# Quote — Niall Ferguson, Empire

> The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.

- Author: [Niall Ferguson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/niall-ferguson.md)
- Book: [Empire](https://www.leafyquotes.com/niall-ferguson/empire.md)
- Page: 105
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson#Empire:_How_Britain_Made_the_Modern_World_(2003)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/niall-ferguson/empire/the-great-paradox

## More from this book

> 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.

p. 364 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/niall-ferguson/empire/finally-although-anglophone.md)

> The familiar rationale of white rule in Africa was that it conferred the benefits of civilization. The war made a mockery of that claim.

p. 301 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/niall-ferguson/empire/the-familiar-rationale.md)

> In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire’s 'finest hour'.
>
> Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?

p. 355 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/niall-ferguson/empire/in-1940-under.md)