Style of writing

Niall Ferguson uses a formal style of writing in the excerpt from his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. 

When it comes to sentence structure, Ferguson uses a mix of different lengths of sentences. Longer sentences help Ferguson express complex ideas. For example:

What had been based on Britain’s commercial and financial supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and her industrial supremacy in the nineteenth was bound to crumble once the British economy buckled under the accumulated burdens of two world wars. (p. 189, ll. 2-6)

Here, Ferguson uses a long sentence to summarize the British Empire’s influence over three centuries and to highlight one of the main causes of its collapse. 

Shorter sentences make Ferguson’s ideas easier ...