Personal Highlights:

• China is the only country that can genuinely be said to be universal, to overstep its boundaries, extending its presence to distant geographies. This is...
• In 2015, word started to reach Europe’s capital cities that the People’s Republic of China had launched an ambitious new initiative, a national project, perhaps...
• The Belt and Road reflects the change towards a more active foreign policy strategy, one aimed at shaping China’s external environment rather than merely adapting to it.

Personal Highlights:

• If the West ever falters, America will want to become less Western. As the fulcrum of world power moves away from the West, so will America. One senses
• Beijing promises local rulers help in increasing their ability to develop policies and deliver results. From the perspective of these rulers – limited as one...
• Letting the statue stay would be a sign of public acceptance of the British legacy. Investors in Europe and America took notice.

Personal Highlights:

• whatever other conclusions one might draw from our weird national origins, the post-colonial history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance.
• “A native will in the heat of the sun lay down asleep, holding a bit of fish in his hand; the bird seeing the bait,...
• gin was made in England and cost next to nothing: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence”

Personal Highlights:

• There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory.
• Nonetheless, the fact that trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready...
• In 1500, only nine years after the first Europeans arrived at Mbanza Kongo, a Portuguese expedition was blown off course and came upon Brazil.

Personal Highlights:

• “To make peace with an enemy one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner.”
• learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated
• When I first visited the homes of whites, I was often dumbfounded by the number and nature of questions that children asked of their parents—and...

Personal Highlights:

• On a more subtle level, all the Western powers, including the Ottoman Empire’s/Turkey’s chief ally in the war, Germany, continued to refer to the city...
• Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.
• Through cutthroat tactics devised by its principal shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades...

Personal Highlights:

• Today, Ras Al-Khaimah is one of the poorest of the seven emirates of the UAE. For this, they hold the British responsible.
• 175 years of uninterrupted succession is probably unprecedented.
• Sheikh Maktoum saw the low-hanging fruit. He launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower Gulf. He abolished the 5 percent customs

Personal Highlights:

• ‘Napoleon often said that nations had their illnesses just as individuals did, and that their history would be no less interesting to describe than the...
• ‘Had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death,’ he later opined, ‘all Europe would have been revolutionized: the war saved England.’
• Asked whether Josephine had intelligence, Talleyrand is said to have replied: ‘No one ever managed so brilliantly without

Personal Highlights:

• Sicily had been a witness to most of the great Mediterranean empires. The Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs had in turn ruled over the island....
• By the late summer his efforts had paid off. The heat was oppressive, malaria had decimated the ranks, and Lothair’s vassals were openly demanding to...
• A great commission based in the busy port city of Palermo was appointed to study geography. For over a decade every ship that requested entry...

Personal Highlights:

• Moreover, given the legacy of the Holocaust, the West has a particular responsibility to prevent another genocide in Europe. Otherwise, what were World War II...
• But saving the Jews as a reason to justify the death of American GIs would not have sustained the Roosevelt administration for even one week...
• It is only from bottom-line summaries that clear-cut policy emerges, not from academic deconstruction.

Personal Highlights:

• The capitalists flung themselves into revolutions in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to break the old relations of production.
• Besides, there were greater egalitarian tendencies in Chinese land distribution than in European land distribution, and the Chinese state owned a great deal of land....
• In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so...

Personal Highlights:

• The best wood for lumber was pine. Light, straight-grained, comparatively knot-free, soft enough to work but sturdy enough to last, available in straight lengths as...
• No capital is required to obtain this gold, as the laboring man wants nothing but his pick, shovel, and tin pan, with which to dig...
• Even the tent on deck was a comparative luxury; most on board could claim no more than a rectangle for sleeping, sketched on the deck in chalk.

Personal Highlights:

• What we call the Byzantine Empire was in fact the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its citizens referred to themselves as Roman from...
• Byzantium—the ancient name of Constantinople.
• Handing over the western areas of the empire, where Latin was the dominant language, to Maximian, Diocletian kept the richer, more-cultured Greek east for himself....

Personal Highlights:

• So great is the volume of these glacial deposits that the Po Delta is advancing fifteen feet a year and the ancient port of Adria,...
• Geology has made the Adriatic’s two coasts quite distinct. The western, Italian shore is a curved, low-lying beach, which provides poor harbors but ideal landing...
• The scale of the operation dwarfed any of the city’s previous maritime expeditions. It required Dandolo to order the immediate suspension of all other commercial...

Personal Highlights:

• It was Portugal’s fate and fortune to be locked out of the busy Mediterranean arena of trade and ideas. On the outer edge of Europe,...
• In 1433, during the seventh expedition, Zheng He died, possibly at Calicut, on the Indian coast. He was most likely buried at sea. After him,...
• The Europeans of the Middle Ages had less contact with the Orient than had the Roman Empire. Marco Polo had walked and ridden there down...

Personal Highlights:

• Hence, it gives particular emphasis to important creators and carriers of memory, such as language, literature, law, religious and political institutions, and of course historical writing itself,
• The monasteries—in which laypeople stored their wealth for safety—were plundered.
• Effectively the country was controlled by about 250 people: the king, the great prelates (chosen by him), and about 170 barons with landed incomes of...

Personal Highlights:

• Weaving was pervasive in ancient Greek society. More than an essential craft, it was one of the culture’s defining practices, celebrated in ritual and art....
• In Afghanistan, weavers inspired by US propaganda leaflets incorporate pictures of airplanes, the Twin Towers, and American flags into “war rugs.” Asked how she translates...
• After more than ten thousand years of dominance, weaving no longer rules the textile world. Knitting has staged a coup.