“Yet despite these advantages, England’s empire remained unlaunched until the seventeenth century. The problem is a dog-in-the-night” — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“His addiction to millenarianism, his confidence in visions, his prophetic stridency, his hatred of art, and his mistrust of secular scholarship align him with… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut,… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“Unless US citizens acknowledge and understand their country's imperial past, they will not be able to understand its present or future. Much of the… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“to become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner.” — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“Chinese naval activity, for instance, was aborted after Zheng He’s last voyage, probably as a result of” — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“Their ships were steeds, and they rode the waves like jennets.” — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values.… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“in their supposed innocence of and opposition to empire, have become the mythic progenitors of the United States—almost as improbably as Solomon was of… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“Like poor immigrants throughout the ages, Jews there adjusted to the jobs no one else would do.” — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
As populations crowd toward the ocean's edge and the sea encroaches menacingly toward the land, John R. Gillis looks at the history of the… — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Copy Share Image
“All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: "I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.” — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“To understand what was in Ivan’s mind, one has to think back to what the world was like before Machiavelli. The modern calculus of… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
“An age of expansion really did begin, but the phenomenon was of an expanding world, not, as some historians say, of European expansion. The… — Felipe Fernández-Armesto Copy Share Image
