British

"To summarize the Allies’ position, they knew an attack was coming, and they knew where it was coming—in the 200-mile gap between the Maginot Line and the English Channel. In this area, they had about the same number of troops as their enemy, and this in an era when one was supposed to need a three-to-one advantage in order to mount a successful attack. Most amazing of all, the French had even foreseen the possibility that the Germans would attack where they actually did, and they had prepared an answer for it With all of this going for them, how could the French and British lose?"

"The East India Company's food ship Lord Amherst had docked at Shanghai in 1832 with members of a trade mission eager to buy tea and silk in exchange for their own piece-goods and opium. They were given a cold reception by officials acting on imperial orders. The opium clippers continued to establish smuggling bases at Lintin Island, off Canton, and other strategic centres like Hong Kong. The authorities had finally raided warehouses on Lintin and boarded several armed junks waiting offshore to take the drug in. They seized and burned twenty thousand chests worth upwards of £2 million. (Some outraged shippers valued their losses as high as £5 million.) It was the long-expected, and not unwelcome, signal for British warships to come to the aid of all honest merchants in the sacred name of free trade. They demolished the weak Chinese forces in an operation which would pay the plumpest of dividends for a full century."

"Foreign investors were the biggest losers in U.S. rail projects. The British, in particular, couldn't resist bankrolling the emerging U.S. market in the mid-1800s, just as Americans couldn't resist bankrolling emerging Asian markets in the late 1900s. Much British capital was lost in what turned out to be a gigantic, albeit unintended, charitable contribution to U.S. track laying and road building. Heed it well, ye global capitalists! Fast growth in the latest emerging phenom doesn't necessarily mean fat profits for foreign enthusiasts. The U.S. railroads proved that."

"in 1965 for a dramatic take-off. What Raitz had dis- covered and Captain Teddy Langton had further developed was that, if you made a business of it and organised everything well in advance, if you chartered aircraft, booking thousands of seats, and reserved blocks of bedrooms, if not entire hotels, and if you put clever advertisements in the way of people who had never thought of going abroad, you could sell them a fortnight on the Mediterranean, including aircraft, all meals and hotel, for less than the cost of the scheduled air-fare to that particular spot. With the spending power of the new technological age working people, wouldn't millions go for that? Gordon based his faith on the expansion that would come from the great mysteries of the British climate and that enormously increasing spending power of the ordinary people. In cost terms, they could have a holiday in the Mediterranean sun in a comparatively high quality hotel for less than they would be asked to pay to sit and watch the rain from a Blackpool boarding-house. Moreover, since a deposit was payable on every booking, the cash would begin to flow in the winter and the spring, just when newspapers were habitually getting in little money, and by the time we had to pay for the hotels the newspaper income would be rising again to meet the demands. We had an added advantage in being able to com- municate through our newspapers and magazines to millions of prospective clients ; in other words we could make our sales of inclusive holiday tours in the advertise- ment columns of our own newspapers, and that very likely at a time—at the beginning of the year—when these columns were not carrying their full load. This would be cross-fertilization between one area and another of the Organisation's activities, which was good economic sense."

"In 1943, to an American critic of the Raj, Churchill said, “Before we proceed any further, let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America who, I understand, are almost extinct?”"

"Churchill wasn’t allowed to savor victory. Within weeks, to the shock of the entire world, he was voted out of office by a public determined to put memories of the war and its sacrifices behind them. With remarkable prescience, Churchill had observed in 1930: “The Englishman will not, except on great occasions, be denied the indulgence of kicking out the Ministers of the Crown whoever they are.” In 1945, the British people showed him just how well he understood them."

"This is why development is such a slow process. But the British obsession with the quantum leap holds us back. We always want to create something new out of nothing, and without research, and without long hard hours of effort. But there is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. Ask the Japanese."