In his new book, Migrations and Cultures , Sowell examines a number of ethnic groups that migrated from their places of origin to far-flung points of the globe. Even when separated from their homelands by thousands of miles and many decades, Sowell asserts, Chinese remain Chinese, Italians, Italian, Jews, Jewish. Culture is a complicated concept, but there can be no doubt whatsoever of its importance. History, the Anchor in Reality History cannot provide direct answers to the quandaries of the present because there are too many variables that change between one era and another. But if history cannot provide answers, it can at least help in defining questions, and in some cases it can utterly destroy theories which might otherwise seem plausible within the narrow confines of a particular time and place.
History is an anchor in reality against the rhetorical winds of the zeitgeist .
Moreover, many of these disparities have persisted for generations or even centuries. In the Austrian Empire, for example, rates of illiteracy in 1900 varied from 3 percent in Bohemia to 73 percent in Dalmatia, and per capita income in the former was nearly three times what it was in the latter during the same era. In Nigeria in 1926, only 10 percent of the children attending secondary school were from the northern part of the country, where a majority of the population lived. An international study of military and police forces later in the twentieth century could find no multiethnic society in which either organization was ethnically representative of the general population. The racial, ethnic, or national minorities who have owned or directed more than half of particular industries in particular nations have included the Lebanese in West Africa, Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, Britons in Argentina, Belgians in Russia, and Spaniards in Chile.