"The rise of Benin...is closely connected with the European demand for slaves...The profits from the trade with the Europeans gave the rulers and merchants of Benin an incentive and also, in the form of firearms, the means, to extend their rule...By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the continual warfare was destroying the prosperity and even the structure of the state...Large parts of the city were deserted and left to crumble into ruins. Trade, even the trade in slaves, declined, and, as European traders came ever less frequently to the city, so the purpose of slave-raids became increasingly to provide victims for human sacrifices. Eventually, of all the greatness of Benin, all that survived was the unchecked and self-destructive lust of its rulers for power and human booty."

"Written accounts of Benin describe periods of fluctuating power and prosperity disturbed by civil wars which appear to have been caused by disputes over the succession to the kingship...Between periods of dissension the kingdom seems to have shown remarkable powers of recovery...The history of Benin, then, is one of alternating periods of territorial expansion and contraction in accordance with the degree of power and authority at the centre."

"It is impossible at the present time to determine the extent of the Benin empire at any particular period in the past...The frontiers were continually expanding and contracting as new conquests were made and as vassals on the borders rebelled and were reconquered."

"His appointment as abbot may have been an excellent thing for the monastery, but it cannot be denied that it was a great misfortune for science."

"Since the 1970s, interest in economic methodology has grown dramatically, to the extent that it is now possible to view methodology as a clearly identifiable sub-discipline within economics."

"As the title of his 1941 book indicates, the theory of capital lay at the heart of his theory of the cycle. The reason is that he attributes the cycle not to changes in aggregate demand, or even to changes in the quantity of capital, but to changes in the structure of production and hence the structure of the capital stock. In this, his theory was highly unusual: one of the reasons for his failure to engage more effectively with Keynes was the latter’s inability to see how the theory of capital could be of any importance for the cycle. Because the theory of capital is so central, and because it is so complex, it needs to be explained carefully. After that, the rest of his theory falls into place comparatively easily."

"In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one."

"Following the financial crisis of September 2008 when the American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, threatening to engulf the entire banking system, the British economist John Maynard Keynes returned to center stage. In the popular press and in the writings of many economists, Keynes featured prominently as governments around the world urgently sought ways to avoid economic collapse. (...) After only a brief delay, critics of Keynes’s ideas also began to appear; but the emergence of such critics only served to emphasize the fact of his return, for only a few years earlier Keynes’s name would not even have appeared in public debate about economic policy: his ideas were seen as having so little relevance that it did not even seem necessary to mention his name when discussing the performance of the economy."