The life of a hunter-gatherer is indeed, as Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
The first paradox of Illuminism, then, was that it was a network that craved an elaborate hierarchical structure, even as it inveighed against existing hierarchies. In his 1782 ‘Address to the newly p...
The aim of Cold War competition in the third world was not to win a contest between rival models of economic development but above all to fill(...) a spiritual void, for even Communism has made many m...
The New York Times detected the sexual dimension of Turkish policy, reporting that ‘the Turks frankly do not understand why they should not get rid of the Greeks and Armenians from their country and t...
Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only...
Significantly, Smith singled out its socially regressive character. First, wages for the majority of people were miserably low: Though the wealth of a country should be very great, yet if it has been...
Si la espada cae sobre Estados Unidos al cabo de ochenta años, la hipocresía levanta la cabeza lamentándose de la muerte de esos asesinos que han hollado la sangre, el honor y los lugares sagrados de...
Primeiro, a atual população mundial corresponde a aproximadamente 7% de todos os seres humanos que já viveram. Há muito mais mortos que vivos, em outras palavras, 14 para 1, e ignoramos a experiência...
Portuguese craftsmen such as Agostinho de Goes Raposo, Francisco Gois and João Dias perfected the construction of nautical instruments. The Portuguese caravel – and its successors the great nau (1480)...
Or, to reassure the bond market, does it cut expenditures in some other area, upsetting voters or vested interests? Or does it try to reduce the deficit by raising taxes?
Latin American republics were among the first to discover that it was relatively painless to default when a substantial proportion of bondholders were foreign.
La retórica europea de los nazis halló especial resonancia en todos aquellos conservadores para quienes el dominio alemán parecía un mal menor frente al comunismo soviético.
It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds – by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.
In 1800 seven out of the world’s ten biggest cities had still been Asian, and Beijing had still exceeded London in size. By 1900, largely as a result of the Industrial Revolution, only one of the bigg...
Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility...
«Creo que tenemos la peculiar idea de que nuestro gobierno es perfecto sin saber real y verdaderamente cómo funciona».72
«Consideramos evidentes estas verdades: que los hombres son creados iguales; que han sido dotados por el Creador de ciertos derechos inalienables; que estos derechos son la vida, la libertad y la búsq...
Valley of the clueless
There are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them
The way the money was spent ensured that Spain’s newfound wealth provided the entire continent with a monetary stimulus.