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Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's Imagine. What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.

Niall Ferguson

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Niall Ferguson
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: April 18
Economic Historian
Historian
University Teacher
Glasgow
Scotland
Niall Campbell Ferguson
States
Imagine
Lots
Little
Nations
John
Campfires
People
Happy
Absence
Campfire
War
Singing
Lennon
Order
Sitting
Anarchy
Ends
Nation
Empires
Around
Full
Essentially
Littles
Create
Civil

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I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.
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You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.
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I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
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My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.
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I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.
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When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.
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Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?
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The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
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If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance.
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The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.
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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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Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.
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