Pour Niall Ferguson Le Califat islamique est dans 10 ans
« Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.
In all, there were seventy-two separate British military campaigns in the course of Queen Victoria's reign – more than one for every year of the so-called pax britannica. Unlike the wars of the twentieth century, these conflicts involved relatively few people. On average, the British armed forces during Victoria's reign amouted 0.8 percent of the population ; and servicemen were disproportionately drawn from the Celtic periphery or the urban underclass. Yet those who lived far from the imperial front line, never hearing a shot fired in anger save at wildfowl, had an insatiable appetite for tales of military derring-do. As a source of entertainment – of sheer psychological gratification – the Empire's importance can never be exaggerated. » (pp. 255-256)
« It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals [Japanese, German] that ultimately ruined the British Empire. In other words, the Empire was dismantled not because it had oppressed subject peoples for centuries, but because it took up arms for just a few years against far more oppressive empires. It did the right thing, regardless of the cost. And that is why the ultimate, if reluctant, heir of Britain's global power was not one of the evil empires of the East [including Russia], but Britain's most successful former colony. » (p. 298)
A la différence de la médecine moderne que l'Occident imposa souvent par la force à ses colonies, la société de consommation constitue une "appli fatale" volontairement "téléchargée" par le reste du monde. Même les organisations sociales anticapitalistes, en particulier celles dérivées du marxisme, n'ont pas réussi à l'exclure.
Toiles, statues, édifices peuvent être bien la quintessence d'une civilisation, elles sont inintelligibles sans un minimum de connaissance des institutions économiques, sociales et politiques qui les ont conçues, payées, réalisées et conservées jusqu'à nous.