Margaret MacMillan

"How groups of humans contemplate and plan for wars is also affected by their culture, including geography. Island nations or those with long coasts have understood and invested heavily in sea power. In the case of Britain, its navy – tellingly called the Senior Service – has absorbed more resources and had much greater prestige over the centuries than its army. While paintings, poems, films and histories memorialise the great naval battles – Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway – when one navy destroyed another, the main strategic purpose of navies is to control the seas, and the highways hat criss-cross them, and prevent their enemies from doing so. Even today land communications are vulnerable to disruption, either man-made or natural; how much more so in the past before surfaced roads and railways?"

"Ever since humans began to build floating craft, water has been the most reliable way of moving people and material. Navies exist to protect their nations, their coasts, people and shipping, and to project their power abroad. By landing troops on enemy coasts, acting as floating gun and aircraft platforms in more recent times to bring firepower to bear on land targets, or destroying enemy capacity to wage war, whether by sinking or seizing enemy and sometimes neutral shipping or blockading ports so that needed resources, including soldiers, cannot move in or out, a powerful navy can make it difficult, even impossible, for its enemy to wage war on land or at sea. ‘We destroy the national life afloat,’ said the leading British naval theorist Julian Corbett, who taught generations of officers before the First World War, ‘and therefore check the vitality of that life ashore, as far as one is dependent on the other.’"

"Napoleon was supreme on the Continent but he never managed to defeat the British navy. As a result the British were able to send supplies and reinforcements to their allies and damage the French economy by sinking French shipping and blockading French ports. In the First World War the British navy successfully enforced a naval blockade on Germany which included interdicting goods which the British deemed necessary for the German war effort even if these were carried on neutral ships. While the impact of the blockade is still debated, senior German officers blamed it for their defeat. ‘We were in the end defeated by sea power,’ said Erich Raeder, who headed the German navy from 1928 to 1943, ‘which deprived us of our food and raw materials, and slowly throttled by the blockade.’"

"Histories that that show past injustices or crimes can be used to argue for redress in the present."

"Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present."

"Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything."

"We have to be careful to cast our gaze as widely as possible. If we only look for the lessons that reinforce decisions we have already made, we will run into trouble."

"History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process."

"Nationalism brought Germany and Italy into being, destroyed Austrio-Hungary, and , more recently, broke apart Yugoslavia. People have suffered and died, and have harmed and killed others, for their 'nation'."

"If history is the judge to which we appeal, then it can also find against us. It can highlight our mistakes by reminding us of those who, at other times, faced similar problems but who made different, perhaps better decisions."

"As a judge, history also undermines the claims of leaders to omniscience. Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past. Robespierre in revolutionary France and Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot's Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society. The founder of China, the Qin Emperor, reportedly destroyed all the earlier histories, buried the scholars who might remember them, and wrote his own history. Successive dynasties were not as brutal but they, too, wrote their own histories of China's past. Mao went one better: He tried to destroy all memories and all artifacts that, by reminding the Chinese people of the past, might prevent him from remodelling them into the new Communist men and women."