In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of fo….

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfir….

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history..

It’s our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Ch….

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible..

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

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been t….

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because o….

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible..

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another s….

Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to..

All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly ….

My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternati….

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood..

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined..

American Empire- it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them mos….

For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian cou….

I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to b….

Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence..

If young men have jobs - or the prospects of jobs - they are less likely to take up arms, they are less likely to join the resistance..

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet..