The Eastern world is finally acknowledging that there is no power without brain power. ibid.
Ordinary English labourers who simply wanted to earn a little land for themselves by the sweat of their brows ... This tale of two Americas ... I’m asking why the property-owning democracy developed in the north and not in the south. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? III: Property
It was a new world. But it was to be the West’s world. ibid.
Real estate plus representation: this is the American dream. ibid.
The Spanish had got there first. ibid.
This is Machu Picchu: the legendary Lost City of the Incas. Well not so much lost, just never found by the Spaniards ... Machu Picchu is an extraordinary, mysterious place. It’s a sobering reminder that no civilisation is immortal no matter how powerful and mighty it may seem to itself. ibid.
Hundreds of lavishly decorated churches were built. ibid.
Carolina seemed to be a bone yard of dead trees. ibid.
The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina by John Locke ... Lock’s assumption that everyone here would own some land, even if it was as little as fifty acres. ibid.
White settlers displaced American Indians as owners of the land. ibid.
It’s the story of a South American general who also overthrew an Empire – Spain’s – but failed to create a United States of South America ... Venezuela’s favourite son – Simon Bolivar. ibid.
Why did capitalism and democracy do so badly in South America? ibid.
Liberation from Spain wasn’t quite the same as freedom in a North American sense. ibid.
Why did the new world need the ancient institution of slavery so badly? The answer had everything to do with man-power. ibid.
The legacy of segregation would endure for centuries. ibid.
Slavery and segregation were quite simply the original sin of the United States, giving a lie for two centuries to the American claim to be the zenith of civilisation. ibid.
It was how it was imposed on Africa. It was here that clear breakthroughs were made that helped develop the West’s most unlikely and killer app ... the medicine. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? IV: Medicine
The French empire had begun with slavery. ibid.
Here was another kind of imperial hero – the bacteriologist. ibid.
The scramble for Africa has become a byword for the ruthless exploitation of an entire continent by rapacious Europeans. But it was also a scramble for scientific knowledge. With the spread of railways went the spread of western civilisation and its killer app – modern medicine. This was the original medecins sans frontieres – doctors without borders. It is a point often overlooked by those like Gandhi who maintain that the European empires has no redeeming feature. ibid.
The Germans were the latecomers to the African party ... For the Germans it was a testing ground for racial theory. ibid.
The same jeans. The same T-shirts. In other words, the West’s way ... All around the world fashions are converging to a Western template. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? V Consumerism
The new United States would weave its own cloth, make its own clothes, design its own fashions. ibid.
For a time cotton was king of the US economy. ibid.
That mass consumerism and standardisation could somehow be reconciled with rampant individualism was one of the smartest tricks pulled ever pulled by Western civilisation. ibid.
The Denim Curtain ... Why was it that Russians couldn’t make jeans? ibid.
The West’s ugly sister. Ugly and dumb. Because somehow the communist block failed to grasp the appeal of an item of clothing that could easily have come to symbolise the virtues of the hard-working proletariat. ibid.
Dressed in their jeans the baby boomers challenged the authority of their parents and their rulers. ibid.
The Czechs called jeans Texas-skis – Texan trousers. ibid.
The demands for Levis soared. ibid.
Their resistance to the West’s consumer society was weaker. ibid.
The collapse of communism: maybe it really was blue jeans and rock-n-roll. ibid.
The West’s way of dress had done for Soviet communism. ibid.
A billion pairs of matching pyjamas ... China had become the world’s drabbest society. Gone were the last vestiges of imperial silk. Gone too was the western dress favoured by the nationalists ... What a difference three decade of reform were to make to the way a society looks. ibid.
China’s began with a massive investment in textile manufacture. ibid.
Judging by what I’ve seen in Chinese cities, they are getting there. ibid.
Is that what Western civilisation boils down to? ... Is all we’ve got left today a spot of shopping. ibid.
Is this the end of civilisation? ... The sixth killer App: Protestantism and the work ethic. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? VI: Work
This work ethic, [Max] Weber argued, was the key to capitalism. ibid.
Europeans these days work a whole lot less than their American counterparts. And they don’t just work less, they pray less. ibid.
Could it be that European Protestantism was killed by greed? ibid.
To the East a Godless Europe; to the West a God-fearing America. ibid.
Springfield ... Some five hundred places of worship. ibid.
Hong Kong created a quasi-Christian society of God-worshippers, that attracted the support of tens of millions of Chinese. ibid.
China’s experiment with Christianity had been a catastrophe ... Churches were closed down. Some were turned into factories. ibid.
The Protestant work ethic has come to China. ibid.
Clocks are the lynchpin of human civilisation. Ancient Discoveries s4e6: Ancient New York, History 2008
But in telling the stories of the first great civilisations of the ancient world I’m going to be making a case for civilisation itself. Richard Miles, Ancient Worlds I: Come Together, BBC 2010
It’s not the story of ancient worlds long past, it’s the story of us then. ibid.
Uruk – the mother of all cities. ibid.
Another ancient city – Tell Brak. ibid.
From the start war was Civilisation’s dark shadow. ibid.
A pitiless age – the Age of Iron ... Civilisation would re-emerge, tempered in the flames of conflict, tougher and more resilient than ever before. Richard Miles, Ancient Worlds II: Age of Iron
The Myceneans ... had learnt the arts of civilisation from the Minoans. ibid.
The catastrophe of the sea peoples is one of the break points of our story. ibid.
Today the Greek Thing has become a sort of shorthand. Professor Richard Miles, Ancient Worlds III: The Greek Thing
The Greeks reconnected with the modern world of the late iron age. ibid.
The city state or polis was a remarkably flexible concept. ibid.
Passions inside the city state ran high. ibid.
This is Olympia. Home of the famous games. There was nothing playful about what went on here ... The Greeks have always played to win. ibid.
The Greeks seemed prepared to try any system. ibid.
Sparta was the strangest test-tube in the whole laboratory. ibid.
Thirteen years of savage training to prepare them for their vacation as warriors. ibid.
The wealth gap was becoming so great it was affecting the unity and stability of Athens. ibid.
Cleistenes called his reforms ... equality before the law. ibid.
Sparta mistrusted Athenian democracy. ibid.