Niall Ferguson: Quotes about the world

“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

"Niall Ferguson: 'Westerners don't understand how vulnerable freedom is'" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization, The Guardian, February 20, 2011.

World , Home , Hell , Thinking

“Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.”

Niall Ferguson

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

People , World , Sea , Country

“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 book Civilization: The West and the Rest

Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011)

World , Country

“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

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

World

“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

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

World

“In leaving Britain, the early emigrants risked not merely their life savings but their very lives. Their voyages were never without hazard; their destinations were often unhealthy and inhospitable. To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seems baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets - some purchased voluntarily, some not - there could have been no British Empire. For the indispensible foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white.”

Niall Ferguson

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

Life , World , Way , History

“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

Source: Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003)

World