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“... and development go in for grand plans and sweeping reforms. In The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly, for 16 years an economist at the World Bank, extols the virtues of thinking small when trying to help the poor. He argues that the urge to plan a country’s path to prosperity, without carefully considering the needs of those for whom ...”

“... of south-east Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia – bringing back on the north-easterly monsoon pepper, spices, camphor, resin and, above all, gold from the newly discovered mines of Sumatra and Sarawak. They carried with them hundreds of passengers exporting every variety of Buddhism and Hinduism, their Sanskrit language and their art and ...”

“... 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few ...”

“... to occupy a high moorland position he had never seen or reconnoitred, while ‘a ferocious south-easterly gale was blowing torrential rain full in the faces’ of his men. The government infantry couldn’t use their muskets because the rain had drenched their gunpowder, while the Jacobites – with the wind and rain behind them – had kept their powder dry ...”

“... and so compassing about Greenland, eastwards until the territories opposite unto the farthest easterly and northern bounds of the Duke of Moscovia his dominions’.Like Nato, the Arthurian empire stretched across the Atlantic and met the Russian empire. The presence of Scottish and English troops in the armies of Poland and Sweden as they harried Russia ...”