Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession.
There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive – but there is only one past. And although the...
The whole notion of exemplary violence seemed to fire Lenin’s imagination. On August 11, 1918 he wrote a letter to Bolshevik leaders in Penza that speaks volumes: Comrades! The kulak uprising must be...
The rationale for the FDA’s rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would...
The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed.15
The masses long ago switched from stocks to investments having higher yields and more protection from inflation. Now the pension funds - the market’s last hope - have won permission to quit stocks and...
The final National Strategic Target List specified 1,050 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) for nuclear weapons, including 151 urban-industrial assets. Even the minimal version of the plan envisioned 650...
The Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on...
The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.
The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian ‘coolies’. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian P...
The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.
The Bolsheviks promised their supporters ‘Peace, Bread and Power to the Soviets’. Peace turned out to mean abject capitulation.
The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were...
The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highl...
También explica por qué Gran Bretaña pudo superar a sus rivales ibéricos: precisamente porque, por ser una recién llegada a la carrera imperial, tuvo que dedicarse a colonizar los pocos prometedores p...
Suddenly the people running Savings and Loans had nothing to lose - a clear case of what economists call moral hazard.
So I was a punk out of frustration. But I became a Tory out of hope.
Si no se emplean en las misiones de paz, es difícil saber para qué sirven soldados, en una Europa que ha declarado la paz perpetua dentro de sus fronteras y que ya no es amenazada por Rusia.
Protection Certificate) to open a lemonade stand in New York City?12 This is the kind of debilitating red tape that development economists often blame for poverty in Africa or Latin America. The ratio...
President Franklin Roosevelt argued that all that Americans had to fear was ‘fear itself’.