Kwasi Kwarteng Quotes
I think that running empires as a way of ordering the world is a flawed model.
Kwarteng, Kwasi. Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World. Bloomsbury, 2011.
The reason that his quotation is memorable is that it illustrates how rapidly political norms can change. Here in 1872, there was general agreement that imperialism was undesirable. By the turn of the century—only 27 years later, imperialism would be the accepted foreign policy of the United States with only a minority holding to is undesirability such as Mark Twain and his Anti-Imperialist League.
There are many who disagree with Say’s claim that the ancient system of colonization produced more friends then the system was at the beginning f the 19th century. Alexander the Great may have been the only large conqueror in world history where the conquered people thought they were better off than before. Certainly the Romans did not make friends, and the French Normans who conquered England were never considered “friends” by the Saxons.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
This statement was made after he had led the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Army to success in capturing Constantinople—Byzantium, Istanbul—bringing the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) to an end. He had his sights set on the Western Roman Empire next which was the remainder of what they knew of as the world then.
Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng is a British Conservative Party politician serving as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy since 2021. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Spelthorne since 2010.
