative machinery and military force. This build-up of control had to be paid for, either by British taxpayers or by their colonists.”

“In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people.”

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