The rise of China is the great economic and political fact of our lifetime — a rude awakening for those of us who thought it was the fall of the Sovi… - Niall Ferguson

Because of the central importance in Luther’s thought of individual reading of the Bible, Protestantism encouraged literacy, not to mention printing, and these two things unquestionably encouraged economic development (the accumulation of ‘human capital’) as well as scientific study. This proposition holds good not only in Prussia but also all over the world. Wherever Protestant missionaries went, they promoted literacy, with measurable long-term benefits to the societies they sought to educate; the same cannot be said of Catholic missionaries prior to Vatican II.

The difficulty with the achievements of the empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of the empire.

Finally, although Anglophone economic and political liberalism remains the most alluring of the world’s cultures, it continues to face, as it has since the Iranian revolution, a serious threat from Islamic fundamentalism.