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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
People
Happy
Absence
Campfire
War
Singing
Lennon
Order
Sitting
Anarchy
Ends
Nation
Empires
Around
Full
Essentially
Littles
Create
Civil
States
Imagine
Lots
Little
Nations
John
Campfires

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I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
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When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.
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The Armenian genocide showed what could happen when empires were beaten into nations.
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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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In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.
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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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The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.
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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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You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.
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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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The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.
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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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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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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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Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?
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From the earliest days, the Rothschilds appreciated the importance of proximity to politicians, the men who determined not only the extent of budget deficits but also the domestic and foreign policies.
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