Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Hadar's read, .
Gunpowder’s subsequent career is even more telling. One might have thought that the Daoist alchemists would have made China master of the world. In fact, the Chinese used the new compound mainly for firecrackers. Even as the Song Empire collapsed in the face of a Mongol invasion, no emperor set up a medieval Manhattan Project to save the empire by inventing a doomsday weapon.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilisations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies without killing the patient.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
International sales have been the feedback mechanism by which successful governments have known whether the manufacturing businesses they have nurtured are approaching global standards, and whether firms have invested the billions of dollars it takes to create, for instance, a viable steel maker or car firm efficiently. Where export discipline has not been present, development policy has become a game of charades, with local firms able to pretend that they have been achieving world-class standards without having to prove it in the global market place.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise