"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. 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 indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
University of Oxford facultyHistorians from ScotlandUniversity of Oxford alumniHarvard University facultyPeople from Glasgow
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 2, “White Plague” (p. 60)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Niall Ferguson
75 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Niall Ferguson →
Related Quotes
"It was the phenomenon of industrial unemployment that shocked contemporaries most. 'Next to war,' remarked The Times …"
"The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the ed…"
"In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the tru…"
"It is a point worth emphasizing that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign effect. According to t…"
"The empire that rules the world today is both more and less than its British begetter. It has a much bigger economy, …"
"The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read.…"
"Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of …"
"Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism …"
"A country’s economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and…"
"Finally, although Anglophone economic and political liberalism remains the most alluring of the world’s cultures, it …"