All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.

All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.

Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

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

If the financial system has a defect, it is that it reflects and magnifies what we human beings are like. Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products, at root, of our emotional volatility.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.