Harvard University Faculty

"The rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources. Did ultimately benefit from French rule? Yes, it's clear. And the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all."

"Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings."

"The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy."

"The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos."

"The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction."

"The empire that rules the world today is both more and less than its British begetter. It has a much bigger economy, many more people, a much larger arsenal. But it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions that need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial."

"Finally, although Anglophone economic and political liberalism remains the most alluring of the world’s cultures, it continues to face, as it has since the Iranian revolution, a serious threat from Islamic fundamentalism."

"It is a point worth emphasizing that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign effect. According to the work of political scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset, countries that were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving enduring democratization after independence than those ruled by other countries. Indeed, nearly every country with a population of at least a million has emerged from the colonial era without succumbing to dictatorship is a former British colony."

"A country’s economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and human action (history, for short): this is economic history’s version of the nature-nurture debate."

"Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them."

"In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s 'finest hour'. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?"

"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."

"Has Niall Ferguson learned anything since 2011. Has he marked his beliefs to market in any way? Does he show any signs of needing to inform his readers of his awful forecasting track record? Or of having any moral foundations under what he writes other than his post-modern relativistic amorality?"

"Ferguson’s metamorphoses in the last decade – from cheerleader, successively, of empire, Anglobalisation and Chimerica to exponent of collapse-theory and retailer of emollient tales about the glorious past – have highlighted broad political and cultural shifts more accurately than his writings. His next move shouldn’t be missed."

"It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain. On this occasion, Trump was bluffing, and the administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs on Europe, much less taking military action to annex Greenland."

"In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe's elite, not to mention Canada's. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States."

"The reality is that [Donald] Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important."

"I look back on January 6 as this combination of a genuine belief on his part [Trump] that the election was stolen and a catastrophic failure of policing that doesn't look entirely accidental. [...] We were all treated to a theatrical event with an amateur cast that really one would be stretching the English language to call a coup or even an attempted coup."

"[On his comments on January 10, 2021 (above) about Trump as a "would-be tyrant"] I'm convinced that whatever impulses he has or has had in the past, the system can contain them as it was designed to."

"There were Chernobyl-like features of the way that the United States handled the [Covid] pandemic, in particular the reluctance of the responsible officials ever to admit any responsibility for any of the things that went wrong."

"[[George H. W. Bush|[George H. W.] Bush]] was in many ways the maestro president when it came to foreign policy. With extraordinary dexterity, he handled the , the collapse of all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, German reunification and then the Soviet disintegration. On his watch, Nelson Mandela was set free and apartheid consigned to the history books; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed. And yet still the presidency was won by a scandal-prone Southern governor with the banal but brilliant slogan: "It’s the economy, stupid.""

"The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners."

"As the Cold War entered its hottest phase in the 1960s, United States and the Soviet Union vied with one another to win the support of independence movements in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. What Harold Macmillan called ‘the winds of change’ when he toured Africa in 1960 blew not from Windhoek or Malawi but from Washington and Moscow. Tragically, they often blew away colonial rule only to replace it with Civil War."

"In 1918 Britain had won the war on the Western Front by a huge feat of military modernization. In the 1920s nearly everything that had been learned was forgotten in the name of economy. The stark reality was that, despite the victory and the territory it had brought, the First World War had left the Empire more vulnerable than ever before. War had acted as a forcing house for a host of new military technologies – the tank, the submarine, the armed aeroplane. To secure its post-war future, the Empire needed to invest in all of these. It did nothing of the kind."

"The creeping crisis of confidence in Empire had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for its victory over Germany in the First World War. The death toll for the British Isles alone was around three-quarters of a million, one in sixteen of all adult males between the ages fifteen and fifty. The economic cost was harder to calculate."

"Before 1914, the benefits of Empire had seemed to most people, on balance, to outweigh the costs. After the war the costs suddenly, inescapably, outweighed the benefits."

"The familiar rationale of white rule in Africa was that it conferred the benefits of civilization. The war made a mockery of that claim."

"Traditional accounts of ‘decolonization’ tend to give the credit (or the blame) to the nationalist movements within the colonies, from Sinn Fein in Ireland to Congress in India. The end of Empire is portrayed as a victory for ‘freedom fighters’, who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their peoples of the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the twentieth century, the principal threats – and the most plausible alternatives – to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires. These alternative empires were significantly harsher in their treatment of subject peoples than Britain."

"Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.… As a source of entertainment – of sheer psychological gratification – the Empire’s importance can never be exaggerated."

"This was the unspoken truth about British India; and that was why, as Machonochie himself put it, it did not really feel like ‘a conquered country’. Only the Indian rulers had been supplanted or subjugated by the British; most Indians carried on much as before – indeed, for an important class of them British rule was an opportunity for self-advancement."

"It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade."

"Livingstone had believed in the power of the Gospel; Stanley believed only in brute force. Livingstone have been appalled by slavery; Stanley would connive at its restoration. Above all, Livingstone had been indifferent to political frontiers; Stanley wanted to see Africa carved up. And so it was. In the time between Livingstone’s death in 1873 and Stanley’s death in 1904 around the third of Africa would be annexed to the British Empire; virtually all the rest would be taken over by a handful of other European powers. And it is only against this background of political domination that the conversion of sub-Saharan Africa to Christianity can be understood. Commerce, Civilization and Christianity were to be conferred on Africa, just as Livingstone had intended. But they would arrive in conjunction with a fourth ‘C’: Conquest."

"Reality did not take long to intrude."

"To Livingstone, the search for a way to open up Africa to Christianity and civilization was made still more urgent by the discovery that slavery was still thriving. Though the slave trade in the west of the continent had supposedly been suppressed following the British abolition law, slaves continue to be exported from Central and East Africa to Arabia, Persia and India. Perhaps as many as two million Africans fell victim to this eastward traffic in the course of the nineteenth century."

"It is one of the less easily intelligible characteristics of the early missionaries that they attached more importance to the souls of others than to the lives of their own children."

"Like the non-governmental aid organizations of today, Victorian missionaries believed they knew what was best for Africa."

"Africa was in fact a great deal less primitive than they imagined.… However, in three respects it struck the Victorians as benighted. Unlike North Africa, the faiths of sub-Saharan Africa were not monotheistic; except for its northern and southern extremities, it was riddled with malaria, yellow fever and other diseases lethal to Europeans (and their preferred livestock); and, perhaps most importantly, slaves were its most important export – indeed, supplying slaves to European and Arab traders along the coast became the continent’s biggest source of revenue. The peculiar path of global economic development led Africans into the business of capturing and selling one another."

"With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna – the eucalyptus trees and kangaroos – Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars. This helps explain why the first official response to the discovery of New South Wales by Captain Cook in 1770 was to identify it as the ideal dumping ground for criminals."

"In all, around 100,000 Loyalists left the new United States bound for Canada, England or the West Indies. It has sometimes been argued that in gaining Canada in the Seven Years War, Britain had undermined her position in America. Without the French threat, why should the thirteen colonies stay loyal? Yet the loss of America had the unforeseen effect of securing Canada for the Empire, thanks to the flood of English-speaking Loyalists immigrants who would eventually reduce the French Quebecois to a beleaguered minority. The amazing thing is that so many people should have voted with their feet against American independence, choosing loyalty to King and Empire over ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’."

"It was the moment when the British ideal of liberty bit back. It was the moment when the British Empire began to tear itself apart. On the village green of Lexington, Massachusetts, British redcoats exchanged fire for the first time with armed American colonists. It was 19 April 1775."

"‘Amazing Grace’ is the supreme hymn of Evangelical redemption….It is therefore tempting to imagine John Newton suddenly seeing the light about slavery and turning away from his wicked profession to dedicate himself to God. But the timing of Newton’s conversion is all wrong. In fact, it was after his religious awakening that Newton became the first mate and then the captain of a succession of slave ships, and only much later that he began to question the morality of buying and selling his fellow men and women."

"This, then, was the combination that made New England flourish: Puritanism plus the profit motive."

"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."

"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."

"Once pirates, then traders, the British were now the rulers of millions of people overseas – and not just in India. Thanks to a combination of naval and financial muscle they had become the winners in the European race for empire."

"The struggle for world mastery between Britain and France would rage on with only brief respite until 1815. But the Seven Years War decided one thing irrevocably. India would be British, not French. And that gave Britain what for nearly two hundred years would be both a huge market for British trade and an inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower. India was much more than the ‘jewel in the crown’. Literally and metaphorically, it was a whole diamond mine."

"The empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar."

"For better, for worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?"

"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."

"The difficulty with the achievements of the empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of the empire."