IDUKKI, India — Spices grown in the mist-shrouded Western Ghats here have fueled wars, fortunes and even the discovery of continents, and for thousands of years farmers harvested them in the same traditional ways.
He does not lose sight of the fact that although the 1970s are now seen as a nadir in Britain's post-war fortunes, for the majority of people it was nonetheless a time of growing affluence, widening horizons and personal liberation.
In the middle ages and afterward, large displays of halos were thought to be divine signals, portents of war or fortune.
With the end of the Cold War, the fortunes and complexion of Big Science began to change.
In the decades following the first world war old fortunes were wiped out by taxation, inflation and economic collapse, so by 1950 wealth in rich economies had typically fallen to just two or three times the level of annual national income.
Ochoa — who was born in 1831 in Chihuahua, Mexico, and whose family held huge land grants and traced their coat of arms to the historic 16th-century Cortes expedition from Spain — could have made a tidy little war-time fortune meeting Confederate demands as a conduit of wagon supply trains.
Sons Andrew and Richard took over the business and largely bankrolled the burgeoning steel industry in Pittsburgh; in the process, they amassed one of the three largest pre-World War I fortunes in the country (along with the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers).
The Wellesley party clung precariously to power during the Napoleonic Wars, its fortunes rising and falling with news from battlefields around Europe.
The once-grand Italianate villa was completed in 1863 by Jedidiah Hawkins, a retired sea captain who, after the Civil War, made his fortune in the family business, processing menhaden into oil and fertilizer.
Great leaders are forged by great crises: where would Churchill be without Hitler and the Second World War? Clinton's fortune, or misfortune, was to be America's president in a comparatively crisis-free era, when the Soviet Union, its ideological and military rival, was no more, and terrorism was still regarded as a criminal, not a political, threat.
