Expansion of Trade Quotes

The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.

Railroads have more than realized the fabulous conception of the eastern imagination which picture the genii as transporting inhabited palaces through the air. They take a train of inhabited palaces from the Atlantic coast, and with marvelous swiftness deposit it on the shores that are washed by the Pacific seas.

All the arguments given for building the Trans-Continental Railroad at the time were plausible but turned out not to be true.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

… a people occupied as we are in opening rivers, digging navigable canals, making roads

In this eventful period the colony of New South Wales is already far advanced.

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

This great country cannot be permanently kept in a state of relapse. I believe we will reoccupy the field temporarily lost to us, and go out to the peaceful conquest of new and greater fields of trade and commerce. The recovery will come slowly, perhaps, but it will come, and when it does we will be steadier and will better know how to avoid exposure hereafter.

Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.

In the period from 1824 to 1833, the tendency was steadily in the former direction, but it was only in the latter part of it that it was made really efficient.

Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another.

What 'Deadwood' did was to talk about how capitalism started, how civilised society came in, and how that brought its own problems.

If you had to find a period in history that would equate to what the Internet has presented us with now, it would be Elizabethan England. It was a world in flux.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

The spread of Viking bling is a good indication of the spread of its culture.