Jeremy Black > Quotes

“Empire reflects power, its existence, and its use. Each, in itself, is morally neutral, but they all are criticized bitterly in the modern world and employed in order to decry Britain’s past and the United States’ present. Between 1750 and 1900, Britain became the foremost power in the world, both territorially and economically. An intellectual powerhouse, Britain also became a model political system for much of the world, as the United States would eventually do in the twentieth century. These changes were interrelated. Territorial expansion provided Britain and the United States with raw materials, markets, and employment, and, combined with evangelical Protestantism and national self-confidence, encouraged a sense in Britain and the United States as being at the cutting edge of civilization, with the last presented in Western and Westernizing terms. Indeed, empire was in part supported and defended on the grounds that it provided opportunities for the advance of civilization. This was seen not least by ending what were regarded as uncivilized, as well as unchristian, practices, such as widow burning and ritual banditry in India, and slavery and piracy across the world.”
― Jeremy Black, Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World

“Ruth Kluger’s Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.”
― Jeremy Black, The Holocaust: History & Memory

“This Catholic assault on the Third Republic and Jews looked directly forward to Vichy cooperation with Nazi Germany during World War II and was a potent instance of the manner in which Catholic anti-Semitism prepared the context for abetting genocide.”
― Jeremy Black, The Holocaust: History & Memory

“Durante los años de entreguerras (1918-39)”
― Jeremy Black, Holocausto

“War tore the guts out of the British empire, weakening it in resources and morale. The first major loss was Ireland.”
― Jeremy Black, A History of the British Isles

“Concern about the “enemy within” was linked to a politics of paranoia. The conspiracy theories that had been pushed to the fore in Europe at the time of the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s, a period in which there was a widespread belief in secret societies, some allegedly long-lasting, influenced the subsequent account of both present politics and the recent past. Earlier concerns about secret movements, notably the Freemasons and the Illuminati, both supposedly responsible for the French Revolution, were played through a new context from the 1790s, and these concerns were made more open and “democratic,” in large part through the culture of print and rising literacy.1”
― Jeremy Black, The Holocaust: History & Memory