![pith II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/pith-II.png)
In Praise of Empires
The worst news I’ve heard about the COVID-19 pandemic was that it took the life of Deepak Lal, one of the wisest men I’ve known. Aged eighty, he was living in London and already suffering from a slow-acting cancer when the coronavirus proved too much for him. He died on April 30.
Several of Lal’s obituarists called him a “development economist” because that was how he made his name in the 1980s when he wrote a number of pungent criticisms of the socialist economic policies that until then had kept most of the Third World in poverty. In the last two or three decades of his life, however, he became one of the world’s great economic historians, which is his true legacy.
Keith Windschuttle’s column appears in every Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe
Part of his wisdom was to recognise that, while economics was an important driver of both national and world histories, it was not alone. To understand the real history of any people, their political, cultural and religious…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins