Remember that the interest is paid on the face value of the bond, so if you can buy a 5 per cent bond at just 10 per cent of its face value you can earn a handsome yield of 50 per cent. In essence, yo...
The sequence is clear: first the Glorious Revolution, then agricultural improvement, then imperial expansion, then industrial revolution.
The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhap...
The overwhelming impression is of professionals transformed into psychopaths – morally blinded, perhaps, by their narrow specialisms (that, at least, was the historian Friedrich Meinecke’s theory). Wh...
The limitation on this system was simply that the Exchange Bank maintained something close to a 100 per cent ratio between its deposits and its reserves of precious metal and coin. As late as 1760, wh...
The leaders of continental Europe would indeed plough relentlessly ahead with monetary union, so that by the beginning of 1999 the euro – a single European currency managed by an authentically federal...
The frenzy of the cheering at the Cow Palace was reminiscent of Nazi times. . . . They [the Goldwater supporters] are the middle class gone rampant: the technocrats, the white collar workers impelled...
The essence of policy is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural. The essence of bureaucracy is its quest for safety; its success is calcula...
The closure of the stock market and the intervention of the authorities to supply liquidity almost certainly averted a catastrophic fire-sale of assets.
The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state: the British Empire.
The Portuguese did not arrive with many products of their own to offer Asian consumers (though they did bring some slaves and gold from their West African outposts). That was not the point. Nor did th...
The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed ‘exchanges’ of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Arch...
The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.
Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi, who burned himself to death in front of the governor’s offices in the town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010.12 Bouazizi killed himself precisely one hour after a policewoman, ba...
Somehow no really terrible Western ideas like, say, witch-burning or communism ever get mentioned, though they seem just as plausibly the products of Judaeo-Christian culture as the spirit of capitali...
Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement...
Since de Soto published The Mystery of Capital, revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt have provided compelling evidence in support of his approach. He sees the ‘Arab Spring’ primarily as a r...
Rothschild houses had capital in excess of £35 million on the eve of the First World War, all of it family money; it was the job of the partners to manage this huge portfolio. A large part of it they...
Pero los intereses estadounidenses podían también verse satisfechos porque la ocupación de países extranjeros reportaba beneficios (al cabo de un tiempo extraordinariamente breve). Sobre esta base, er...
People born in other countries accounted for 14.6 per cent of the population in 1910 compared with 12.9 per cent at the 2010 census.