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America in the Shadow of Empires
David Coates
ISBN: 9781137482600
DOI: 10.1057/9781137482600
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Previous Work by David Coates
The American Collection
Pursuing the Progressive Case? Observing Obama in Real Time (2013)
The Oxford Companion to American Politics (2 volumes) (2012) */**
Making the Progressive Case: Towards a Stronger U.S. Economy (2011)
Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments (2010)
Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know (2009) */**
A Liberal Tool Kit: Progressive Responses to Conservative Arguments (2007)
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Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches (2005) **
Models of Capitalism: Debating Strengths and Weaknesses (2002) **
Models of Capitalism: Growth and Stagnation in the Contemporary Era (2000)
Economic and Industrial Performance in Europe (1995) **
Industrial Policy in Britain (1996) **
Social Stratification and Trade Unionism (1973) *
The Labour Party Collection
Prolonged Labour: The Slow Birth of New Labour Britain (2005)
Blair’s War (2004)*
Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parliamentary Socialism (2003) **
New Labour into Power (2000)*/**
The Crisis of Labour (1989)
Labour in Power? A Study of the Labour Government 1974–79 (1980)
The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (1975)
The UK Collection
UK Economic Decline: Key Texts (1995)*/**
Running the Country (1991/5)
The Question of U.K. Decline: Economy, State and Society (1994)
The Economic Revival of Modern Britain: The Debate between Left and Right
(1987) */**
The Economic Decline of Modern Britain: The Debate between Left and Right
(1985) */**
The Context of British Politics (1984)
Teachers Unions and Interest Group Politics (1972)
The Socialist Collection
Working Classes, Global Realities (2000) */**
Features of a Viable Socialism (1990) *
The World Order: Socialist Perspectives (1987) */**
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* = jointly authored/edited **= edited collection
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David Coates

america in the shadow of empires
Copyright © David Coates, 2014.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

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ISBN: 978-1-137-48236-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coates, David, 1946–

America in the shadow of empires / David Coates.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-137-48236-5 (hardback)
1. United States—Foreign relations—21st century. 2. United States—Social
conditions—21st century. 3. National characteristics, American—History—21st century.
4. Imperialism—Case studies. I. Title.
JZ1480.C63 2014
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Contents
Introduction 1
I The Problem
1 The Nature of Our Contemporary Condition 7
2 The Question of Empire 33
II The Parallels
3 The Glory That Was Rome 53
4 Spain: The Rise and Fall of a Dynastic Empire 81
5 The Rise and Fall of the British Empire 105
6 Russian Empires Old and New 137
7 The Lessons of Empire 159
III The Reckoning

8 A New Rome on the Potomac? 171
9 Toward a Better America 201
Notes 219
Subject Index 259
Name Index 265

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Introduction
This study rests on a single premise, it pursues a single question,
and it explores a single theme. The premise is that, internally, the United
States is in trouble, performing less well economically and socially than
it has in its recent past and less well currently than some of its major com-
petitor economies and societies abroad. The question is the contribution,
if any, that the scale of America’s global commitments has made, and is
now making, both to the development of that troubling underperfor-
mance and to our inability easily to resolve it. The theme, therefore, is the
likely costs of empire, and the possibilities of avoiding them.
Exploring those costs in the context of America’s contemporary eco-
nomic and social difficulties will doubtless be neither universally popular
nor welcome. After all, it is not normal in most American political dis-
course to keep the focus of the dialogue on the debit side of the American
account, and it certainly is not normal to frame America’s global role as
an imperial one. So before this exploration begins, it is necessary to say
something about both underperformance and empire.
Public discourse in America is invariably uneasy with any idea of US
economic and social underperformance. We like to tell ourselves that
everything we do is world class and world leading and that America is
genuinely without equal as a free society; we tend to hold to that set of
beliefs while remaining broadly ignorant of parallel performance by oth-
ers. Knowing much about the world beyond our shores requires an effort
that most Americans are too busy and too internally focused to prioritize:
the United States is big enough, after all, to call its own internal baseball
finals “The World Series,” even though the bulk of the world doesn’t
even chose to play baseball and certainly does not participate in the com-
petition itself. But broad assertions based on systematic ignorance have
a high chance of inaccuracy, and any unquestioning assertion of unbri-
dled American superiority does not sit easily with contemporary facts.
America is not the best at everything, no matter how often conservative
commentators tell us that it is. Sadly, it is not even the best at everything
we collectively value; indeed, lately we have seriously slipped on a string
of key indicators of both economic performance and quality of life—
indicators on which American supremacy once went unchallenged.1 The

2 America in the Shadow of Empires
full examination of that slippage awaits us in Chapter 1, but as a teaser,

note this: levels of social mobility are now lower in the United States
than in at least 6 countries and possibly in 12—countries that include
Canada on this continent and a slew of others in Europe.2 We used to
pride ourselves—and many of us still do—on being the place in which it
was possible to raise yourself socially simply by your own efforts. Well, we
are not that exceptional in the sphere of social mobility any more, and
we would do well to ask ourselves why.
American public discourse is also uneasy with any notion of empire.
We are not supposed to have one. On the contrary, we are supposed to be
the first new nation born from the empire of others. As a country, we are
particularly good at spotting the imperial practices of other nations and
at finding them wanting. Russia, after all, was the “evil empire” whose
global power Ronald Reagan helped break, just as long ago Britain was
the inept empire that Benjamin Franklin chose to advise on how best
to retain the loyalty of its colonies.3 But these days, neither of those
empires remain intact to challenge the enormous global role now played
by American arms and American diplomacy. From outside the United
States, that global role is often seen as imperial in character—no differ-
ent in kind from that of its British or Russian predecessors—which helps
explain that strangest of modern phenomena: that of the American state
acting abroad and expecting its actions to be welcomed, only to find that
they are not. Donald Rumsfeld was not the first, and probably will not be
the last, American defense secretary to make that fundamental mistake.
So, at the very least, as we examine the costs and benefits of American
global leadership in the twenty-first century, it will be worth explor-
ing the degree to which America’s actions abroad are similar to things
done abroad by empires in the past. That, at least, is the governing wager
underpinning this book—the wager that, because America now operates
globally in at least the shadow of other empires, the fate of those other
empires may have things to teach us both about our present condition
and about our likely condition in years to come.
The exploration of America in the shadow of empires will move through
the following stages. In Part 1, we will make a preliminary assessment of
America’s contemporary condition and of the degree to which American
foreign policy is, or is not, best understood as imperial in kind. In Part 2,
we will examine in turn each of the empires that have left the most endur-
ing footprint on the modern American condition—the empires of Rome,
Spain, Britain and Russia—before drawing some general lessons from all
four about the internal consequences of any prolonged imperial role. In
Part 3, those internal consequences will be used twice: first to reframe our

Introduction 3
preliminary assessment of America’s contemporary condition and then

to inform a closing argument on how best to improve that condition by
avoiding such consequences if we can.
In the preparation of so ambitious a project, the accumulation of
private debts is unavoidably huge. The first debt has to be to the many
scholars of empire on whose work all that follows so heavily draws. Every
footnote is really a statement of thanks to them for the quality of what
they have done and for the awe and excitement that their work raises
in all of us who read and benefit from it. The second debt has to be
to colleagues and students here at Wake Forest University, with whom
preliminary drafts of parts of this book were shared and who gave so
generously of their time and expertise to correct errors of fact and inter-
pretation. My thanks are particularly due to Will Waldorf, Jeff Lerner,
and Peter Siavelis; and also to Monique O’Connell, Jack Amoureux, Tom
Brister, and Michele Gillespie. Thanks are also due to my three research
assistants early in the project—Kristen Olson, Peter Gauss, and Jonathan
Coates—and to two sets of students who shared with me a senior seminar
on the rise and fall of empires.4 And, as always, the greatest debt I gladly
acknowledge—a debt about the quality of my life as well as about the
quality of this text—is to Eileen, who is both the great editor of my writ-
ing and my fabulous partner in our ongoing American adventure. While
excusing all of them from any responsibility for any errors that remain—
those are mine, of course, and mine alone—let me dedicate this book
to them all, in the hope that its publication can make some small but
important contribution to the creation of that better America for which
so many of us now long.
David Coates, Wake Forest University, July 1, 2014


PART I
The Problem


CHAPTER 1
The Nature of Our
Contemporary Condition
It is still conventional in American political discourse to treat this

country as exceptional and to understand the term “exceptional” as actu-
ally meaning “superior.” In the national anthem, for example, America
is hailed as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and most
Americans still treat that claim as a factually accurate one. As far as I can
tell, it remains largely axiomatic among citizens of all ages, races, classes,
and creeds that here in the United States, we enjoy better and larger
freedoms than do people elsewhere; that we possess a stronger economy
and a higher standard of living than others do; and that we uniquely
experience a higher probability of individual economic advancement and
upward social mobility. America is the land of the free and the home of
the brave—everybody in America is above the global average, so the con-
ventional wisdom runs—because this is the one country on the face of
the earth in which we can all successfully live out the American Dream.
Indeed, immigrants flock to these shores for precisely that reason, eager to
become citizens in the one global power committed to the freedom and
liberty of all peoples. My late father-in-law used to regularly ask his newly
acquired British relative, “Is this a great country, or what?” “Great” was, of
course, the only permitted answer. In fact, more than great—exemplary
indeed—exemplary at home as a uniquely dynamic capitalist economy
based on free-market principles, and exemplary abroad as a global power
uniquely committed to the greater good of all.
We possess many scholarly and popular expositions of this general posi-
tion.1 The most widely cited academic exposition in recent years has been
that by Seymour Martin Lipset. The leading political sociologist of his gen-
eration, Lipset anchored US exceptionalism in the country’s status as what
he termed “the first new nation.”2 He saw the United States as a revolu-
tionary society uniquely committed to the values of liberty, egalitarianism,

individualism, populism, and laissez-faire. He thought those values were

the key to America’s economic superiority, though Lipset was also well
aware of how easily that superiority could be challenged, when he was
writing, largely by Japan. Seymour Martin Lipset was, at least, sufficiently
sensitive to the nuances of his material to insist that this exceptionalism
was “a double-edged sword”: that it was one with a definite downside that
left the United States as a different (an outlier) society rather than as a
necessarily better one. In comparative terms, the United States was simply
for him “the most religious, optimistic, patriotic, rights-oriented and indi-
vidualistic”3 society yet devised—and he liked it that way.
Subsequently, other scholars and commentators have been less
restrained in their defense of that exceptionalism. For Thomas Madden,
for example, America is currently and uniquely running an empire of
trust, one to be compared favorably with earlier empires of conquest (like
the Soviet’s) or of commerce and trade (like Britain) and to be likened
to other empires admired by Madden, most notably that of Republican
Rome.4 Equally, for Olaf Gersemann, what Seymour Martin Lipset saw
as a potentially threatened economic superiority is best understood (from
the libertarian perspective of the Cato Institute in which Gersemann
was based) as a highly desirable form of “cowboy capitalism,” and he
defended it as a much more productive way of organizing economic life
than that delivered by any state-led/managed alternative of the kind com-
mon in Western Europe.5 Newt Gingrich recently said it best: “The facts
are all on our side . . . America is simply the most extraordinary nation
in history . . . a land of liberty . . . the land of the never-ending ‘second
chance’ . . . a land of infinite possibility.” It is “a nation,” as he put it, “like
no other.”6
These writers differ in the level of sophistication of their arguments
and in their senses of the limits of American superiority, but they share at
least two underlying premises of central relevance to our concerns here.
The most obvious is their shared assumption of continued American
military and economic strength. Most participants in the celebration of
American exceptionalism take for granted that these forms of strength are
both permanent and desirable. The second, less obvious perhaps, is the
shared assumption that one form of strength reinforces the other: that
the American economy and the US global role are so configured that they
produce a self-sustaining dynamic of comparative superiority. Certainly
what the public (and perhaps even the scholarly) conversation about
American exceptionalism does not so readily concede, however, is the
alternative to those two governing assumptions. Advocates of American
exceptionalism do not easily admit even the possibility of America being

The Nature of Our Contemporary Condition 9
no longer exceptional as a country or as a power. Nor do they regularly

explore the possibility that, instead of a mutually reinforcing dynamic
of superiority, we might rather be on the cusp of a similarly reinforcing
dynamic of decline: one in which economic underperformance and impe-
rial overreach are coming together to weaken America both at home and
abroad.
Yet there are signs that such a mutually reinforcing dynamic of decline
may indeed be building up around us. It is at those signs that we first
need to look.
The US Global Military Footprint

One thing that is definitely building up around us is the scale, extent, and
cost of America’s military role overseas. Historically, that scale was modest
and the role was limited—mainly to the Americas and to a number of
Pacific islands—but no longer. In the last seven decades—that is, in the
lifetimes of the oldest of the baby boomers—the United States has fun-
damentally reset itself. It has changed from its interwar isolationism into
a global power with an exceptionally large and, in that sense, a genuinely
unique, global military footprint.
That footprint is most evident in the wars that the United States has
fought since 1941. The list is long and well-known: fighting a world war
(alongside a series of major allies) until 1945 and then fighting more local-
ized wars (with different allies each time) in Korea (1950–53), Vietnam
(1964–75), the Persian Gulf (1991), Iraq (2003–11), and Afghanistan
(since 2001, 4000+ days and counting). Any complete record of US mili-
tary involvement abroad also needs to include a set of wars that are less
generally remembered: a set of more limited military interventions that
included Lebanon in 1958, Somalia in 1991, and Kosovo in 1998. Even
before the “war on terror” was launched in 2001, the United States had
already “employed its military in other countries over seventy times since
1945, not counting innumerable instances of counterinsurgency opera-
tions by the CIA.”7 The number of post-1945 American wars is therefore
large—unprecedentedly large indeed in American history—and so too is
the number of military personnel consequently involved. Taking all the
military services together and drawing on figures from the 2012 Qua-
drennial Defence Review, “including operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,
approximately 400,000 U.S. military personnel are forward-stationed or
rotationally deployed around the world.”8 If we then add to that the fur-
ther 1.6 million Americans now working in the defense-related industries
on which the effectiveness of the 400,000 depend,9 we can see that the

current US military effort abroad directly impacts the lives and careers of
probably at least two million Americans.
The American global military footprint is not, however, just a mat-
ter of American boots on foreign soil. It is also a matter of foreign real
estate held and developed by American arms. Both where the United
States has intervened directly and where, in addition, the Pentagon has
felt US strategic interests require it, post-1945 US administrations have
built military bases—and have built them in unprecedented numbers.
The US military reportedly built 505 bases in Iraq in the years fol-
lowing the 2003 invasion. The US military has currently built more
than 400 in Afghanistan10 and the global total of American military bases
abroad is now probably nearer 1,000 than the earlier Chalmers John-
son figure of 865.11 These bases differ significantly in size, “ranging from
micro-outposts to mega-bases the size of small American towns.”12 Many
of them are extremely large, including some that were simply aban-
doned as US troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011. The 505 bases once
in US hands there declined to just 39 by September 2011.13 The Al-
Asad Airfield in Iraq, for example, is said to cover 25 square miles. When
completed, Base Balad covered 15 square miles, and included a football
field, a softball field, a movie theater, and a 25-meter swimming pool
among its major facilities. Construction costs associated with these bases
exceeded $2.4 billion, according to an analysis of Pentagon annual reports
by the Congressional Research Service. The US Army Corps of Engi-
neers alone was responsible for $1.9 billion in base construction between
2004 and 2010.14
Moreover, in addition to the public face of the American military pres-
ence overseas, there is the covert one. Since at least the days of the failed
raid to rescue American hostages from Iran in 1980, the US military has
trained and used special operations forces in an increasing number of
countries. During Barack Obama’s first term as president, black-ops teams
operated in at least 75 countries for certain (and possibly in as many
as 120), up from the 60 countries into which such units were deployed
under George W. Bush. SOCOM, the US Special Operations Command
to which they answer, now has some 60,000 personnel and a budget of at
least $6.3 billion;15 and CIA operations, though never publicly recorded,
have now clearly expanded to include the maintenance of secret prisons,
rendition, and torture.16 The United States has also covertly financed a
series of proxy wars since 1945, arming resistance movements keen to
topple regimes that Washington also wished to see removed. Such proxy
wars included covert support for the mujahidin in Afghanistan against
the Soviets in the 1980s, support that came back to haunt us in a very

big way in September 2001. What the resulting US-Afghan war has now
added to these covert operations is the development of drone warfare—
the planned execution of known militants using technology directed from
a very long way away (e.g., from military bases near the field of operation
or from control centers in the United States itself ). Recent reports suggest
a significant escalation of such drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Somalia, and South Yemen in the years since 2008, with drone attacks
resulting in the deaths between 2004 and May 2012 of anywhere between
2,464 and 3,145 people in Pakistan alone—a significant proportion of
whom, tragically, were either civilians or noncombatants.17 The Pentagon
apparently had 50 drones in 2000. It now has 7,500. The Bush admin-
istration launched 52 drone strikes. Though the number of drone strikes
fell in 2012–13, the Obama administration launched more than 350 such
strikes in its first term alone.18
Even when the US military withdraws or downsizes in key theaters
of war, this no longer means the automatic reduction of the American
presence there. The government-licensed flow of arms from US private
companies to foreign military forces favored by the United States contin-
ues apace. So too does the outsourcing of many of the military’s original
functions—and their retention in place as the US military pulls back—a
process of privatization that has now become a key feature of the way in
which the United States imposes itself militarily abroad. As Rachel Mad-
dow noted, “in the Gulf War, the United States employed one private
contractor for every one hundred American soldiers on the ground: in the
Clinton-era Balkans, it neared one to one—about 20,000 privateers tops.
In early 2011 there were 45,000 US soldiers stationed inside Iraq and
65,000 private contract workers there.”19 Recent investigative journalism
by The Washington Post found that a third of the CIA’s workforce had
recently been privatized, and that of the “854,000 people with top-secret
clearance in the federal government, 265,000 were corporate employ-
ees.”20 Likewise, the bipartisan Congressional Commission on Wartime
Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan reported in 2011 that “federal reli-
ance on contractors to support defense, diplomatic and development mis-
sions . . . stands at unprecedented levels. Over the course of the past nine
years,” the Commission noted, “contractors have at times exceeded the
number of military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.”21
The Cost of That Footprint

The financial cost of this military activity and presence overseas has been
and remains enormous. The official figures for military expenditures are
striking, though they tell only part of the story at best. Official figures

show the Pentagon budget rising and falling over the years—peaking, as
would be expected, during major wars. They show that as a percentage of
US GDP, recent US military spending has moved up and down within
a band that runs from 14.2 percent (at the height of the Korean War in
1953) to 3.0 percent (in 2000, at the peak of the peace dividend gener-
ated by the end of the Cold War). In 2010, that figure was 4.8 percent.22
The equivalent Russian figure was 3.1, the United Kingdom’s was 2.7,
France’s 2.1, China’s 1.5, and Germany’s 1.4.23 As a proportion of global
military expenditure, however, the Pentagon’s budget is much higher.
Currently the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population and
a quarter of total global economic output, is responsible for more than
40 percent of total global military spending.24 In 2010, the United States
spent more on defense than the next 17 nations combined; and that mili-
tary expenditure has escalated dramatically of late, with the base Penta-
gon budget almost doubling in a decade, from $287 billion in 2001 to
$530 billion in 2012. Add to that the cost of two wars—Iraq and Afghani-
stan together cost roughly $150 billion a year—to take total Pentagon
spending “in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 to . . . about $700 billion, far
more than Medicare outlays, which totaled $452 billion in 2010 and
$486 billion in 2011.”25 So even on official figures, military expenditure is
now consuming between a fifth and a quarter of the entire federal budget.
Pentagon spending is not, however, the only element in the overall
military spending of the contemporary United States. If you add on to
the Pentagon’s budget the military dimension of the budgets of other
federal departments—from the cost of homeland security to the cost of
the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, plus its nuclear program, its veterans
support, and the interest paid on war debts—it is likely that the current
spending total for the US military effort is nearly twice the official figure.
In 2011, therefore, the total becomes $1,398 billion, as opposed to the
official $708 billion Pentagon allotment.26 It is also likely that fighting
the “war on terror” since 2001 has actually cost the United States upward
of $8 trillion,27 and that the total “black budget” for US spy agencies
reached the staggering figure of $52.6 billion in fiscal year 2013.28 The
cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone had reached $1.26 tril-
lion by 2011. Given that, it is likely that US military spending currently
absorbs almost half of all federal expenditures (48 percent in 2011) and
consumes almost a tenth of US GDP.
But fighting has costs other than the resources spent. It has the oppor-
tunity costs of other programs curtailed, and it has the human costs of the
fighting itself. Those too must be factored into any evaluation of the value
and domestic impact of America’s military role overseas.

Opportunity costs are always hard to measure with precision. The

calculation depends on which alternative programs are prioritized and
on the tightness of the causal relationship established/asserted between
spending by the Pentagon and the absence of spending elsewhere in the
federal system. But costs can be illustrated, and the illustrations invari-
ably suggest that the opportunity costs are/can be substantial. According
to the National Priorities Project, for example, “what we’ve spent on the
Afghanistan war so far could fund Head Start for all eligible children for
15.6 years.”29 The cost of maintaining a single soldier in Afghanistan
for a year has been reported to be currently equivalent to the cost of
providing free health care for 588 children or of employing an additional
17 teachers. And the money earmarked for ballistic defense in 2011
could, if earmarked for other things, have hired as many as 190,000 extra
police officers.30 Most striking of all, if you take the Republican budget
passed in the House in 2012, its projections of federal spending by 2040
has discretionary spending (including on the military) equal to 4.75 per-
cent of GDP and by 2050 to 3.75 percent. Yet inside that budget, mili-
tary spending was due to be maintained or even increased, and it already
absorbed 4 percent of GDP. That didn’t leave much room—or by 2050,
any room at all—for a slew of social programs aiding the poor or for envi-
ronmental controls protecting us all.31
Opportunity costs are one thing, the human costs to the people actu-
ally doing or directly experiencing the fighting are quite another: the
human costs to those killed and to those seriously wounded—physically
and mentally. Major wars like those waged in Iraq and Afghanistan since
2001 inevitably come at a huge human cost, which official figures can
only ever hope to partially capture. The American military recorded
4,487 dead and 32,226 wounded in action during its stay in Iraq.
The American contingent of the NATO forces in Afghanistan suffered
2,000 fatalities in the years up to 2012, with other NATO forces losing
just over 1,000.32 But these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. The
number of US veterans of those two wars who now suffer long-term phys-
ical and mental problems probably approaches 500,000. In other words,
one in three Americans deployed in those two wars is now more than
likely to be suffering “from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or
traumatic brain injury,”33 and that number holds true even before we start
counting in the scale of postdeployment domestic violence, separation,
and divorce triggered by the traumas of war.34 In 2012, the number of
military suicides (349) actually outstripped the number of soldiers killed
in combat (229 in Afghanistan in 2012): roughly one military suicide
a day.35 Even more telling, the Department of Veteran Affairs reported

a suicide rate for veterans of 22 suicides per day in 2012—2,700 suicides

in total, or 22 percent of all the suicides reported that year.36 In total,
then, there are half a million people physically and mentally traumatized:
and that is just the soldiers in those two theaters of war. The burden on
the civilians in each war zone was likely heavier still, though less care-
fully calculated. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths during the American
occupation totaled anywhere between 110,000 and 1.2 million, depend-
ing on the source used,37 and the number of Afghan civilian deaths is
not even known. The number of internally displaced Iraqis was probably
1.25 million, and the number of refugees was over 1.5 million.38 These
are huge numbers, capturing human suffering and distress of the most
basic kind.
Two other features of the American military effort also need to be
noted before this initial audit is complete. The first is this: the Ameri-
can military endeavor has always been high on technology relative to the
enemies against which it has been deployed. This was not initially true
in the opening years of World War II, and when it was not, American
victory proved elusive. But ultimately the Nazi war machine proved inca-
pable of matching the volume and quality of armaments deployed against
it by both Russian and American adversaries; and in all subsequent wars,
American men and women in uniform have been equipped with the
products of a military-industrial complex that, in global terms, is second
to none. As a proportion of the American manufacturing base, weap-
ons production has long taken the lion’s share of government-sponsored
research and development, with the Pentagon effectively acting as the US
industry ministry, comparable in its impact (on the quality of military
output) as was Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry in
its heyday (on the quality of postwar Japanese consumer output). The
current war in Afghanistan has carried that tendency even farther, add-
ing drone warfare to the mix of options available to commanders on the
ground. Even before the development of drones, if the calculations of
the Congressional Budget Office are accurate, the Department of Defense
was responsible for nearly half of all federal research and development
outlays in 2004—a year in which such federal outlays made up approxi-
mately one-third of all research and development expenditures in the US
economy.39
There is one final feature of all this military spending and effort on
which we also ought properly to dwell—namely, the imbalance between
the resources expended and the results obtained. Keeping America safe is
not a project that is easy to evaluate. There is no simple way of showing
that, had military expenditure and military focus been set in some other

way, our national security would have been either enhanced or depleted.
What can be shown, however, is the lack of final success on the ground in
each theater of war dominated by US troops since 1945.40 The 1945 vic-
tory that launched “the American century” was, in that sense, the excep-
tion. The Korean War ended in a stalemate. The Vietnam War ended in a
humiliating retreat. The invasion of Iraq proved a quagmire from which
US troops could only be extracted slowly, and the war in Afghanistan is
now America’s longest, with US success in establishing total ground con-
trol in that difficult country currently being no greater than that achieved
by previous invaders: in the nineteenth century by the British and in the
twentieth by the Soviets. American treasure has been lavishly spent, and is
still being lavishly spent—treasure that, if not spent on military endeavors
overseas, might more properly have been spent on civilian endeavors at
home—treasure that has produced no clear military outcome but that
comes at the price of other domestic outcomes either being underfunded
or being not pursued at all.
Signs of Diminishing Economic Performance

The global US military role is therefore currently large and recently much
expanded. The US economy, by contrast, though equally globally signifi-
cant, is in a much less dynamic condition. It is as though—right now,
at least—US military capacity is going in one direction and US economic
capacity in another. Any serious divergence in those key trajectories matters
enormously. The divergence matters in periods of economic strength and
of economic weakness. It matters in periods of economic strength because
one truth that seems to hold throughout the modern period is that a strong
global military presence invariably requires an equally strong economic
one. And it matters even more in periods of economic underperformance,
because then—as in the United States in 2013 with sequestration—
restricted government revenues make military budgets (and global mil-
itary roles) progressively more difficult to deliver. As one of America’s
leading imperial historians, Alfred McCoy, recently put it, any “slow slide
in U.S. economic power will someday force a retreat in Washington’s
global reach.”41 The question before us now, therefore, is whether that
slow slide is already under way.
It certainly wasn’t in 1945 when, at the dawn of what was then widely
hailed as the new American century, US military strength was entirely
grounded on the US economy’s global superiority. Though the fighting
after 1941 had taken a terrible toll in American lives, the productivity of
US armament factories had ultimately given American armies the edge
in both the European and Pacific theaters of war, producing the mass

weaponry that had ultimately forced each Axis power into surrender. In
consequence, neither the German nor the Japanese economy was in any
condition in 1945 to offer the United States serious global competition:
on the contrary, each was under Allied military rule and in desperate need
of postwar reconstruction. The burden of victory had also drained the
economies of the main American allies in ways that it had not drained
the US economy. The United Kingdom in particular had run down its
foreign reserves completely by the war’s end and had sustained its limited
wartime civilian living standards and military capacity only by the size-
able injection of American aid—aid that was immediately terminated at
the war’s end. And Russia was soon isolated from the rest of the American
sphere of influence by the Cold War division of the world that was fully
in place by 1948.
So the United States started the postwar period as the dominant
economy in the noncommunist part of the world order but then spent
a generation undermining that dominance by facilitating the successful
reconstruction of leading capitalist economies within that world order,
mainly for Cold War reasons. The United States presided over the post-
war reemergence of major Western European economies in the 1950s and
1960s—primarily West Germany, but also France and Italy, in a series
of so-called economic miracles—a reemergence which then helped trig-
ger the 1971 collapse of the fixed exchange system based on the dollar.
The United States also presided, again primarily for Cold War reasons,
over the reconstruction of strong capitalist economies on the eastern edge
of the communist bloc: first Japan in the 1960s and 1970s and then South
Korea. This was a reconstruction that so challenged the dominance of US
manufacturing—even within the domestic American market—that by
1985, the Reagan administration was obliged to force Japan to so revalue
its currency as to bring its “economic miracle” to a grinding halt in 1992,
a halt from which the Japanese economy has yet fully to recover. Then,
with the entirely unanticipated collapse of the Soviet Union and the inter-
nal reconstruction of Chinese Communism after the death of Mao, key
parts of the US economy found themselves under serious competition
from goods imported from what, until then, had been the closed world
of communist states. Add to that the rapid economic growth of other
sleeping giants—India and Brazil in particular—and a global economic
order once dominated by the United States is now dominated by the
United States no longer. The American economic “century” turned out to
be, at most, only half of one—and we in the United States now struggle
with the economic (and indeed social) consequences of our unexpectedly
changed circumstances.

There are several short-term indicators of growing American eco-

nomic weakness: not least the slow recovery from the financial debacle
of 2008, an inability to replicate in the second decade of this century the
job-creating performance that was the defining strength of the Ameri-
can model right through to the last decade of the previous century, and
the associated rapid emergence of a sizeable trade gap with what is still
officially Communist China. The 2008 financial crisis initially hit the
entire global economy, and not just the United States, by drying up
lines of credit and bank confidence everywhere. Yet there is no escaping
the fact that the 2008 crisis hit hardest the economies that triggered it: the
United Kingdom to a significant degree and the United States to an even
greater one. Five years on, the UK economy was still smaller than it was
in 2007, and, even today, the US economy is still struggling with rates of
unemployment greater than any seen in the United States since the Great
Depression. As late as April 2014, the official rate of unemployment in
the United States stood at 6.3 percent and the growth rate of the economy
in total—at 0.1 percent for the first quarter of 2014—was actually lower
than in 10 of the previous 12 quarters.42
That the US economy should have been so afflicted by the fallout
from the 2008 financial crisis is not entirely unreasonable, given that
the roots of the crisis lay in the excesses of an inadequately regulated US
financial sector,43 but the vulnerability of the rest of the US economy to
such an exogenous shock points to deeper weaknesses of longer dura-
tion. Contrasting the performance of the US economy on either side
of the events of 9/11 makes many of those weaknesses clear. In the
decade before 9/11, the US economy created 23 million new jobs. In
the decade after 9/11, it created 5.6 million up to 2007 and then lost
7 million in the recession that followed. In the 1990s, the US labor force
participation rate was the highest in any of the G7 economies. In the
decade after 9/11, US unemployment moved from the lowest in the G7
to the third-highest, and the US labor participation rate had slipped
by 2 percentage points even before the 2008 financial crisis. That rate
was 66 percent in 2008; in 2014 it was just 63 percent.44 In the decade
before 9/11, real wages for median American workers rose by 5 percent.
After 9/11, they stagnated: indeed, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)
has recently labeled the ten years after 9/11 as “the lost decade” for
American wages precisely because of this failure to grow.45 Before 2008,
the speed of recovery from recession to prerecession levels of employ-
ment was already slowing down: 6 months after the 1982 downturn,
15 months after the 1991 recession, and 39 months after the 2001
one—slowing down, but still fast. Not this time. This time around, it

will take at least 78 months for the US economy to recreate all the jobs
lost after the financial collapse of September 2008.46
There is more. Before 9/11, the United States ran only a modest
trade deficit with Communist China. In 1991, that trade deficit was
$10.4 billion. Twenty years later, it was $301 billion. When that trade
deficit had been small, the main US exports to China had been man-
ufactured and durable goods, while at home the US-based furniture
industry still employed 80,000 Americans47 and the textile industry
1.5 million.48 Right now, among the main US exports to China are scrap
metal and waste paper; and the influx of Chinese-made consumer goods
since 2001 has coincided with the loss of at least 2.7 million US manu-
facturing jobs.49 Whether the loss of those jobs is a direct product of
Chinese competition remains controversial. The EPI says it is responsible
for maybe half of all the losses in manufacturing employment;50 others say
maybe only a quarter.51 But there is no escaping the fact that employment
in the US manufacturing sector, which once led the world, is now down
by a significant amount. There is also no escaping the fact that in 2013,
the overall US trade deficit stood at $475 billion—some 3 percent of the
total US GDP. So something rather fundamental seems to be going on
(and going wrong) in the contemporary state of the American economy—
something that has helped move the United States in the space of a single
generation from being the world’s leading creditor economy to being its
leading debtor one. What might that something be? Probably the coming
together of the following set of less immediately visible economic weak-
nesses, each one of which slowly built up over the four decades that now
divide us from the end of the Vietnam War.
Weakening Economic Underpinnings: (1) Education

If there is a contemporary weakness in the American education system, it
should surprise and disturb us, because the United States has long been
a world leader here. In fact, America was the first major industrial econ-
omy to develop mass education for the bulk of its citizenry, doing so
on the Jeffersonian premise that a functioning democracy required an
adequately educated electorate. The United States was also among the
first of the major industrial economies—Scotland was perhaps the first,
and Germany was certainly not far behind—to recognize both the eco-
nomic importance of high-quality undergraduate and graduate education
and the key role that institutions of higher education can play, if properly
funded and directed, in the generation of new knowledge, new technolo-
gies, and new human capacities with an economic impact. Indeed, the
American military has long recognized that importance, working closely

with (and funding) cutting-edge research in the pure and applied sci-
ences. Private drug companies have been equally active as of late, with
visible and important results. There are, in consequence, a whole swathe
of major innovations, from the computer to the latest vaccines, that owe
their origins to the quality (and the funding) of world-class US univer-
sities and research labs; and, even today, the United States remains in
possession of 15 of the top 20 universities in the 2012–13 Times Higher
Education World University Rankings.52
But the superior quality of the American mass education system has
genuinely slipped away, though the debate remains active on whether
that narrowing of the gap between the United States and the best of the
rest is explained by others catching up or by the United States falling
behind. There is simply no escaping the fact, however, that in spite of its
possession of world-class elite universities, the United States is no longer
an automatic world leader in general educational performance. On the
contrary, the United States is currently falling behind on a string of test
scores of student capacity among high-school students. It is falling behind
on both the number and proportion of its college-age students who do
attend college; and it is a world leader in the one thing that it would be
best to be bad at: the average volume of debt those students acquire as
they complete their studies.53
Both the nationally focused and the comparative data give cause for
concern. The 2012 CAP/Next Generation survey, for example, found
half of US children still receiving no early childhood education. It also
found more than a quarter of them with chronic health conditions such
as obesity and asthma; and, most significantly of all, it found 22 percent
of them living in poverty—up from a child-poverty figure of 17 per-
cent in 2007. The report also found a postsecondary drop-out rate of
more than 50 percent (nearly 6.2 million 16–24 year old college students
dropped out without a degree in 2007 alone): this in a world in which,
by contrast, China plans to provide 70 percent of its children with three
years of preschool education, to graduate 95 percent of its schoolchildren
through nine years of compulsory education, and to more than double
enrollment in higher education by 2020.54 Add to that the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) data—in which the Organisa-
tion for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), every three
years, measures the literacy of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and
science—where we currently find the United States ranking seventeenth
in reading literacy, twenty-fourth in science literacy, and thirty-first in
math literacy. These rankings are largely unchanged since the examina-
tions began in the early 2000s and, in math literacy at least, performance

levels that now fall below the OECD average.55 This is hardly a stellar
performance from what is still ostensibly the world’s leading economy,
but how could it be stellar, given the level of income inequality that now
divides American students from each other. American schools with low
levels of poverty still rank among the world’s highest performers in PISA-
defined literacy.56 America’s education problem right now is that too few
American schools are unscarred by poverty, and too many are entirely
blighted by it.
For that very reason, it is also worth noting that the most recent PISA
scores were accumulated in the midst of a recession (and associated cut-
backs in public spending) that actually reduced the number of local edu-
cation jobs in the United States (by at least 300,000 between June 2009
and June 2012) and continued the steady erosion of teacher salaries and
status.57 In 2011, teacher pay in the United States ranked 22 out of the
27 national education systems surveyed by the OECD.58 Contrast that
to Finland—consistently a top scorer on all the PISA measures—which
“has managed to make teaching the single most desirable career choice
among young Finns”59 by doing all the things that American public edu-
cation does not: by reducing student testing, by lowering competition
between schools, by prioritizing social equality, and by paying its teach-
ers well. Currently, half of all new teachers in the United States leave the
profession within the first five years of teaching. This is a remarkable and
burdensome rate of labor turnover that can only damage an economy in
which “over the next ten years, four out of every ten new jobs will require
a post-secondary vocational or academic degree.”60 Since all “the evidence
shows—consistently and over time—[that] countries and continents that
invest heavily in education and skills benefit economically and socially
from their choice,”61 the status and rewards accruing to teaching as a
profession are actually going down in America at precisely the moment at
which the impact of high-quality education on economic growth is at an
all-time high. This can hardly be wise public policy.
Moreover, as Fareed Zakaria has noted, “a generation ago, America
had the highest percentage of college graduates in the world. Now we’re
ninth and falling.”62 In 2000, the US share of graduates emerging from
world universities was 24 percent. By 2010, it was 21 percent, and by
2020, it will be under 18 percent. By 2020, China will possess more than
two hundred million college graduates—a greater number than the total
US labor force—and already the rate of output of science and technol-
ogy graduates in the United States is being outpaced by rates elsewhere: a
24 percent annual increase in the number of STEM graduates from four-
year colleges and universities in the United States between 2004 and

2008, as compared to annual rates of growth in the output of similar

graduates in China (218 percent) and in India (300 percent). What we
are doing that is world-beating in the area of higher education is loading
up this generation of college students with debt: more than $1 trillion in
student debt in total in 2012, at an average for undergraduates of more
than $23,000 per head, in a higher education system within which nearly
30 percent of those taking out loans then still drop out—that is, students
leaving higher education with debts but without a degree.63
There would appear to be problems at both the high- and low-skill
ends of the American education and training system. At the high end, the
United States currently lacks a sufficient supply of indigenously generated
high flyers in the key math, science, and engineering skills vital to indus-
trial innovation. It is a gap that the United States is currently attempting
to fill by immigration.64 At the bottom end, education performance is
highly and adversely affected by dimensions of class, gender, and eth-
nicity. Currently, 20 percent of African American boys fail to graduate
from high school, and 30 percent of Latino children are equally unsuc-
cessful. Overall, the dropout rate from American high schools for young
men aged 16–24 is currently running at more than 18 percent.65 Post-
school, US industry increasingly lacks the incentive structure to regularly
train and retrain its key personnel, particularly at the level of intermedi-
ate skills.66 Despite the existence of an extensive system of community
colleges, apprenticeships are rare in the United States and in-company
training remains patchy and nonstandardized.67 Public funding for com-
munity colleges actually fell by 7.6 percent in 2011–12: “the largest
annual decline in at least five decades.”68 Skill poaching, rather than skill
growing, is the inevitable logic of a labor market in which employers are
free to hire and fire, and employees are free to job hunt with impunity. Not
surprisingly, therefore, as “today’s industrial workplace [evolves] towards a
technology-driven factory floor that increasingly emphasizes highly skilled
workers,” US manufacturers regularly report unfilled vacancies in the midst
of generalized unemployment: a 5 percent job vacancy rate, for example,
in October 2011 because of “workforce shortages or skills deficiencies in
production positions such as machinists, craft workers and technicians.”69
Such skill deficiencies do not explain the totality of US unemployment—
maybe being responsible for at most 1.5 percent of the 5 percent increase
in US unemployment during the 2008–11 recessions70—but they do point
to long-term weaknesses in US education and training systems that require
serious consideration and remedy.
Perhaps the most disturbing data of all in this regard are those from the
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published

in 2010. Revisiting the data first published in 2005 under the title “The
Gathering Storm,” the Academies’ overall assessment in 2010 was that
“the United States’ competitiveness outlook (read jobs) has further dete-
riorated since the publication of The Gathering Storm report five years
ago.” As the academicians said, “today, for the first time in history, Amer-
ica’s younger generation is less well-educated than its parents. For the
first time in the nation’s history, the health of the younger generation has
the potential to be inferior to that of its parents. And only a minority
of American adults believes that the standard of living of their children
will be higher than what they themselves have enjoyed.”71 Those findings
were entirely in line with the later OECD report on adult skills in leading
industrial nations. US performance in that report was sufficiently poor—
“weak on literacy, very poor in numeracy”—that the US Department of
Education had the OECD publish a separate report to make the point:
the special report was titled Time for the U.S. to Reskill?72 The fact that
such a case still needs to be made does not augur well for the long-term
competitiveness and prosperity of the US domestic economy.
Weakening Economic Underpinnings:

(2) Manufacturing
In the 1950s, when the United States was the unchallenged economic
and political leader of the noncommunist world, the great engine of rapid
economic growth was the steady flow of dollars from the United States
into the rapidly reconstructed economies of Western Europe and Japan.
In that decade, the United States ran a balance of payments deficit—more
dollars left these shores than returned—but it also ran a balance of trade
surplus: many of those dollars came back home in exchange for American-
produced goods. Six decades later, that is no longer the case. More dollars
leave these shores now than ever before, but they do so increasingly to buy
goods made overseas.
The size and persistence of the US trade deficit in the second decade
of the new century speaks to the diminished international competitive-
ness of American-based manufacturing industry. The American home
market is no longer a safe haven for American-made products. On the
contrary, in key sector after key sector, levels of import penetration
are high and rising. Nor do American-made manufactured goods now
command precedence in overseas markets: that American superiority gave
way in the 1970s to German-made products, in the 1980s to Japanese
ones, and now to products increasingly manufactured in China. Apolo-
gists for the growing US trade deficit used to find comfort in the thought
that low-tech jobs were being outsourced but that the high value-added

jobs were not. But not anymore. There is now a considerable literature
deploring what Tyler Cowen has labeled “the great stagnation”73—the way
in which, through a combination of “outsourcing and faltering invest-
ment in research, the U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to
develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products.”74
The figures are daunting. The National Science Board’s latest report
on the global share of expenditures on research and development by
selected countries shows that the United States was responsible for 38 per-
cent of global spending in 1996 but for just 30 percent today. The absolute
US spending is up, but the edge on competitors is down.75 In fact, as of
2008, US-based companies had slipped back to become world leaders
in only five product areas: computer hardware, software, biotechnology,
aerospace, and entertainment.76 “In 2000, 40 percent of the world’s tele-
com equipment was produced in America. [By 2006] that share [was]
21 percent and falling.”77 By 2002, indeed, US trade in advanced tech-
nology products had gone into sustained deficit—exports earning less
than imports cost by $16.6 billion. By 2006, that deficit was $381 bil-
lion.78 “In 2009, 51 percent of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S.
companies . . . China replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one
high-technology exporter, and [China was] second in the world in pub-
lication of biomedical research articles.”79 In the 12 months to August
2011, China sold the United States $81 billion worth of high-technology
products and imported just $13.4 billion—a 17 percent increase in the
trade deficit on the figures for the year before.80 In the first decades of
the new century, that is, global leadership in manufacturing has increas-
ingly gone overseas, much of it to China; in the process, it has taken with
it not simply American-based employment (including high-tech employ-
ment) but also the trade surplus vital to long-term global political and
economic independence.
This does not mean, of course, that American manufacturing com-
panies are no longer significant world players. Many of them still are:
but, increasingly of late, they have maintained that global role only by
outsourcing much of their manufacturing activity to economies abroad
where labor costs are significantly lower than in the United States and
where strong labor rights are even less evident than they are at home.81 In
one sense, this is not new: American capital also went abroad during the
Cold War years, embedding itself in (and helping to reconstruct) econo-
mies such as West Germany and Japan under the umbrella and protection
of US arms. But in the post–Cold War years, the imperative to locate
production facilities overseas has been qualitatively different. This out-
sourcing has been driven not by the search for global political stability but

by the search for corporate cost competitiveness. The employment con-

sequences of capital export have also been quite different. In the 1990s,
the US multinationals that employ one in five American workers were net
creators of employment inside the United States. But not in the decade
after 2001, when they cut their American labor force by 2.9 million while
adding 2.4 million workers to their employment rolls overseas.82 That
differential pattern of job creation held both before and after the 2008–9
recession. As recently as 2011, a year in which American multination-
als increased their worldwide labor force by 1.5 percent (to 34.5 million
workers), we now know that their US employment totals rose only by
0.1 percent as their overseas employment rose by 4.4 percent.83 This dif-
ferential pattern of job gain and job loss affects not just semiskilled fac-
tory workers; it affects skilled research workers too. “The share of R&D
spending going to the foreign subsidiaries of American-based companies
rose from 9 percent in 1989 to almost 16 percent in 2009, according to
the National Science Foundation.”84 “In 2001, 32 percent of the income
of the firms on Standard and Poor’s index of the 500 largest publicly
traded U.S. companies came from abroad. By 2008, that figure had
grown to 48 percent.”85
When NAFTA was signed in 1994, Ross Perot warned of a “great
sucking sound south” as US manufacturing employment relocated to
Mexico. In key industries, that relocation did indeed occur—maybe as
many as 682,000 American jobs went south86—but the movement did
not stop there. Mexico soon also experienced a similar sucking sound—
this time a noise caused by the rapid relocation of job opportunities east,
into formerly communist economies now open to global capitalism as the
iron curtain fell in Europe and evaporated everywhere else other than in
North Korea. China is now the United States’ major supplier of a slew of
manufactured goods—everything from “shoes and shirts to computers,
autos, advanced telecommunications gear, and photo voltaic panels for
generating solar energy.”87 The United States, by contrast, exports back
to China “oilseeds and grains,” “waste and scrap,” “semiconductors and
other components,” and “aerospace products and parts.” Note the “waste
and scrap”—over $7 billion worth in 2008 and our second-largest export
earner from China: they sell us the manufactured goods we need, and we
reexport to them the boxes the goods came in.88
The last two decades have seen a significant degree of deindustrializa-
tion in the United States. Some of that loss of manufacturing employment
has been the traditional movement of industries with low capital intensity
into economies with high levels of labor availability: textiles being the
classic case.89 Some has been the result of manufacturing productivity

rising more quickly than output: 5.7 million manufacturing jobs were
lost between 2001 and 2011 because manufacturing output rose by
3.9 percent a year while productivity rose annually by 6.8 percent.90
But much has been the product of a modern form of globalization—a
consequence of the global mobility of even high-technology produc-
tion systems in the age of the Internet. The relocation of manufactur-
ing employment to China, and the development there from the 1990s
of competitive export industries drawing on an apparently inexhaustible
supply of low-cost labor, has been key to what Pierce and Schott have
called “the surprisingly swift decline of U.S. manufacturing employ-
ment.”91 US-based manufacturing employment has fallen dramatically in
the last three decades, “from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979
to 11.5 million in December 2011,”92 a key element in the diminished
capacity of the US economy to create a sufficient volume of new jobs
trade cycle by trade cycle. For a set of reasons still heavily in dispute, the
great American job machine is now fundamentally broken.93
What we have witnessed in the United States in the last two decades,
therefore, has been an effective “hollowing out” of the manufacturing
sector, and the reconfiguration of an entire economy into one dominated
by two kinds of service employment: high-wage employment in the top
echelons of a burgeoning financial sector and low-wage employment in
labor-intensive retail and leisure industries. If there is any buffer zone
between the two, it is as likely as not these days to be employment in
health care. Health-care provision makes up nearly one-fifth of total eco-
nomic activity in the contemporary United States.94 What is now in more
limited supply at the heart of the US economy is semiskilled, factory-
based employment—employment that, in the years after World War II,
brought rising living standards to a blue-collar labor force that would
have been recognized and labeled as “working class” in Western Europe
but was here labeled “middle class.” Less than one American in ten now
works in a manufacturing plant, and the percentage of GDP now gener-
ated by home-based manufacturing firms is down to 13.9 percent. That
is a lower percentage than in every other advanced industrial economy
except France. In the 1950s, the largest employers in the United States
were car companies. The largest earners were their CEOs. Now the largest
earners are Wall Street financiers and the largest employer of US labor is
Walmart. We live in a different world.
This weakening of manufacturing employment matters because
manufacturing matters. Even today, manufacturing firms pay well—
“20 percent more than the national average”95—wages earned by pro-
duction workers, many of whom have technical and associate’s degrees

but not a full college education. Those manufacturing jobs link out to
a string of high-level service jobs such as “product and process engineer-
ing, design, operations and maintenance, transportation, testing and lab
work, as well as sector-specific payroll, accounting and legal work.” And
each worker directly employed in manufacturing helps sustain workers
elsewhere: with a ratio of 1:8.6 in motor vehicle manufacturing, 1:5.6 in
computer manufacturing, and 1:10.3 in steel.96 So without a substantial
manufacturing base, the strong wages vital to middle-class affluence are
increasingly hard to generate, as is the broad tax base on which to sustain
both infrastructure investment and health/pension and welfare provision.
Run your industrial base down and your trade deficit will go up. Run
your industrial base down and your income distribution will polarize and
the Walmart effect will kick in. The Walmart effect is that more and more
Americans are pushed into low-paying service employment or out of the
job market altogether, “caught up in a globalized race-to-the-bottom,
obliged to turn to companies like Wal-Mart for the shoddy goods they
need and the shoddy wages they alone provide.”97
Weakening Economic Underpinnings: (3) Labor

As US manufacturing companies relocate production abroad, their CEOs
often place the blame for that relocation on trade union bargaining power
and on high American wages. Yet the relationship between wages and
outsourcing is far more complicated than that. Contrary to the impres-
sion often created, blue-collar wages in the United States are no longer the
highest in the industrialized world. In 2009, “of the 20 richest countries
tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States ranked
17th in hourly pay for production workers in manufacturing”—this in a
group of countries accounting “for almost half of total U.S. trade flows.”98
In 2010, the United States was fourteenth in that same ranking, leaving
US hourly wages lower than those in 11 EU countries plus Canada and
Australia.99 American firms are, however, freer than others to move pro-
duction abroad without penalty, and there are many labor forces in the
developing world willing to work for less than workers in the industrial-
ized world. It is the impact of their presence in global labor markets that
has pulled (and is pulling) US manufacturing wages down.
General Motors is a good example of how outsourcing, global labor
markets, and weakening trade unions in the United States currently inter-
act to undermine the capacity of American workers to match their ris-
ing productivity to any rising pay. The linkage of pay and productivity
fuelled the great expansion of American middle-class living standards in
the 1950s and 1960s. It was a link that was then broken in the Reagan

and post-Reagan years, so that American workers even in core manufac-

turing industries maintained a rising standard of living after 1980 (if they
maintained it at all) only by combining longer working hours and more
family members going out to paid work with rising levels of personal
consumer debt. That debt-based growth came to an abrupt halt in the
2008–9 financial crisis, and cannot now be reconstructed, even if such a
reconstruction were desirable. When GM restructured with federal help
in the wake of that financial crisis, it did so only by shedding labor and
by paying those it retained significantly less per hour. Before the 2008–9
recession, a typical GM worker cost the company about $56 an hour with
benefits: Equivalent costs in Mexico were $7, in China $4.40, and in
India $1. New hires back in the United States after the recession report-
edly started at $14 an hour.100 After the 2008–9 recession, median family
income in the United States continued to fall. By 2012, it had fallen for
five years in a row, was 11.6 percent lower than in 2000, and was no
higher in real terms than it had been in 1989. By 2014, the American
middle class was no longer the richest even in North America. That acco-
lade had apparently passed by then to the Canadians.101
This “hollowing out” of American middle-class wages has paralleled
the “hollowing out” of American-based manufacturing point for point,
and has set in train a set of economic and social processes that now
threaten the long-term prosperity of us all. One very standard response
by American workers to the failure of their wage rates per hour to grow
has been to increase the number of hours they have been prepared to
work. The United States is now a long-hours economy when set against
the best of the rest elsewhere in the advanced industrial world. Average
working hours per year in the United States in 2011 totaled 1,787: in
Germany, they totaled 1,413, and in Norway, 1,426. In the OECD as a
whole, the United States now ranks 26 out of 34 for the average number
of hours worked per employee per year.102 With long hours and intensi-
fied working routines has come greater illness and greater weight: greater
illness because of stress-generating pressures both at work and at home,
and greater weight because, as wages have stagnated and hours have
lengthened, the typical American diet has shifted away from domestic
cooking to the consumption of calorie-rich convenience food. American
workers may not be significantly richer than they were in 1974, but they
are certainly heavier and less healthy; and, in consequence, the United
States currently leads the industrial world in the one metric it ideally
would shed—dying and suffering. If the data produced in a 2013 report
commissioned by the US government from the National Research Coun-
cil and the Institute of Medicine are accurate, Americans currently die

younger and, when alive, have poorer health than people in the other top
16 industrial nations in the world.103
With the link between productivity and pay broken, income inequal-
ity has soared, as has personal consumer debt. The typical compensation
differential between a CEO and the factory floor in 1965 was around
18.3:1. It is now typically close to 300:1.104 And that growing differential
is only part of a more general trend: Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
data released in 2011 showed the average real after-tax household income
of the top 1 percent of US income earners rising by 275 percent between
1979 and 2007, while the income of the bottom 20 percent rose only
18 percent.105 The United States currently has the seventh highest level
of income inequality in the OECD, and ranks fifth out of 150 countries
in its degree of wealth disparity.106 Moreover, and not surprisingly, as this
scale of social inequality has gone up, America’s much-famed rate of social
mobility has gone down. The American Dream is slipping out of the
grasp of more and more Americans, two-thirds of whom are no longer
economically mobile.107 The chances of the children of Americans in the
bottom two quintiles of income earners rising into the top quintile is now
lower than in a range of other industrialized countries: a list that includes
Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and possibly even Germany and the
United Kingdom.108 An equivalent EPI data set adds Switzerland, France,
Spain, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia to that number.109
Instead of experiencing rising levels of consumption, greater and greater
numbers of Americans now find themselves trapped in poverty. In 1959,
before Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty, the official poverty
rate in the United States was 22.4 percent. By1973, it had effectively
halved. But with the war on poverty then abandoned in the Reagan years,
rates of poverty stabilized and in the recent recession rose again. In 2012,
15 percent of Americans (46.5 million people) were officially in poverty,
one in three Americans were living within one tranche of the official pov-
erty level for their size of family, and one American child in four lived in a
household that was officially poor. In fact, it now makes more sense these
days to talk of the existence of two American working classes—one that is
mired in poverty and one that struggles on the edge of it.110 Those on wel-
fare are definitely among the American poor, but not all Americans with
incomes below the poverty line are without work. On the contrary, “the
number of low-income working families in the United States increased to
10.4 million in 2011, up from 10.2 million a year earlier.” Those num-
bers mean that “nearly one-third of all working families—32 percent—
may not have enough money to meet basic needs.”111 Thirty-two percent
of working families (47.5 million Americans) currently struggle daily to

make ends meet. In this way, low pay and involuntary part-time work112
have joined welfare dependency as the three key, immediate causes of pov-
erty in the contemporary United States, and the impact of all three was
enhanced by the adverse effect of the 2008–9 recession on wages, state
and federal revenues, and the availability of welfare provision.
The distribution of poverty in contemporary America, however, is not
simply a product of class differences. The distribution of poverty is also
overlaid by issues of ethnicity. African Americans and Hispanic Ameri-
cans are three times as likely to be trapped in low-income or welfare-based
poverty than are their Caucasian equivalents,113 and, if you are African
American and a male, you are significantly more likely than your white
counterpart to find yourself excluded from employment altogether by
virtue of incarceration. There was a time when the bulk of the US prison
population was white: but not now. Now it is black and Hispanic. One
African American young male in nine is currently in jail.114 The general
population has grown by 34 percent since 1980, but the prison popula-
tion has risen by 375 percent.115 The US incarceration rate, at one in every
hundred American adults, is now the highest in the industrial world—
indeed, America’s 737 inmates per 100,000 residents in 2005 compared
badly with a world average of 166 per 100,000 residents116—and an
extensive prison-industrial complex has emerged to provide employ-
ment (to guards) and inmate-made products (to market) on a historically
unprecedented scale.117 With less than 5 percent of the world’s population
but nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, the United States con-
tinues to be a leader among nations in both prison and jail populations
and per capita rates.118 Federal and state authorities in America claim to
be fighting a war on drugs, but to many observers the manner in which
that war is currently being fought looks more like a reincarnation of
old-fashioned Jim Crow.119
Americans talk the language of freedom and see themselves as uniquely
free. But the conventional American understanding of freedom is, by
contemporary global standards, very antiquated and narrow—taking in a
formal set of political rights to vote, to speak, and to bear arms, but not
extending that list to include key economic and social rights that are often
constitutionally guaranteed elsewhere. In twenty-first-century America,
the right to collectively organize and bargain—so hard-won during the
New Deal—is now largely eroded by so-called right-to-work legislation.
The right to a decent minimum standard of life is continually threatened
by the inadequacies of the minimum wage and the perpetual erosion of
welfare provision. And the rights of women at work to paid maternity
leave, flexible working hours, and available child care—rights increasingly

available across the rest of the Western world—still remain to be won in

most states in contemporary America. Labor as a voice is weak in industry.
Workers as a political force are perpetually outspent by the lobbyists for
business, and a post-Reagan culture privileging individualism over col-
lectivism now erodes the legitimacy of even the most modest attempts to
avert the worst excesses of unregulated capitalism. The economic image
of America abroad remains one of affluence and splendor, but in the back
streets of American cities these days, as well as in small towns and suburbs
all over America, that image rings increasingly hollow.
Is America in Decline, on the

Cusp, or Simply Resting?
Pessimism can be carried too far, of course, and a glass described as half
empty can also be described as half full. And so for that reason (and no
doubt for other reasons too), it is possible to point to many commenta-
tors who, poring over the same data we have just surveyed here, remain
adamant that it contains no signs of American decline. On the contrary,
they are quick to remind us that the United States remains the largest
economy on earth and that jobs are beginning to come back to the United
States as China’s labor costs and currency revalues.120 America, they tell
us, is rebounding. Its energy independence is growing. It still leads the
world in manufacturing value-added. It still ranks third in the volume
of its manufacturing exports.121 Its ability to attract immigrants remains
undiminished. Its capacity to project its culture abroad—through the new
technologies of communication that it dominates—is unsurpassed.122
America’s decline, such commentators tell us, is “a mirage in a world
that’s rising.”123 The United States is not posed “to fade away.” There is no
issue here of inevitable imperial decline. On the contrary, Robert Kagan
has written, by every military and economic measure “the United States
today is not remotely like Britain around 1900, when that empire was
locked into a ‘difficult and demoralizing Boer War.’” It is more like Brit-
ain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power. Following
Charles Krauthammer, the Kagan view is that decline is a choice and not
an inevitable fate (or, at least, not an immediate inevitability). “Empires
and great powers,” as he said, “rise and fall, and the only question is when.
But the when does matter,”124 and in the case of an empire understood as
being as benign as this one is, it needs to be delayed for as long as possible.
But other commentators are not so convinced that America does have
that much time, or indeed that much control over the future of its fate.
Some are troubled by what they see as “a major disconnect between Amer-
ican self-perception and the reality of the data.” The self-perception is of

American superiority and American exceptionalism. The “reality of the

data” is US underperformance in comparative terms—underperformance
on aspects of life as disparate (and as important) as health, personal safety,
political participation, and social mobility—on what Howard Friedman
has recently labeled “major cracks in the armor of America’s strength.”125
In the hands of sympathetic critics of this kind, America is not as excep-
tional as it likes to think it is, at least when compared to the best of
the rest abroad. On the contrary, for concerned critics like Friedman,
to characterize America as exceptional is to perpetuate a self-indulgent
myth. It is a myth because the United States is no longer an unchal-
lenged world leader in things we value (like levels of political participa-
tion, individual freedoms, and economic performance). And it is also a
myth because, unfortunately, America is a global leader in certain things
that we do not necessarily value (a list that runs from rates of capital pun-
ishment, incarceration, and gun ownership on the one hand to income
inequality, the role of money in politics, and the degree of imperial hubris
on the other).126 The United States is currently fourth in the world for
executions—behind only China, Iraq, and Iran—but sixteenth overall on
Harvard University’s new Social Progress Index that measures social and
environmental indicators. We used to be exceptional in a positive sense.
“That used to be us.”127 But of late, the United States has slipped down
the international league tables on so many key variables that we might
not be at some American equivalent of the United Kingdom in 1870, no
matter what Robert Kagan says. We might instead be nearing a premature
end to “the American century,” an end that will damage us all unless we
act quickly to set our house in order.
All this then takes us back to the question with which this chapter
began. Are the critics right? Is the United States currently caught up in
some mutually reinforcing dynamic of decline? And if the United States
is so caught, is the scale and burden of America’s global role now seriously
beginning to erode the internal economic, social, and cultural capacities
that are so vital to the maintenance of that role? We need to know, and
one way to find out is to examine the character of the global role itself and
to ask that most basic of questions. Is modern America more than just a
superpower? Is it actually an empire?


CHAPTER 2
The Question of Empire
Setting the United States amid a review of empires and claiming

the setting will illuminate the contemporary American condition only
makes sense if America does indeed have an empire. Going farther and
studying those empires in order to prevent the United States from falling
into imperial traps only makes sense if our general view of empire is a
negative one. Both views/assumptions are, of course, highly controversial.
There are plenty of people out there who think that empires are good
things. There are plenty of people out there who think that the American
Empire is a particularly good thing, and there are plenty of others who
deny that America is an empire at all. Before we can sensibly develop any
comparative analysis of America and its predecessor empires, we need first
to deal directly with those who deny the validity of the comparison.
Is America an Empire?
Not everybody thinks so. Precisely because it was born as a nation in a
successful anticolonial struggle of which it is still proud, America is often
said to be, as Sandy Berger put it in the 1990s, “the first global power in
history that is not an imperial power.” Indeed, “traditional scholarship on
American foreign policy has espoused the same idea, consciously avoiding
terms like ‘imperialism’ or ‘empire’ and instead using terms like ‘diplo-
macy,’” since “one of the great themes of American historiography . . . is
that there is no American empire.”1 Empires, after all, traditionally exer-
cise direct control over their dependent properties, and the United States
quite simply does not do that. On the contrary, the United States has
long eschewed the seizing of overseas territories and the sustenance of
colonial empires. Remember what Donald Rumsfeld told the Iraqis as
American-led coalition forces invaded their country in 2003: “We’re not
imperialistic. We never have been.”2 Or again, his president on the same
war: “Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained
to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more

than to return home.” As Americans, that is, we like to tell ourselves that
we “don’t ‘do’ empire.”3 Instead, we come to liberate, and then we leave.
Far from being an empire, it is the view of many commentators, particu-
larly those on the American right, that the United States should rather
be understood (and defended) as a target—the object of a multipronged
siege that makes its military preparedness both legitimately defensive and
absolutely necessary.4 Or again, that the United States in its foreign policy
relationships should be understood not as an empire but as “a kind of
umpire,” as the one global power periodically compelling “acquiescence
as necessary with rules that have earned broad legitimacy.”5
If, however, that is too much of an apology for American militarism
for your taste, then how about understanding America’s role in the world
less as imperial and more as hegemonic. A number of scholars hold to
this position, arguing “that it is analytically more useful to understand
the United States as a hegemonic rather than an imperial power, because
doing so forces the analyst to focus directly on the crucial questions of
negotiation, legitimacy and ‘followership.’”6 On this argument, impe-
rial control runs deep and detailed. Hegemonic control, by contrast, is
“shallower and less intrusive;” and, for Andrew Hurrell at least, shallower
and less intrusive captures America’s contemporary global presence and
role in ways that the blunt labeling of that presence and role as “impe-
rial” cannot hope to do. As he put it, “the power resources of the United
States are indeed enormous. But what is more striking is the instability of
power, the uncertainties of power, and the perennial difficulty of trans-
lating power into desired outcomes, especially desired outcomes in an
increasingly complex world.”7 America may at times have had imperial
ambitions, but it has to play out those ambitions in a postimperial world,
one characterized by “the declining utility of military force, resistance to
alien rule, changes within the metropolitan core, changes in the interna-
tional legal and moral climate, and the existence of opponents and chal-
lengers.”8 Talk of Pax Americana by all means, but treat it as a hegemonic
phenomenon and not as an imperial one.
Most serious students of American foreign policy understand the argu-
ment that Hurrell is making, but for many of them it is a distinction
without a difference. And if the distinction is not important, why make
it? Max Boot, for one, does not; nor do Bradley Thayer, Josef Joffe, or
Thomas Madden. For Bradley Thayer, when making the case for Ameri-
can Empire, the question is simply put and simply met. “Is America an
empire? Yes, it is . . . America is an empire, but it is a unique empire . . . It
does not covet territory or resources. It covets ideas. The American Empire
is an empire of ideas, and the ideas are those that led to its founding in

The Question of Empire 35
1776. These ideas are ‘The Spirit of 1776.’”9 For Max Boot, America does
indeed have an imperial role to play, and for its own security, it needs to
play that role with greater assertiveness than hitherto. From Somalia
to Afghanistan, “the problem, in short, has not been excessive American
assertiveness but rather insufficient assertiveness . . . the most realistic
response to terrorism is for the United States unambiguously to embrace
its global role.”10 Likewise, Josef Joffe notes that America has a “virtual
empire . . . like the twenty-first-century economy, a blend of the digital
and the real.” And because it does, the United States cannot avoid its fate:
to be both the “indispensable nation” and the “default power.” “A rules-
based world requires a caretaker,”11 and, for everyone’s sake, that is what
the United States must continue to be.
The Thayer defense of America as an empire is echoed in that offered
by Thomas Madden. For Madden, as we saw in Chapter 1, the contem-
porary American Empire is one based on “trust” (as, in his view, was also
the early Roman Empire) rather than, as with the British Empire, being
based on “commerce,” or with the Russian Empire being based on “con-
quest.” It is not that America has actively sought empire; it is rather that
America has had empire thrust on it. “Britain actively sought to build
an empire,” Madden has written, “while the United States has actively
sought to avoid one.” For Madden at least, the United States was and
still is a reluctant global power—isolationism being, in his view, “woven
into the DNA of the American character”—one drawn into foreign alli-
ances, much like the young Roman Republic, only in response to external
threats; and once so drawn, obliged to play a incrementally bigger role
only to honor the trust placed in US support by its allies. “The overriding
dynamic behind Roman and American expansionism,” he tells us, “was
not to build an empire of the vanquished but a community of allies.”
Madden even develops a diagrammatic encapsulation of the way in which
the American “desire to be left alone” has been systematically thwarted
by the twin forces of attacks on allies and appeals from friends. It is these
twin forces, we are told, which have cumulatively obliged a reluctant
hegemon to develop not a colonial empire but rather a global network of
military and economic obligations.12
Robert Kagan put this case for America as a benign empire more elo-
quently still:
There was a time when the world clearly saw how different the American
superpower was from all the previous aspiring hegemons. The difference
lay in the exercise of power. The strength acquired by the United States in
the aftermath of World War II was far greater than any single nation had
ever possessed, at least since the Roman empire . . . That the American

people “might have set the crown of world empire on their brows” . . . but
chose not to, was a decision of singular importance in world history and
recognized as such . . . Let us not call this . . . selfless. Americans are as
self-interested as any other people. But for at least 50 years they have been
guided by the kind of enlightened self-interest that, in practice, comes
dangerously close to resembling generosity.13
Not everyone, however, buys into this notion of America as the reluc-
tant imperialist, or of America as the benign empire. On the contrary,
a whole litany of critics from both the political left and the political
right have dismissed both characterizations as entirely fanciful and self-
delusory. At the very least, some are struck by the trappings of empire
that the United States has developed on a grand scale for itself since the
1940s. As Arthur Schlesinger put it, the United States is not a colonial
empire but definitely an informal one “richly equipped with imperial par-
aphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators,
all spread wide around the luckless planet.”14 Others are quick to point
out that although Americans may choose to deny the existence of their
empire, “for many foreigners it increasingly looks, walks, and talks like
one, and they respond to Washington accordingly.”15 Or as Michael Hunt
and Stephen Levine have it, when surveying America’s wars in Asia from
the Philippines to Vietnam, “from start to finish the U.S. undertaking
was marked by features that most observers would automatically associate
with empire were any other country under consideration.”16
This disjunction between self-perception and foreign policy reality was
particularly acute in the 1990s when, with the Cold War over and the
United States left standing as the world’s one superpower, the global reach
of American arms was still not reduced. That lack of reduction was enough
to persuade a Canadian intellectual such as Michael Ignatieff to talk of
America as “Empire Lite” but Empire nonetheless. “What word other than
Empire,” he recently asked, “can fully encompass the awesome thing that
became the American international order with its hosts of dependent allies,
its vast intelligence networks, its ‘five global military commands,’ its more
than one million men and women ‘at arms on five continents’ and its ‘carrier
battle groups on watch in every ocean?’”17 For him, “America’s entire war
on terror is an exercise in imperialism” and though “nation-building isn’t
supposed to be an exercise in colonialism . . . the relationship between the
locals and the internationals is inherently colonial.”18 The post–Cold War
ubiquity of American arms was also enough to persuade London’s Michael
Cox that many of the standard rebuttals of the “America as empire” case did
not stand up to careful scrutiny. True, America has not gathered territory
and colonies in the traditional way, but America is a continent-wide nation

only because it bought, conquered, and ethnically cleansed vast adjacent

territories in its pursuit of Manifest Destiny. True, it champions the prin-
ciple of self-determination—a strange thing for an empire to do—but it
does so sparingly and only when not in tension with its own self-interest.
And true, it doesn’t always get its own way in global affairs, but then—what
empire ever did?19
The case for engaging with America as an empire therefore remains
a strong one, made by a string of serious scholars of both interna-
tional relations and post-9/11 US foreign policy. The “new Romans
on the Potomac,” as Michael Cox labeled the American political class
in the years of George W. Bush, “face some difficult decisions.” Under-
standing how and why they seek to resolve those in particular ways can
only be helped, in his view, if we “still welcome the debate about Empire”20
and, in spite of all its problems, engage with the concept “in a creative
fashion.”21 “The ‘Age of Empire’ may indeed have ended,” Eliot Cohen
wrote, “but an age of American hegemony has begun. And regardless of
what one calls it or how long it will last, U.S. statesmen today cannot
ignore the lessons and analogies of imperial history.”22 Nor should they
ignore those lessons and analogies if Niall Ferguson is right, because for
him at least, “the very concept of ‘hegemony’ is really just a way of talking
about ‘empire.’ Empire being a word to which most Americans remain
averse.”23 The notion of empire “as applied to the United States,” Michael
Cox wrote, “has its limits: but it also has huge potential as a tool of com-
parative analysis, so long as we know what we are (and what we are not)
talking about.”24 The United States, after all, used force outside its bor-
ders more than a hundred times in the nineteenth century alone, invari-
ably insisting as it did so that its purpose was not to conquer people but
to liberate them. It was that mentality that led J. R. Seeley to anticipate
that while the “British acquired an empire in a fit of absent-mindedness,
when the United States acquired one of its own it would do so in a state
of ‘deep denial.’”25 On this view, America may not be an empire in the
traditional sense. Nor is a fully globalized world easy to dominate in a tra-
ditional imperial fashion, but contemporary American foreign policy has
distinctly imperial dimensions to it that make debating the character and
fate of something called “the American empire” both legitimate and valu-
able. “Scholars should stop the insistence that America is not an empire,”
Bryan Mabee has argued, “in order to engage more profitably with the
historical debate about the ‘imperial’ in international relations history.”26
His instruction is well put.
Among those who have followed that injunction are the many strident
critics of America’s imperial role overseas. The best known of these critics

is probably Noam Chomsky, writing immediately after 9/11 to condemn

the United States as “a leading terrorist state”27—but he is not alone.
The litany certainly includes at least Harry Magdoff,28 Michael Mann,29
Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Tom Engelhardt, Paul Attwood30
Perry Anderson,31 Walden Bello,32 and Oliver Stone.33 All these radi-
cal scholars and public intellectuals clearly agree (1) that America is an
imperial power, with its urge to empire motored out of the Pentagon;
(2) that because it is, America’s moral record overseas has become deeply
soiled and now stands in profound tension with the moral superiority
that American leaders regularly assert; (3) that the scale of America’s
overseas involvement is key to both its impending global and its actual
domestic decline;34 and (4) that, like empires before it, the American one
necessarily generates overseas resistance and blowback that our imperial
proconsuls (and many ordinary American citizens) find unintelligible
and offensive. The level of popular denial about the reality of American
Empire is understood by these scholars as itself a product of the empire
being denied, since for them imperial self-delusion is a core characteristic
of the way that empires necessarily operate. Empires tell themselves one
thing but do another; and precisely because they do, they are invariably
both surprised and irritated by the degree of external resistance and even
military blowback with which they are regularly confronted.
Chalmers Johnson had the American Empire now so overstretched as
to be on the cusp of decline: for him it was and is “an empire of bases.”35
Andrew Bacevich has preferred to write more prosaically of “imperial
policing . . . and the management of empire” and of American involve-
ment in “global war with no exits and no deadlines.”36 Tom Engelhardt
has the empire, the new imperialism of the post–Cold War period, as
driven to the edge of destruction by “military profligacy and . . . creeping
gigantism”;37 but all agree that American foreign policy both before and
after 9/11 must be understood as being quintessentially imperial in char-
acter: imperial and also costly, so that because of it, the United States is
said today to find “itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first
of these crises is economic and cultural, the second political, and the third
military.”38 So then the question to be asked necessarily becomes, “Are we
going down like the Soviets?”39
It is not, of course, that the possession of imperial power necessar-
ily means unbroken global success. It does not; indeed, the overriding
irony for many of America’s domestic critics of US foreign policy under
George W. Bush and now Barack Obama is that by pursuing bin Laden
so relentlessly, the United States has ended up doing exactly what bin
Laden wanted the United States to do—become embroiled in a series of

small wars from which American arms could neither extricate themselves
nor achieve decisive victory.40 In the process of pursuing a war on ter-
ror that it could never win,41 the American state was instead sucked into
human rights abuses abroad and the erosion of civil liberties at home,
two tendencies that were already well under way prior to 9/11 under
the exigencies of the Cold War. Andrew Bacevich put the anti-imperial
case this way: that after 9/11, the global war on terror went from “lib-
eration to assassination in three quick rounds” as the American military
opened up new fronts not just in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter being
problematic enough) but now also in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Soma-
lia.42 America’s dominance is now coming to an end, in Bacevich’s view at
least. All empires fall, and this one is falling now, but before it does (and
indeed as a consequence of its death agony), “America’s empire and end-
less wars,” as he and Terrence McNally put it, “are destroying the world
and ruining our great country.”43 Andrew Bacevich and Robert Kagan,
though both self-proclaimed conservatives, could hardly be farther apart
on this. Both agree that America is at work in the world, but for Bacev-
ich, that work is necessarily self-defeating and globally disruptive, and for
Kagan, it is exactly the reverse.
Finally, in this survey of views on America as Empire, we can come
full circle. There are arguments on the left that mirror those on the right
with which we began: arguments asserting that America does indeed pos-
sess an empire but an empire that is actually strengthening. There are
even arguments on the left that American imperialism so helped create
a global phenomenon—Empire—that the result is no longer tied to any
nation-state, including the United States itself. The first of this pair—
the radical view of America as a strengthening empire—is best found
in the writings of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, as well as scholars linked
to them at York University in Toronto and to The Socialist Register that
is edited from there. The second is best represented by the writings of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: the view that “the United States does
not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperial
project” because “imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in
the way modern European nations were.”44 Panitch and Gindin could
not disagree more: “bizarrely out of sync with the times,” was how they
responded to the “imperialism is over” argument in 2004.45 Among the
many things that Hardt and Negri missed (if Panitch and Gindin are
right) is the way in which in the new relationship between capitalism and
imperialism, “the densest imperial networks and institutional linkages,
which had earlier run north-south between imperial states and their for-
mal or informal colonies, now came to run between the U.S. and other

major capitalist states.”46 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin write of a new
“form of imperialism, uniquely embodied in the American state, which
has emerged in the contemporary era. It is characterized above all by eco-
nomic penetration and informal incorporation of other capitalist states,
but at the same time it both permits and requires imperial policing and
military intervention in ‘rogue states’ which have not been incorporated
into the neoliberal capitalist order. These two forms of American imperial
statecraft—penetration and incorporation on the one hand, policing and
intervention on the other—are intimately related.”47 In the new infor-
mal American Empire based on the global strength of American finance,
the contemporary US state is then said to necessarily play “a balancing
act between its role as the domestic state of its own social formation
and its imperial role as the state of global capitalism.”48 The weakness
of the American labor movement relative to that of, say, Canada allows
the American state greater flexibility to play that balancing role than
might otherwise have been the case, as do flows of capital regularly return-
ing to the United States as the metropolitan center of a global imperial
network. It is the Panitch and Gindin view, not simply that America is a
new form of empire, but also—and quite contrary to the views of most
radical commentators on that empire—that it is an empire that “is more
powerful today than it was at the end of World War II.”49 Contradictions
abound. This is capitalism after all, and the authors are Marxists, but there
are no signs yet, as far as they can see, of America in decline because of
its empire. Just the reverse: America is stronger, in their view, because
of its dominant position in an empire of capitalist states.
What Is an Empire?
Before we can decide who, if anyone, is right in this debate we had better
decide what we mean by “empire.” So what do we mean?
An empire can be recognized both by what it is and by what it is not.
What an empire is, in all its essentials, is “a multinational or multieth-
nic state that extends its influence through formal or informal control
of other polities.”50 What an empire is not is simply a nation-state writ
large. “An empire in the classic sense,” Charles Maier wrote, “is usually
believed, first, to expand its control by conquest or coercion, and, sec-
ond, to control the political loyalty of the territories it subjugates . . .
an empire is characterized by size, by ethnic hierarchization, and by a
regime that centralizes power but enlists diverse social and/or ethnic
elites in its management.”51 We now live in an international order, one
first formally recognized in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, in which
the basic unit of international relations is the autonomous nation-state:

the entity successfully claiming sovereignty over a particular territorial

area and the one monopolizing the legitimate use of force within that area.
In modern times—since 1648, that is—an empire must be understood
as a political arrangement in which one such nation establishes effective
sovereignty over other such nations; or, more generally, as Michael Doyle
has it, as “relationships of political control imposed by some political soci-
eties over the effective sovereignty of other political societies.”52 Follow-
ing Maier again, “empire is a form of political organization in which the
social elements that rule in the dominant state—the ‘mother country’ or
‘the metropole’—create a network of allied elites in regions abroad who
accept subordination in international affairs in return for the security of
their position in their own administrative unit (the ‘colony’ or, in spatial
terms, ‘the periphery’).”53
Empires necessarily involve hierarchical relationships between a
core political unit and more peripheral political units. The result is not
just political inequality between core and periphery. There is also exploi-
tation: an empire is “a composite state in which a metropole dominates a
periphery to the disadvantage of the periphery.”54 In empires, “the right to
rule . . . resides with the ruling institution, not in the consent of the gov-
erned.”55 As Alexander Motyl put it, when thinking of empires as “hub-
like arrangements between cores and peripheries,”
first, like all political systems, empires consist of distinct units—the core
state and the peripheral societies. Second, these units are not just randomly
collected elements but constituent parts of a coherent imperial whole. Just
as no empire can exist without core states and peripheral societies, the
characteristics of each are defined in relation to the other: core states pre-
suppose peripheral societies and core elite status presupposes peripheral
elite status and vice versa. Third, the units occupy specific places within
the Empire. The elites of core states must be situated in a distinct core,
and the elites of peripheral societies must be situated in distinct peripher-
ies. Fourth, the relations between core state and peripheral societies are
structured in a way that defines the system as a whole. Core elites rule;
peripheral elites govern. The core elite is dominant; the peripheral elites are
subordinate. The absence of significant relations between peripheral elites
completes the picture.56
That said, the political relationships at the core of empire can take
and have taken many forms. They can vary in territorial space: some
local, some regional, some very occasionally on a far grander scale. The
Romans, the Mongols, and the British all controlled vast proportions of
the then known land mass. The Venetian Empire, by contrast, hardly

controlled any land mass at all. Empires can be predominantly land or sea
based. They can be direct and contiguous (most land-based empires were),
or they can be indirect and scattered (as with most sea-based empires).
They can be predominantly territorial, as with Rome, or predominantly
economic, as with much of the British Empire. They can be formal (with
little autonomy left to peripheral elites) or they can be informal (with high
levels of such autonomy left in place). “Critics and cheerleaders alike have
tended to focus on having an empire, not being one. Russia, the historian
Geoffrey Hosking has noted, was an empire; Britain had an empire.”57
The power relations in play within an empire “might include: imperial
(intervening in a polity without actually governing it), hegemonic (set-
ting the rules of the game others must follow), and colonial (governing
internal affairs of a subordinated polity).”58 Imperial power can be hard
(military) or soft (diplomatic).
There are and have been varying types of territorial and nonterri-
torial empires. In an important essay to which we will return, George
Steinmetz lists the territorial ones as “(1) classical land-based empires;
(2) expansionist nation-states such as early modern and modern-century
France . . . or the United States in its westward continental expansion;
(3) early-modern colonialism, for example New Spain or Portuguese Sri
Lanka during the 17th century; and (4) modern colonialism.” Likewise,
nonterritorial empires, which involve the control of space rather than the
annexation of territory or sovereignty, also took distinct forms in the early
modern and modern periods. Steinmetz distinguishes early nonterritorial
empires like Venice and the Hanseatic League from modern imperialism
of the kind he associates with America59 and complicates matters farther
by distinguishing “hybrid imperial formations” and “imagined relations
between past and present empires.”60 There is, as he says, a “wild confu-
sion of historical terminology in this area.”61
That wild confusion arises because empires come in different times
and types: ancient and modern, land- or sea-based, global or regional,
formal and informal, or political or economic. “Most are established by
force of arms, but some expand by other means: by political collabora-
tion, by economic, social, or cultural dependence.”62 Some empires live
relatively peacefully alongside others. The British and the Russian did
that—aside from the Crimean War—for most of the nineteenth century.
Other empires necessarily share a less easy and far less amicable relation-
ship, set into tension with each other not just by territorial ambition but
by ideology: the Ottoman against the Venetian in clashes of religion, for
example, or the American and the Soviet in clashes of economic ideol-
ogy. But amicable or hostile, empires are different from nations. Some

nations can and do build empires, but the two concepts are best kept
well apart. Nations have recognizable territorial boundaries while empires
do not. Nation-states recognize other nation-states as formally equal.
Empires normally recognize neither nation-states nor other empires in
this way. On the contrary, “states are always in the plural, empires mostly
in the singular.”63 Inside a modern state, the status and rights of the state’s
members tend to be formally equal. In empires, by contrast, status and
rights tend to diminish as you move from core to periphery. Empires are
even different from states exercising great influence over states adjacent
to them. As Münkler said, “the line between hegemonic supremacy and
imperial domination may be fluid, but it is still meaningful to distinguish
the two.”64 Hegemony is normally exercised over states that have formal
political equality even with the hegemonic power. Empires do not handle
internal relations in this formally equal way.
Moreover, as we struggle to decide whether the United States is or is
not an empire—and, if it is, an empire of what kind—it would be unwise
to assume that empires are necessarily bad things. Colonial empires cer-
tainly left a bad taste in the modern mouth, but earlier generations often
evaluated empires differently, seeing them as both familiar and fortuitous.
The term “empire” comes from the Latin imperium, meaning simply “to
govern”; and people were governed by empires for long periods and in
many places throughout the ancient and premodern world. Then and
now, it was and is possible to mount a strong defense of empires: as guar-
antors of regional or local peace and stability, as harbingers of increased
commerce and culture, and as instigators of the rule of law and the dis-
pensation of justice.65 “The endurance of empires,” as Burbank and Coo-
per note, “challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary
and inevitable, and points us instead toward exploring the wide range of
ways in which people over time, for better or worse, have thought about
politics and organized their states.”66 It is an important exploration that
we will need to make as well.
Doing that, one thing that becomes immediately clear about empires
is that they do more than stabilize the areas under their control. They also
go through phases of growth and decline, phases in which their capacity
to provide that stability ebbs and flows, and in which the balance between
the positive and the negative in the imperial experience necessarily var-
ies for both governors and governed. This means, among other things,
that deciding whether a particular country is or is not an empire is not
as straightforward a task as it might first appear; because in making that
judgment, it is also necessary to establish at what stage of the standard
imperial trajectory the case under review may or may not be located. For

Alexander Motyl, that trajectory is normally four-staged: moving from

dense and formal core-periphery relations, through loose-formal and then
loose-informal relations before settling at loose and dense.67 For Julian
Go, it is three-staged: “imperial expansion, abatement, and reassertion,”
phases that “roughly correspond with the . . . state’s phases of ascendancy,
hegemonic maturity, and decline.”68 For Herfried Münkler, it is less a
matter of stages than of thresholds. Empires that want to last have to hit
what he calls (following Michael Doyle, and using Rome as his model)
the “Augustan threshold:” that set of political reforms “of the administra-
tion, the economic order, the fiscal and financial system, even the military
apparatus . . . through which an empire ends its phase of expansion and
passes into the phase of settled long-term existence.”69 And if Niall Fer-
guson is right, fewer and fewer empires have managed that consolidation
as time has gone on. Empires come with expiration dates, he has written,
and it is “especially striking that most modern empires have a far shorter
life span than their ancient and early modern predecessors.”70 So if the
United States has, or is poised to acquire, an empire, we should not expect
it to last long in the manner of the Romans or the Ottoman Turks.71
Empires always fall, and for very good reasons—or rather, they eventu-
ally always fall for one or more of a set of very good reasons. Ultimately,
empires are only possible because of the weakness of others; and as that
balance of power shifts over time, empires that once looked impregnable
find that their only way forward from the peak of their power is actually
down. Empires can fall because of overreach: passing a point at which
they can expand successfully without overstretching the internal resources
that initially gave them dominance and without finding qualitatively new
problems of scale in the governance of their territories. Empires can fall
because their dominance of subordinate regions, if benign, allows those
regions to strengthen internally to such a degree that maintaining for-
mal control over them becomes progressively more difficult. They can fall
because their dominance of subordinate regions, if not benign, necessar-
ily generates resistance and blowback, the costs of which (either costs of
repression or costs of retreat) tends to grow exponentially as the empire
expands. They can fall because, in the exercise of their dominance, inex-
orable cultural shifts undermine their capacity to govern—as imperial
hubris sets in and steadily erodes the capacity of both imperial elites and
their supporting core population to retain a full understanding of exactly
what is happening in the world that they govern.72 They can fall because
of what Colin Read called “the winners’ curse”—imperial self-satisfaction
and sense of natural superiority—the curse “that actually bestows an
advantage on the up-and-coming who recognize winners’ complacency

is their Achilles heel.”73 And empires can fall because they are challenged
from without as well as from within: challenged by other empires eager to
supplant them or challenged by external (now global) developments that
undermine their original capacity for dominance.
Empires can rot from the top (with hubris) and from the bottom (with
resistance). They can rot from within (as they deplete their resources)
and from without (as they attract competition from others). Empires are
really good at rotting, and many fall with remarkable and unexpected
speed. The British Empire certainly did, gone in a generation; so too
did the Soviets,’ effectively gone overnight. Empires invariably look good
in their prime, but the thing about primes is that they are always—and
necessarily—followed by decline. People can’t be in their prime forever,
and neither can empires.
Is America an Empire and, If So,

What Kind of Empire?
As we now close in on what exactly to call the contemporary United
States in this discussion of empires, it does seem that a nation-state is
best labeled as some kind of empire if it exercises regular and effective
sovereignty over the internal and foreign affairs of other nation-states or
regions, and it is best not labeled as some kind of empire if it does not.
Following George Steinmetz, it also seems sensible to “define imperial-
ism as a non-territorial form of empire in contradistinction to colonialism
as a territorial one.”74 But as he says, “of course, there is a continuum
rather than a sharp dichotomy between a colonialism that smashes native
sovereignty and governs in its stead and an imperialism that respects for-
eign sovereignty except in emergencies.”75 The idea of a continuum is par-
ticularly valuable here. At one end are empires that exercise direct and
formal control over subordinate polities and rely heavily on superior mili-
tary force to initiate and consolidate that control. At the other are hege-
monic powers exercising indirect and informal control over polities that
enjoy formal equality of status with the hegemon, and where hegemonic
leadership (political or economic) rests overwhelmingly on soft power. It
is then possible to place classical Rome at the first end of that continuum
alongside the Belgian Empire in the nineteenth century Congo and the
Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe in the years after 1945. The British
Empire then sits in the middle of the continuum, with the British some-
times using direct colonial control and sometimes political and economic
hegemony. The question for us now is where to place the United States on
that particular continuum? Can we indeed place it there at all?
We can say at least four general things to guide us here.

First, in general, it is safe to say that the United States does not stand
at the classical imperial end of the continuum. The claim that, unlike
earlier global powers, the United States does not hold and occupy terri-
tory has some validity. But even that claim, of course, seems more credible
at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it did at the end of the
nineteenth. That was partly because the United States, in creating itself
as a continent-wide entity, did practice land seizure and occupation on a
truly gargantuan scale. Under the guise of Manifest Destiny, the United
States in the first century of its existence fought Mexico and annexed its
territory, pushed Native Americans into constrained and limited reserva-
tions, and even invaded Canada in the hope of expanding north. It is true
that military and political leaders on the American east coast did not then
lock the settlers of each new territory into permanent political servitude:
each area was, in the end, admitted to the union as an equal partner.
That equality was not extended, however, to nineteenth-century Native
Americans, whose ethnic exclusion and political subordination was total.
It was not extended to them then, and it does not extend to them now.
We still need to remember, when considering whether “empire” is or is
not in America’s DNA, that “the nation we now call the United States of
America only became the United States of America because it annexed
a great deal [of other people’s territory] during the nineteenth century:
from France and Russia (through purchase), Spain and Mexico (by mili-
tary conquest), from Britain (by agreement), and, most savagely, from
those three million native-Americans who were nearly all eliminated
in the process.”76 P. Eric Louw rightly calls this whole nineteenth-century
nation-building story “America’s first venture in empire building,” in
what he sees as the “three distinctly different empires” that “Americans
have built . . . over the past two centuries.”77
Moreover, for all its normal anticolonial rhetoric, the United States
did have its brief moment of old fashioned and direct colonialism: in the
wake of the 1890s war with Spain, with the occupation of the Philippines,
Guam, Samoa, and Puerto Rico. This is Louw’s second American Empire.
It is true that the political class in Washington, DC, did quickly shed its
Philippine ambitions, though only after fighting a bloody and repressive
campaign against local liberation forces and before losing the islands to
the invading Japanese. It is also true that Puerto Rico now enjoys high
levels of political autonomy and the prospect of future statehood. But the
often-trumpeted claim that the United States chose not to have colonies
belies this colonial moment. It also belies the depth and regularity of US
intervention in the politics of countries to the south in the Americas.78
It also belies the reality of global politics in 1945—namely, that there

were by then no unoccupied colonial spaces into which the United States
could easily have expanded.79 So yes, either by accident or by design,
the United States did not acquire—outside the America’s—a territorial
empire. Inside the America’s, however, on even that dimension of empire
the jury is still legitimately out.
The second thing to be said is that instead of establishing a formal and
territorial empire, in the years after 1945, the United States created a
truly remarkable international political and economic hegemony.80 That
hegemony did not extend beyond boundaries set by the fall of the Iron
Curtain, at least until that curtain fell so completely and dramatically in
1991 as to vanish entirely into history. But in that part of the post-1945
world that American commentators in the Cold War years euphemistically
labeled the “free” part, the writ of the United States was dominant and all
pervasive. The economic reconstruction initially of Western Europe and
subsequently Japan under American political leadership created a bloc of
countries linked by ever more open trade, based on the dollar as the reserve
currency. In that bloc, until the 1970s at least, US economic superiority
went unchallenged. So too did American military and strategic leadership
in the collective security alliance of NATO, one protected from any effec-
tive Soviet challenge by the superiority of America’s nuclear arsenal. Across
the “free world” as a whole in those Cold War years, it was American
rules that prevailed, American interests that framed collective policy, and
American economic and cultural institutions that became commonplace
everywhere:81 “an ascendancy built not only on military superiority, but
on economic and technological prowess and the appeal of its popular cul-
ture.”82 And it was that American dominance that the fall of the Berlin
Wall then extended dramatically in the 1990s, as the communist bloc sud-
denly found itself without an equivalent hegemonic capacity coming from
what to that point has seemed the totally impregnable USSR. Over the
postwar period as a whole, that is, the United States laid the foundations
for what Bernard Porter, the well-respected historian of the British Empire,
labeled as a “super-empire,” one that was even greater and more hubristic
than the British had been before the Americans picked up and took over
Britain’s earlier hegemonic presence in the global system of states.83 And
why not? “The sheer size of the American economy in 1945, the military
superiority it enjoyed over all its potential rivals, and the indispensible role
it played in both rebuilding and protecting international capitalism after
World War II, meant that few at the time had much difficulty in thinking
of the United States as a new kind of hegemon.”84
The third point we must bear in mind is this: even while the United
States designed, oversaw, and maintained a global political and economic

order that met American long-term interests as those were understood

by the Washington political class during the postwar period, the United
States also maintained and deployed massive military forces overseas. The
late Chalmers Johnson’s characterization, to which we referred earlier, of
America as an empire of bases, is particularly germane here. He even had
great fun on one occasion pointing out the similarity of the numbers of
bases deployed by Rome, Britain, and America at their imperial zenith:
38 large/medium size US facilities spread globally in 2005, compared
to 36 British naval and army bases in 1898 and 37 major Roman bases
in 117AD.85 But this military underpinning of American political and
economic dominance was more than a matter of bases, vital and unusual
in their quantity and scale as those were and still are. As we discussed in
more detail in the previous chapter, American hegemony over the non-
communist world in the Cold War period was maintained by the actual
fighting of wars by American men and women in uniform: wars that
stretched from the Korean peninsula at the start of the Cold War through
Vietnam at its peak, and on to the deserts of Kuwait as the Cold War
wound down. America may have been “empire-lite” in those years with
its use of force, if the comparison being drawn is with imperial Rome.
But it was “hegemony-heavy” with military backup during that same
period—heavier indeed in military capacity than even the British Empire
at the height of its global influence in the years before 1940. Remember
the sheer weight of current US military spending: greater than the com-
bined total of the next 17 major military powers (many of whom are
allies) and over 40 percent of all military spending worldwide. Remem-
ber the global scale and reach of the modern American military, particu-
larly the way in which “all the other navies in the world combined could
not dent American maritime supremacy.”86 Memories like that make it
hard to deny the force of Doug Stokes’s view that “in short, the USA has
long been an empire, both informally, through its commitment to main-
taining global free trade within a world system of ostensibly sovereign
states in which it enjoys market predominance, and in the more formal
aspects of empire, including ongoing military interventions and covert
statecraft to unseat governments considered to be potentially inimical to
imperial interests.”87
The fourth thing to bear in mind is that the impulse to empire in the
American political class remains strong. It has been at its most obvious
and most blatant recently in the neoconservatives’ orchestration of the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, an invasion that was so clearly legitimated by
false claims (about links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 and his sup-
posed possession of weapons of mass destruction) that it sparked a whole

debate on the character of America’s “new” imperialism.88 For the United

States after 9/11, war for a while “became a seemingly permanent condi-
tion,” as the Bush administration enthusiastically pursued “a war of no
exits and no deadlines” and presided over a period in which “realism and
humility [were] in short supply” and in which “hubris and sanctimony
[became] the paramount expressions of American statecraft.”89 Indeed
there were moments, not least in 2003 and 2004, when the US media
did treat Paul Bremmer, the US ambassador to Iraq, “as Iraq’s Governor, a
term redolent of colonialism”:90 moments that played to this new sense of
America replacing informal hegemony by formal empire.91
The Bush administration and its neocon personnel are fortunately now
gone, replaced by a president who opposed the invasion of Iraq, and so
saving us from the prospect of the “liberal fundamentalist jihadism” that
commentators like Tony Smith saw as a potential development if the neo-
conservative vision was given full rein by subsequent administrations.92
The impulse to empire, however, remains fully intact. As the United
States pulls back the number of its soldiers deployed in combat zones
abroad, those zones remain areas of combat fought now between local
insurgents and ever more sophisticated US military technology, which is
often deployed from locations far from the zones themselves. As we noted
earlier, the “pre-emptive strike” philosophy that took American troops
into Baghdad in 2003 now takes drones into the airspace of countries
as disparate as Pakistan and Yemen (and in 2013 also into Niger). Bush’s
“new imperialism” has morphed into Obama’s “drone imperialism,” with
that morphing justified by its advocates as a vital source of global peace
and American self-interest.93 So be in no doubt: the new imperialism of
the neoconservatives was no accidental aberration on the normal trajec-
tory of American foreign policy. It was rather an extreme and unsubtle
version of what Andrew Bacevich has rightly called “Washington Rules”:
the as yet entirely unbroken bipartisan beltway consensus on the benign
and vital nature of America’s global role.94
When standing down as secretary of state in January 2013, Hillary
Clinton expressed that view of America’s role in this way: “the United
States must continue to lead in the Middle East, in North Africa, and
around the globe. We’ve come a long way in the past four years, and we
cannot afford to retreat now. When America is absent, especially from
unstable environments, there are consequences. Extremism takes root;
our interests suffer; and our security at home is threatened.”95 She was
not alone. Her president made the same general argument for the United
States as the “indispensible nation” when, somewhat incongruously, he

was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009. Barack
Obama said this:
The world must remember that it was not simply international

institutions—not just treaties and declarations—that brought stability to
a post–World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain
fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global
security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the
strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in
uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and
enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne
this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out
of enlightened self-interest because we seek a better future for our children
and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’
children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.96
Going Forward
Which leaves us where? Here, I think: Washington looks like Rome. Its
public buildings were designed to look like Rome. And if something
looks like Rome, talks like Rome, walks like Rome . . . then it is perhaps
as well to think that maybe there are strong parallels with Rome: or if not
with Rome directly, then with later states that also occupy some position
on that continuum from empire to hegemon. And if those parallels exist,
maybe then in addition there are things to be learned about our present
condition and likely future from a careful examination of their past con-
dition and subsequent futures. The ultimate test, of course, will be in the
doing. It is now time to try.

PART II
The Parallels


CHAPTER 3
The Glory That Was Rome
In any discussion of empires in the Western world, it seems sensible to

start with the history and experience of the Roman Empire. The Roman
Empire wasn’t the first to dominate significant parts of what is now the
Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, but it was the first to establish
its dominance over a long period, and it was the first to leave a huge
shadow on empires (and indeed on nations) that were to follow. Since
the United States is among those nations, it is worth asking how much
of the glory that was Rome is now being replicated in Washington, DC,
and how much of that replication is something worth having.
The Roman Empire in the West

The western Roman Empire was unambiguously a territorial one, an
empire won and maintained by the sheer force of arms. It was also at
its peak a very large empire, and one that lasted for a remarkably long
period of time: the product of successful military campaigns by a series
of Roman generals and their armies in the three hundred years that strad-
dle the birth of Christ. Beginning as a small Italian city that replaced
its monarchy with a republic in 509 BC, Rome (or more properly, its
governing classes) then waged a prolonged (and not always successful)
series of local wars and diplomatic initiatives that left them dominant
over the full Italian peninsula by the end of the Second Punic War in
202 BC.1 Then “in the last two and a half centuries or so BC, Rome as
a Republic expanded from an Italian power to a far flung empire which
stretched from the Atlantic to Syria”:2 an expansion that included the
complete physical destruction of its major competitor-city, Carthage and
the parallel destruction of Corinth, both in 146 BC. “In the correspond-
ing centuries AD, as a monarchy the empire continued to expand, but
in contrast with the preceding period her expansion now was sporadic
(Britain and Dacia) and/or tentative (Germany and the near east).”3 Ten-
tative but still extremely bloody: under the republic, Roman generals who

killed more than five thousand foreigners were allowed a grand parade in
Rome to mark their achievement. “The Romans held more than three
hundred of these ‘triumphs’ between 509 and 19 BC, which means that
the Republic dispatched roughly 1.5 million of its enemies during this
period,”4 and even more in the imperial period that followed. As Simon
James has it, “roughly from 200 BC to AD, Roman arms dominated the
known world.”5
So this unprecedented Mediterranean-hugging empire “was the cul-
mination of a process spanning centuries, as annual, mainly expansionist
warfare gave way to sporadic large wars of conquest fought against a back-
drop of mainly non-expansionist low-intensity wars, the spacing between
the big wars growing ever greater.”6 Though the bulk of the empire was
acquired in the years of the republic, “in the Near East, Roman impe-
rialism and expansionism retained vitality through and beyond the
early empire.” The pace and character of expansion, however, definitely
changed: “a polity that had advanced in leaps and bounds now went step-
by-step.”7 That step-change had much to do with Rome crossing what (as
we mentioned earlier) Michael Doyle has called its “Augustan threshold”:
that hinge moment in the entire history of the Roman Empire at which
Octavian/Augustus recentralized the Roman state as an imperial one (the
Principate), creating what was effectively a monarchy in all but name.
Augustus’ reforms were fundamental. Personally responsible for the last
of a series of civil wars that had threatened to tear Rome apart, Augustus
took power out of the hands of a Senate that had treated the empire as
a source of self-enrichment and instead created a powerful bureaucracy
that ran the far-flung parts of the empire largely as systematically taxed
and locally governed entities free of the rapacity and pillage of the Roman
elite to which they had hitherto been periodically subject.8 An expansion
driven under the republic primarily by the avarice (the desire for booty
and glory) of competing senators/families was now sustained as the per-
sonal responsibility and avarice of one dynasty: whichever dynasty that
managed to seize and hold the title of princeps.9
This wider empire effectively covered the central core of the then-
known Western world. “At its greatest extent, at the accession of Hadrian
in 117 AD, the territory of the Roman empire embraced something like
2,000,000 square miles.”10 Its boundaries to the north lay broadly along
the Rhine and the Danube rivers. Germanic tribes thrived beyond those
rivers, and Roman armies periodically clashed with them but without
ever establishing a lasting political or military control on any significant
geographical scale. To the east and beyond the Euphrates river lay the Par-
thian Empire and later the empire of the Sassinad Persians; and beyond

The Glory That Was Rome 55
them, the polities/empires in India and China were too far away (given
the transport technology of the day) to be of any serious political/military
concern to Rome. To the south of the Roman Empire along the African
shore of the Mediterranean lay the natural boundary of endless desert.
Girded in this fashion, the entire Roman Empire survived intact until the
late fourth century AD. It survived serious internal crises in the second
and third centuries AD and briefly revitalized itself under Diocletian and
then Constantine between 284 AD and 337 AD, splitting into an empire
ruled from two cities after 395 AD, and finally succumbing in the west to
a string of military defeats by German tribes in the years after the Battle
of Adrianople in 378 AD.11 From 406 AD, “there were always Germanic
tribes within the borders of the western empire, gradually acquiring more
and more power and territory.”12 Rome was then sacked twice in the
space of little more than a generation: by the Visigoths in 410 AD and by
the Vandals in 455 AD before the last emperor of Rome, Romulus Augus-
tus, was deposed by the Ostrogoths in 476 AD. The empire in the east, of
course, survived in truncated form—as a regional power rather than as a
global superpower—until Constantinople was sacked by Ottoman forces
in 1453. It is with the decline and fall of the western empire, and not with
that of Constantinople, that we are concerned here.
Debating the Fall of Rome

“It is a famous puzzle: why . . . a certain size of population and econ-
omy . . . sufficed for mighty victories up to a certain century; but thereafter
could not prevail against enemies of the same number and weaponry.”13
So puzzling in fact that, for some scholars at least—Henri Pirenne in the
1920s being the most famous—the best solution was to deny that Rome
ever really fell and to insist instead “that the Roman empire survived in all
its essentials until the coming of Islam destroyed the unity of the Mediter-
ranean world.”14 In fact, much modern scholarship on the early Middle
Ages now recognizes that “the best way of understanding historical devel-
opment in the late and post-Roman periods is to consider it in terms of
organic evolution rather than cataclysm.” But even so, “taking a minimal-
ist view of the historical importance of the disappearance of the western
Roman state is also . . . mistaken.”15 Total denial is no answer to what
was a very real set of events. Roman terminology may well have survived
in the courts of Germanic kings, and the later Holy Roman Empire may
well have wanted lines of continuity emphasized over points of rupture;
but as we have just noted, Rome was sacked (twice) in the fifth century
and the Roman imperial line was ended (permanently) in 476 AD. That

year, a political system that had survived for so many centuries was sud-
denly no more.
Through the years, in consequence, there have been many explana-
tions offered of why Rome fell. Indeed in 1984, the German scholar Alex-
ander Demandt came up with a list of 210 competing explanations, in a
range that stretched from hedonism and hyperthermia to bolshevization
and bankruptcy.16 Among the many often-cited explanations in the popu-
lar literature on the end of the western empire are such stalwarts as lead
poisoning (from all those orgy-sustaining wine cups), moral decay (the
orgies again), political corruption, inferior technology (including mili-
tary technology, with the invention of the horseshoe), widespread disease,
military spending, and inflation. But the most famous explanation of the
sudden turn of events selected none of these. The most famous explana-
tion of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was that offered by
Edward Gibbon in and after 1776; and for him, the fall of the empire
was as inevitable and natural as its emergence had been unexpected and
forced. “The decline of Rome,” he wrote, “was the natural and inevitable
effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay;
the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as
soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupen-
dous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.”17
For Gibbon, the decline of Rome as an imperial power was long and
drawn out, rooted back in the character of the early empire, and sim-
ply accentuated (or brought to a head) by the moral sensibilities that
the adoption of Christianity as the state religion brought to a global
power hitherto willing to exercise total savagery to maintain its territo-
rial dominance. Gibbon’s decline begins not with Christianity but in the
second century AD when “the long peace and uniform government” of
the Good Emperors “introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals
of the empire.”18 Peace, prosperity, and luxury eroded the martial spirit
essential to the creation and maintenance of imperial power. It was the
empire’s success and longevity that eventually turned Rome soft. Gibbon
again: “In the various states of society, armies are recruited from very dif-
ferent motives. Barbarians are urged by their love of war; the citizens of
a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty; the subjects, or
at least the nobles, of a monarchy are animated by a sentiment of honor;
but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be
allured into the service by the hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread
of punishment” (1:541).19
More recent scholarship in the field has moved well beyond Gib-
bon (some of it indeed even relegating his argument “to no more than

a footnote in the debate,”20) by exploring the degree to which the fall of

Rome was either externally or internally generated. For Peter Heather, for
example, professor of medieval history at King’s College in the University
of London, the great drivers of decline came definitely from without.
He still holds to that view most briskly asserted earlier by the French
historian André Piganoil, that “the Roman empire did not die, it was
assassinated.”21 It was assassinated by barbarian invaders driven west (by
376 AD into the lands of the western empire) by the prior movement
into the lands north of the Black Sea by the Huns. It was an “exogenous
shock,” as Heather has it, with “two components: the Huns who gen-
erated it, and the largely Germanic groups who caught its momentum
and whose invasions fatally holed the west Roman ship of state.”22 It was
this western movement of initially the Tervingi and the Greuthingi (later
united as the Visigoths) that, according to Heather and others, brought
Roman military defeat at the battle of Adrianople in 378 AD; the Gothic
invasion of Italy between 408 and 410 AD; and the Visigoth capture,
in the decades that followed, of first Gaul, then most of Spain, and finally
the Roman provinces in North Africa. “In all this,” as Peter Heather has
it, “it was armed outsiders warring on Roman territory who played the
starring role,” such that “any attempt to reconstruct fifth-century events”
necessarily “brings home just how violent the process was.” In Heather’s
view at least, “it is impossible to escape the fact that the western empire
broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its
territories and expanded their holdings by warfare.”23
By contrast, the Oxford-educated scholar Adrian Goldsworthy puts
the explanatory drivers of Rome’s fall firmly within the empire itself. As
far as he can tell, “there is no good case for claiming that the enemies
of the Late Roman Empire were simply more formidable that those of
earlier periods”;24 and because there is not, for him, the fall of Rome has
to rest on internal weakness rather than on any growing set of external
challenges. The fall of Rome, from Goldsworthy’s perspective, ultimately
lies in what he calls the rot at the top: in a virtually unbroken series of
civil wars (in the more than two centuries that divide 217 AD from
476 AD) during which “time and again substantial parts of the army were
drawn away, and Roman military dominance across its borders reduced
or utterly shattered.” The Late Roman Empire, he has written, “was not
designed to be an efficient government, but to keep the emperor in power
and to benefit the members of the administration.”25 And because it was
so focused on the survival of the emperors in power, like an aging athlete
the Roman Empire became weaker over time. Beset with a surfeit of men
ambitious to become emperor and willing to fight each other for that

privilege, a long decline was its unavoidable fate. In the end, the empire
“may well have been ‘murdered’ by barbarian invaders,” Goldsworthy has
written, “but these struck at a body made vulnerable by long decay.”26
Peter Heather and Adrian Goldsworthy probably agree that “there
is no serious historian who thinks that the western empire fell entirely
because of internal problems, or entirely because of exogenous shock.”27
It is rather a matter of emphasis: and fortunately for our purposes here,
there is a middle way through this sharp disagreement. Cullen Murphy
likened that middle way to Murder on the Orient Express: “all the prime
suspects shared in the deed.”28 It is a middle way rooted in the recogni-
tion that the very success of the Roman Empire, in the end, generated
a series of problems—both internal and external—which cumulatively
eroded the base on which the success of the empire had initially been
built. Writing a generation ago, Richard Mansfield Haywood pointed to
five such problems: the maintenance of the authority of the central gov-
ernment, the problem of regulating the succession to the throne, the dif-
ficulties of finance, the complexity of foreign affairs, and the management
of the army.29 Each problem grew more difficult over time. Each was
compounded by the expansion of the empire. Each, in the end, helped
bring the empire down. Each has contemporary US parallels, and each
therefore is worth examining in turn.
Problems of Governance in an Empire of Size

As the Roman Empire spread ever wider in the three centuries that strad-
dle the birth of Christ, governance structures that worked for a small city
state, or for regional governance within areas easily and quickly traveled
across, fell victim to the problems of size itself. “First of all, it should be
remembered that territorial expansion is some function of the square of
the distance from the center. It is not a linear function of that distance.
There is not only an external border to be defended against outer ene-
mies, there is also an internal territory to be controlled against the inner
foes of the regime.”30 Those internal foes eased after Augustus, and Rome
under the early emperors was able to effectively govern the vast territories
that its armies had conquered partly because of the quality of his bureau-
cratic reforms; but over time that bureaucracy itself turned from an asset
to a burden.31 In consequence, and by the fourth century, the problem of
maintaining the authority of the central government had come to have
three aspects: “the difficulty of controlling the large landowners [of which,
more later], the difficulty of controlling the expanded bureaucracy, and
the increase in the ever present tendency towards a division between the
eastern and western parts of the empire.”32 As Michael Doyle observed,

the civilian bureaucracy of the Roman Empire not only grew over time,
“absorbing more functions and elaborating its own hierarchic structure,”
but as it did so, it also “became the preserve of the very wealthy, and
office became a sinecure and a property right.” In that way, “the bureau-
cracy became representative of the wealthy classes and their particularistic
interests and the state lost its effectiveness and general impartiality.”33 As
the scholarship of Max Weber among others has long demonstrated,34
bureaucracies have a distinct tendency to do that kind of thing: they grow,
they gather interests to themselves, they stop being a means to an end,
and they become an end in themselves.
It was not just that the centralization of power within the vast Roman
Empire required the creation of a civilian bureaucracy that itself became
more difficult to govern. The centralization of power in so large a terri-
torial space also directly affected the ability of the center to govern even
with a bureaucracy intact. Territorial size was itself a problem in an era of
underdeveloped transportation and pushback against imperial rule. As the
empire spread out to each end of the then known world, the sheer physi-
cal demands of governance became eventually more than one emperor
could control alone. From at least the time of Diocletian (284 AD),
imperial power became periodically divided, initially between junior and
senior Caesars and eventually (395 AD) between a western and an eastern
empire: between an empire based in Constantinople and ruled by one
son of Theodosius I and another still technically anchored in Rome and
ruled by Theodosius’s other son. It was, however, a measure of the scale
of internal challenges and external threats with which the late western
empire was beset that Rome saw progressively less and less of its emperors
over time, as new imperial centers were established in areas of internal
tension and external threat: briefly in Trier during the reign of Diocletian,
then in Milan, and finally (from 402 AD) in Ravenna. Emperors had to
go where the action was, particularly in the near-century that divided
Diocletian’s accession from that of Theodosius in 379 AD, when they
were expected not simply to establish armies but personally to lead them
into battle—with a predictably large increase in the imperial death rate
as the result. As the widely respected student of ancient history, Stephen
Mitchell, put it, “fourth-century emperors were constantly on the move
between the empire’s trouble spots,”35 such that it was only when the last
western emperor to lead his army into battle—Valens—died with perhaps
ten thousand of his troops in the defeat of the Roman army by the Goths
at Adrianople in 378 AD, that emperors thereafter retreated once more to
their capitals. But by then, repeated imperial attempts to effect “a man-
ageable division of imperial powers” were well on their way to creating an

“unofficial territorial division of the empire”36 that eventually left Rome

to its fifth-century fate and Constantinople to battle on alone.
Governance problems were not simply, however, the product of impe-
rial size. They were also the product of the necessarily changing character
of the military forces that first created and then policed that vast imperial
space. As the frontiers of the empire moved farther and farther away from
Rome, a military capacity initially built on citizen-farmers became less
and less viable as a means of defending and extending the empire. Given
the primitive transport technology of the day, soldiers were simply away
from home for too long (and at too great a distance) to be able to com-
bine military and civilian roles. In consequence, and in the wake of the
Marian reforms of 107 BC,37 the expansion of the empire became increas-
ingly dependent on the existence and success of a professional army—
one that had to live off the land it conquered (with all the degenerative
consequences of that for both the victors and the vanquished) or one that
had to be sustained by the development of a vast bureaucracy and food
distribution system. The generals commanding those armies found them-
selves increasingly beyond the direct control of elites based in Rome; and
as power concentrated within the Roman state in the hands of an emperor
rather than a senate, eventually generals and armies became a means for
winning and holding power within the empire itself (Goldworthy’s civil
wars) rather than, as earlier, simply a means of defending and extending
the empire’s borders. The very size and success of the empire made it a
prize worth winning. The dangers of losing out in the unavoidable succes-
sion battles created by the move from republic to monarchy made seeking
the imperial prize all the more vital; and yet, as Goldsworthy documents
so well, the pursuit of that prize by wave after wave of insecure gener-
als eventually left the prize too weak to successfully defend itself against
challenges from without. It was an internal pursuit of power that, by
the last two centuries of the western empire, had become all-consuming:
one that undermined the internal strength and character of the impe-
rial state machine, as officials at every level had no choice but to focus
exclusively on personal survival and advancement. “In the Late Roman
Empire,” as Goldsworthy put it, “government became primarily about
survival.”38
The Management of the Army

Indeed, the problem of the military ran deeper still. It was not just that,
over time, the scale of the empire transformed armies on its frontiers into
forces as much concerned with internal politics as with external defense.
It is also that, over time and as the empire grew, the capacity of Roman

armies to protect the empire against forces massing on its borders actually
diminished. This was because of at least two transformations—one inter-
nal, one not—set in train by the very success of the early empire itself.
Internally, the composition of Roman field armies changed signifi-
cantly as the republic gave way to the empire and as the empire moved
through its third century crisis. It is known that prior to the Marian
reforms of 107 BC, the core of the army had been formed by small and
medium landowners called to arms when needed and returned to civilian
life when not. From as early as the last century of the republic, how-
ever, and certainly under the Principate, the army had become profes-
sional rather than voluntary, open to (and dependent on) career soldiers
drawn from the empire’s landless classes, whose years of compulsory ser-
vice then became very long. Recruitment little by little shifted from Italy,
first to the oldest Romanized provinces, and then to the more peripheral
ones. The inclusion of barbarian elements, in the beginning gradual and
limited, by the end became the rule. And in the late empire, recruiting
became increasingly difficult, not because of scarcity of men, but because
of the reluctance of the great landowners to hand over their own tenants
as recruits. As Haywood noted, the condition of the army in the late
empire “was partly due to the government’s inability or unwillingness
to force the conscription of men who were engaged in farming, espe-
cially on the large estates.”39 In the process, the original Roman military
resource—thousands of citizen veterans able and prepared to return to
military service—was progressively lost, and ultimately the empire suc-
cumbed to increasingly porous borders, defended against external threats
in part by the very people who were also threatening it.
But the borders (always porous, of course) became more porous as
they became longer and as the Roman Empire posed genuine threats in
places to those just beyond its reach. We need to forget the glorification
of Rome so common in Hollywood and the popular media, as well as the
association in the educated Western mind of Roman rule with advanced
civilization. The Pax Romana was, at its height, a remarkable phenom-
enon on which we will comment later, but there was nothing advanced or
civilized about the military forces that policed its borders and maintained
its internal order. On the contrary, Roman military practices were savage
and brutal—savage and brutal even by the standards of the time—a sav-
agery that all too often “modern treatments . . . downplay or airbrush out
completely. For under their eagles or hissing dragon standards, Rome’s
milites plundered, raped and slaughtered on scales outmatching almost
any of their foes.”40 So if we are tempted to seek modern parallels to the
Roman soldier of the years of imperial expansion, Simon James suggests

that that soldier’s propensity in battle for “aggression, brutality and deter-
mination to die rather than surrender . . . more closely resembled the
fanaticism of the Japanese in World War II than any Western armies.”41
It was the fanaticism and ruthlessness demonstrated by so many Roman
field armies that over time made the Roman military a huge catalyst for
huge social change within and beyond the empire.
Within the empire, the persistence of Roman military capacity made
possible the creation of a “demilitarized, ‘globalized’ Roman civilization
in the core provinces” that kept war out of the Mediterranean area for
unprecedentedly long periods of time, while at the same time developing
an equally “important ‘military Rome’ in the bases and growing cities
of the frontier provinces.” And beyond the frontiers of the empire at its
height, “the actions of Rome’s soldiers inadvertently catalyzed the rise
of new peoples and states, which would shatter the west, and shake the
east.”42 The rise of powerful external enemies, triggered in response to
the local threat posed by Roman expansion, is a particularly striking fea-
ture of the last century of the Roman Empire in the west. Indeed, the
collapse of “the more strategically vulnerable western empire was largely
a long-term consequence of Rome’s own military aggression, and the
changes she precipitated among the barbarians beyond the frontiers.”43
Which is why, in part, the western empire’s ultimate military weakness
has to be understood as a consequence of blowback against imperial power
itself. As Simon James put it, “by the fourth century Roman aggression
and interference had brought into being a ring of enemies beyond the
capacity of her soldiers to destroy, and only just within their ability to keep
at bay—a precarious balance shattered by the unforeseeable intervention
of the Huns.”44 Empires invariably make enemies as well as friends, and
the Romans made lots of both.
The Economic Problems of a Slave-Based Economy

The initial superiority of Roman arms rested on the superiority of Roman
agriculture, but the victory of those arms increasingly created economic
conditions destructive of that agricultural superiority. Indeed, repeated
military victories eventually put in place “an economic model . . . based
on the cycle preceding from war to exploitation to contracting to wealth,
then to war again,” which then blocked the capacity of the Roman econ-
omy to grow with the dynamism of later capitalist ones.45
Initially, indigenous economic strength and military expansionism
went together. As Michael Doyle put it, “considered as a foundation for
imperialism, the productivity of Roman agriculture [was] second only
to fidelity and patriotism. Small farms that produce[d] adequate crops

provide[d] an economic base for a citizen army”46—but not for long in

the Roman case. For victory in battle brought a steady flow of slaves,
tribute, and taxation back to Rome and to its immediate hinterland, in
the process facilitating the consolidation there of vast latifundistas that
were economically superior to the small independent farming on which
Roman expansion had initially relied. Moreover, those small-scale farmers
proved so rapidly vulnerable to the costs of imperial expansion because
the Roman economic and social structure, even in its earliest days, was
never as egalitarian as that which had previously propelled Athens and
Sparta to periods of urban prosperity and military success. Instead,
and from the outset of the republic, land ownership in Rome was (and
remained) highly unequal, with upper-class control of landholdings that
far outstripped the farm size of the assidui, the “men who could equip
themselves with armor and weaponry necessary for infantry service in the
legions . . . ‘those settled on the land’ who possessed the necessary qualifi-
cation to bear their own arms.”47 The constant warfare of the republican
period then hastened the economic decline of this key class of small-scale
citizen farmers.48 “The assidui citizenry called to the legions year after
year died in thousands under their standards, while those who survived
were unable to maintain their farms at home, which were increasingly
absorbed by the nobility.”49 In this way, “while tribute from client states
and provincial taxes poured new riches into Rome, the imperial windfall
had an enormous hidden cost. The common farmers, who made up the
backbone of the early republican armies, faced bankruptcy because they
could not compete with cheap grain from Sicily and Spain.”50 They faced
bankruptcy. They sold up, and they drifted to the growing urban centers
of the spreading empire, most notably to the city of Rome itself.
So over time and long before the replacement of the republic by the
empire, Roman agriculture became increasingly slave based, as “victori-
ous wars in their turn provided more slave-captives to pump back into
the towns and estates of Italy.”51 Aldo Schiavone dates the “threshold”
separating an agriculture based on small peasant proprietors to one based
on plantations and large estates to the third and second centuries BC,52
as the slave population grew and as the number of independent agrarian
producers commensurately declined. “Conventional estimates place the
population of Italy in the [later] Principate at around six million, one mil-
lion of whom lived in Rome itself. Slaves were estimated to have [by then]
constituted as much as one-third of Italy’s population and one-half of
Rome’s.”53 As the number of slaves grew, small landowners “no longer had
a role on the great stage of Roman history,” as “the use of slaves became
the ideal functional means of agricultural exploitation, slave labor the

basis of all manufacturing, and the owners of land and slaves the ultimate
protagonists of every organization of production.”54 As Perry Anderson
said a generation ago, “the decisive innovation of Roman expansion was
ultimately economic: it was the introduction of the large-scale latifun-
dium for the first time in Antiquity.”55And because it was, the economic
underpinnings of the Roman Empire then succumbed over time to the
ultimately unavoidable contradictions of slave-based agriculture.
The first such contradiction, slowly working itself out in the long
period of peace that followed the establishment of the monarchy by
the first Augustus, was the manner in which slave production (in this
empire as in others) was not, and never is, naturally self-reproducing. A
slave population is certainly never self-reproducing when slaves are housed,
as they were on the largest Roman farms, in rural barracks that resemble
prisons, with few private amenities or spaces. In fact, Roman slavery was
highly gendered—men being more valued than women as workers in the
field—so that the expansion of an agricultural system based on slavery
required, in the Roman case, an ever-expanding empire and a perpetu-
ally successful war machine to guarantee an adequate flow of new slaves.
Rome in the end simply ran out of places that it was able to conquer; and
as it did so, the price of slaves went up, taking agricultural prices with
them. Indeed, “the opportunity costs of slavery must have been consid-
erable,” as Galtung and his colleagues noted, because “apart from the
social stigma slavery placed upon ‘its’ economic sectors, it [also] pressed
wages towards the level of subsistence, destroying a part of the market for
processed goods (and incidentally increasing the economic significance
of the army)”56 in the process. The inflationary crisis of the third century
has its roots here, in rising agrarian costs and limited urban wages. So too
did the erosion of the legal rights of the empire’s poorer classes, “which
certainly began in practice in the first century of the Christian era and
was mainly ‘institutionalized’ and given explicit legal formulation in the
second century and the early third,” as the Roman ruling class attempted
“to increase the rate of exploitation of humble free men, in order to make
up for a reduced return overall from slaves.”57
The second contradiction—already hinted at in the quotation from
Galtung and his colleagues—was that slave-based production in Rome, as
in other empires later, proved a serious disincentive to technological inno-
vation in the agricultural sector. Though slave-based production does not
completely inhibit technological change, such change is never as central
to rising productivity in slave-based economies as it is in wage-labor ones.
What Aldo Schiavone called “cultures of slavery” marginalized production
and downgraded the status of labor in ways that blocked the systematic

development of technology, cocooning “the entire realm of labor” in what

he termed “a shell of ethical and cognitive indifference.”58 And it is
striking, in this regard, that the innovative capacities of the Roman state
under the empire were largely focused on architectural development (cement
and the Roman arch) and on military technology, rather than on develop-
ments likely to enhance living standards for the mass and generality of the
Roman people. The two great civilian innovations of the period—the water
mill and the reaping machine—both of which would become central to
feudal agriculture, were hardly deployed in Roman times. As Perry Ander-
son put it, “the slave mode of production had little space or time for the mill
or the harvester: Roman agriculture as a whole remained innocent of them
to the end.”59 As F. W. Walbank observed more than fifty years ago,
it was the slavery at the root of society which controlled the general pat-
tern of classical civilization. For it split every community into two kinds of
human being—the freeman and slave—and it ordained that those who did
the basic work of society should not be those to benefit from it. The natu-
ral outcome was that the slave lacked the incentive to master and improve
the technique of the work he was doing. Equally disastrous was its effect
on the slave-owners themselves. Because it became normal to associate
manual labor with slaves, Greek culture began to draw the line between the
things of the hand and the things of the mind . . . Thus the atmosphere was
wholly unfavorable to technical progress in a field for which everyone of
any consequence have nothing but contempt. If labor is cheap and worth-
less, why conserve it?
Fortunately for Rome, the societies and military formations on the edge
of its empire were equally technologically inert: indeed, the capacity of
the empire to persist for so long was in no small measure a product of this
shared technological stagnation. At the peak of Rome’s general prosperity
in the early empire, it is possible that living standards in Rome itself were
“similar to that of the early modern period of seventeenth and eighteenth
century Europe”; and if so, were “an extraordinary achievement for any
economy in the ancient world.”60 But as we will see next, regardless of
the state of its opponents, the prolonged inability of slave-based Roman
agriculture to continually raise internal living standards ultimately robbed
the Roman state of the expanding tax base necessary to sustain the scale of
military preparedness vital to long-term survival. In consequence, posttax
living standards in the late imperial period, for most Romans, actually
fell back.
The third contradiction of the Roman slave-based economy—the one
that put urban political volatility at the heart of the later republic and early

empire—was that the free peasantry displaced by slave-based agriculture

became, over time, largely urbanized and un/underemployed, flocking
“to the cities partly as a cause, partly as a consequence, of the twin institu-
tions known as ‘bread and circuses,’ panem et circenses.”61 Once there (and
the Italian peninsula was 30 percent urbanized in the early empire62) “this
urban poor became a dangerous rabble ready to support any conquering
hero who promised to feed and entertain them.”63 Even artisan labor in
Rome became predominantly slave based, so that with the collapse of
indigenous, small-scale agriculture and the associated growth in Rome’s
urban population, only a steady flow of free corn from the edges of the
empire—primarily from Egypt—could keep urban social unrest down
and the political elite safely in power. As Schiavone noted, “in the empire
of the first and second centuries A.D., millions of men and women (from
a variety of social conditions, ranging from the urban elites, to the armies
lined upon the frontiers, to the crowds who thronged Rome and the other
big cities of the empire) were permanently exempt from productive labor.
For those who were charged with the task, simply feeding these masses
was a challenge that bordered on the impossible.”64 While the Empire
prevailed, the flow of goods was entirely into Rome: consumption there
without any parallel production to sustain it in more difficult times. And
when those difficult times came—when the swathe of civil wars had
so weakened the empire’s frontiers that ultimately even Egypt itself was
lost—Rome found itself incapable of returning to the self-sufficient agri-
cultural productivity on which initial dominance had been so successfully
based. And though later Roman emperors (both Diocletian and Constan-
tine) were able to extend the life of the western empire by reforming both
the military and financial wings of the Roman state, neither was able to
effect fundamental agrarian reform. The interests of the Roman nobil-
ity (like that of the Russian nobility under the Tsars, whose fate we will
study in a later chapter) were simply too entrenched to allow any state-led
erosion of their own agrarian privileges, however vital that erosion might
have been to the long-term economic health of the empire.
The Growing Fiscal Crisis of the Roman State

What we saw in the Roman case we will see again: namely, the imperial
state becoming over time a barrier to the long-term economic strength
on which its imperialism ultimately depended. That barrier built up over
time, partly as the product of economic development stunted by state
growth and partly as the product of financing state growth from an econ-
omy that was so stunted.

One feature of the Roman state in its postrepublican form was the
way in which the character of the imperial state apparatus itself tended to
undermine the scale and scope of commercial enterprise. Perry Anderson
put that point this way: that the Roman state, being “by far the largest
single consumer of the empire” as well as “the one real focus of mass
production of necessities,” could have “given birth to a dynamic manu-
facturing sector.” But it did not. “The provisioning policy and peculiar
structure of the imperial state precluded this,” and it did so because “the
infrastructure of slavery” actually “found one of its most concentrated
expressions within the imperial superstructure itself in the permanent and
direct use by the Roman state of slave labor”:
Throughout classical antiquity, ordinary public works—roads, buildings,

aqueducts, drains—were typically executed by slave labor. The Roman
empire, with its massively enlarged state machine, saw a corresponding
extension of this principle: for the entire armaments and a considerable
proportion of the procurements supply for its military and civilian appa-
ratus came to be furnished autarchically by its own industries, manned by
submilitary personnel or hereditary state slaves. The one truly large-scale
manufacturing sector was thus to a great extent subtracted from commod-
ity exchange altogether . . . Thus the state could expand, but the urban
economy received little benefit from its growth: if anything, its size and
weight tended to suffocate private commercial initiative and entrepreneur-
ial activity. There was thus no increase in production in either agriculture
or industry within the imperial borders to offset the silent decline in its
servile manpower, once external expansion had ceased.65
Moreover, we must remember that the Roman Empire, unlike more

modern ones, could not offset this adverse effect of imperial growth
on the dynamism of the underlying economy by exploiting the ben-
efits to the imperial core of uneven economic development within the
territories the empire controlled. In fact, throughout the centuries of
Roman domination, the eastern empire was more developed economi-
cally and culturally than the western empire, and yet it was Rome that
ruled the totality for most of the period under review here. As Charles
Maier has it, “an old empire like Rome did not have the same center-
periphery cycle of expertise and physical goods” that characterized
European-based colonial empires in the modern period. Yes, grain came
from Africa to feed the metropolis, but there was no technological gra-
dient between Italy and Spain or Antioch. As a result, Rome’s economic
function was to “expand agricultural settlement, ensure water supplies
to arid regions, and keep open the lines of trade and communication.”66

It was not to build up capital and commodity production in the heart-

land of the empire itself.
In truth, Maier’s set of functions for the imperial center was pursued
with a remarkable degree of success during the long period of peace initi-
ated by the early emperors. What Rome established instead of a center-
periphery structure of extraction, of the kind that had been developing
in the late years of the republic as the Roman nobility plundered one
defeated enemy after another, was an extensive system of imperial taxa-
tion. Under the empire, “taxation was key to the whole operation. The
Romans taxed land, persons, inheritances, slave-owning, imports and
exports.”67 They organized censuses to establish who was to be taxed,
and then they taxed them. Why else did Mary and Joseph travel to Beth-
lehem other than to be taxed? The army was the biggest single cost those
taxes had to sustain. A growing state bureaucracy became another major
cost; and “there was also the maintenance of many buildings, some ports
and a vast road network, as well as the subsidized or free doles of food to
the population of Rome and later Constantinople.”68
Some of those state responsibilities were very large indeed. The Roman
army in the second century AD numbered nearly half a million men,69
each of them with a daily ration of “about two pounds of bread, a pound
and a half of meat, a quart of wine, and about half a cup of oil.”70 Feeding
Rome took 200,000 tons of wheat each year. These were huge undertak-
ings, ones that were progressively more difficult to sustain over time. As
Adrian Goldsworthy put it, though “none of these duties of the empire
ground to a halt in the third or fourth century . . . this does not mean that
[by then] they were functioning well.”71 Schiavone put it this way:
Until the end of the principate of the Flavian emperors . . . the eco-
nomic accounts of the empire were still in balance. But in the course of
the second century, the values of the balance sheet were inverted. In the
absence of new technologies that might have permitted long-term savings,
the costs of political unification—the army, bureaucracy, transportation,
communications—began to be higher than the profits earned through
economic integration . . . The provinces continued to be used as a regular
and plentiful source of wealth, but the administrative and military costs of
managing an immense empire, now inhabited almost entirely by subjects
to whom Roman citizenship had been granted, relentlessly absorbed huge
quantities of money and goods. The imperial universalism . . . became
increasingly untenable, as ever more onerous expenses accumulated [so
that] in the course of the first half of the third century, the imbalance
between resources and requirements was beginning to resemble a true
epochal collapse.72

The root of this growing fiscal crisis of the late Roman state was partly
the expansion of the army and the deleterious effect on local output (and
therefore taxation) in regions ravaged by the repeated civil wars. It was the
Diocletian reforms that took the army to that half-million total, men in
arms holding the frontier against barbarians too economically underde-
veloped to provide worthwhile booty that might be seized in partial lieu
of wages. In fact, in the late empire, the balance of payments across the
frontiers of the empire often ran the other way: with a series of Roman
emperors buying the temporary appeasement of particular tribes by the
distribution of gold. Alongside that, we must note the rapid expansion
of the civilian bureaucracy under both Diocletian and Constantine, an
expansion that also required state funding. There is clear evidence in the
historical record of taxation doubling in the half century after Diocletian’s
death.73 The main source of Roman taxation for that funding, and for
that increase in the volume of funding needed, had to be the taxation of
land. There was simply not enough commerce to remove that priority
in a social system at least 80 percent of which was still agrarian.74 The
problem the Roman state had with taxing land at that rate (and at that
rate of increase) was that over time ownership of that land had become
increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few; and those few proved
increasingly adept at winning tax exemptions from emperors who needed
their support, or from emperors too preoccupied elsewhere to tackle the
massive tax evasion in which the large landowning class then engaged.
Taxes that could not be avoided in this fashion were then passed down the
social ladder. There is clear evidence of this in the growing tax pressure on
(and the falling living standards of75) all the lower classes of the western
empire in the last century of its existence.76 There is also clear evidence
of a significant weakening of the quality of Roman arms because of the
growing fiscal crisis of the late Roman state.
The link between fiscal crisis and imperial decline is critical here. As
Haywood noted in his study of the imperial finances, “the increased size
of the bureaucracy and of the army was a perceptible added burden upon
an economy which rested on a productivity so much lower than ours. The
larger number of men in non-productive operations had to be directly
supported by the smaller numbers of men in productive operations.”77
That had been a problem even in the early empire, when “for budget-
ary reasons the sword passed from the hands of the Italici into those of
the provincials and from them, in the late Empire, into the hands of the
barbarians.”78 Even an emperor as successful at extending the empire as
Hadrian had been obliged to forego raising the rate of taxation as the
spoils of war began to diminish; and many of his successors tried to

square the circle of rising costs and falling revenues by actually debasing
the currency. Diocletian stopped that, but he could not legislate away the
growing fiscal crisis of the state over which he presided. Nor could those
who followed him, which is why, after a military defeat at Adrianople
in 376 AD that was caused in part by the small size of the field army
that the Emperor Valens could afford to raise and deploy, later emperors
increasingly relied on the heavy subsidization of the barbarian tribes who
had won at Adrianople. They granted the Goths high pay and generous
tax exemptions and allowed them to serve within the Roman army in
military formations under their own chieftains. Those tribes then increas-
ingly settled within the empire, reducing still farther the land available
for state taxation. The eventual result was the emergence of a dangerous
vicious circle:
Increased state expenditure on the army, the bureaucracy, in welfare state

commitments brought about a continual unbearable tax pressure. Tax pres-
sure grew heavier and the tendency to evasion—illegal or legitimate—on
the part of high officials and large landowners, was increased. Evasion
on the part of the potentiores was increased and the pressure of taxation
came to be concentrated on the middle classes, automatically bringing
about a redistribution of wealth distinctly in favor of those classes that in
one way or another refused to pay tribute to the State. This vicious circle
could lead to only one result, that which clearly shows itself in the course
of the fifth century. The bankruptcy of the enormous State at the same
time as small privileged groups, while they evade taxation, heap up riches
and create around their villas economic and social microcosms, completely
cut off from the central authority. It was the end of the Roman world. It
was the beginning of the Middle Ages.79
Problems of Class and Culture

What has impressed so many commentators in the modern period is not,
of course, the way in which Rome fell but rather the manner in which
that fall was delayed for so long. The peculiar character of the Pax Romana
continues to intrigue us, and rightly so. Roman domination lasted so
long because it depended on more than Roman military might. It also
depended on the willingness and ability of the Roman state to absorb
into its networks the elites of the societies its armies defeated. From the
very outset of the republic, the governing elites of cities and regions on
the Italian peninsula found that the ruling groups in Rome were willing
to extend to them limited degrees of access to Roman citizenship, were
prepared to support their retention of local control, and were keener to
tax them in the form of military service than of money or goods.80 Rome

extended its empire by what Simon James called “a remarkably effective

combination of the sword and the open hand.”81 The open hand drew
into imperial service “minor (and in some cases not so minor) urban elites
ranging from Spain to Asia whom the presence of Rome had helped to
create or advance,” elites that Schiavone refers to as “the true backbone of
the dominant ‘party apparatus’ of the Romans.”82 So strong did that back-
bone become, indeed, that by 212 AD the Emperor Caracalla was safely
able to extend Roman citizenship to all members of an empire that was
then fully engaged in codifying rules and procedures to place the entire
system under one shared legal code.83
The Pax Romana at its peak brought law, stability, growing trade, and
urban expansion to the entirety of the Mediterranean basin. It was a
remarkable achievement. In fact,
the Roman position can be presented in a simple model. With the sta-
bilization of the empire and the establishment of the Pax Romana under
Augustus, a sort of social equilibrium was created. Most of the population,
free or un-free, produced just enough for themselves to exist on, at a mini-
mum sum of living, and enough to maintain a very rich and high-living
aristocracy and urban upper class, the court with its palace and administra-
tive staffs, and the modest army of some 300,000. Any change in any of
the elements making up the equilibrium—for example, an increase in the
army or other non-producing sectors of the population, or an increase in
the bite taken out of the producers to increase rents and taxes—had to be
balanced elsewhere if the equilibrium were to be maintained. Otherwise
something was bound to break.84
And ultimately, it was bound to break, because the social peace periodi-
cally established within the Roman Empire was never without its own
internal contradictions. Some of those contradictions lay within the core
of the imperial system itself. Others lay farther afield, in the peripheral
regions of an imperial system still strongly directed from the center. In
both cases, these were contradictions so deeply buried in the imperial
social formations as to be easily overlooked by the casual observer. Indeed,
many commentators, both past and present, tend to see Rome through
the eyes of Romans themselves—through the eyes indeed of powerful
Romans of noble birth with whom they somehow vicariously iden-
tify. But empires are structures with bottoms as well as tops. Seen from
below and in all their complexity and detail, they look far more socially
complex and far less socially harmonious and stable, than they do when
seen from above and from afar. That is true of all empires, and it was
certainly true of this one.

At the heart of the imperial system, there were always strong under-
currents of class tension. Rome survived for so long in part because of
the relative rarity of slave rebellions. A slave-based mode of production
normally scatters slaves across a sufficiently wide agrarian surface and
subjects them to sufficiently tight and daily supervision, so the com-
ing together of disaffected slaves is an extremely rare occurrence. Slave
resistance invariably takes the form of individual recalcitrance rather
than of mass uprisings: though Rome did experience several of those—
especially that led by Spartacus 73–71 BCE—mass uprisings that the
Roman army then ruthlessly repressed.85 No, the major tensions inside
the Roman social formation were always those between a governing
nobility and the lower classes of small farmers, artisans, and the urban
unemployed. Being a Roman noble was one thing. Surviving in a world
dominated by that nobility was something else entirely. The Roman
Empire survived for as long as it did only, as Simon James has noted,
“through a lasting rapprochement between native landowning aristocra-
cies and the Roman state,”86 and the Roman state and military survived
only through a similar class compact with Rome’s landowning aristoc-
racy, a compact from which lower social classes in the empire were pro-
gressively excluded over time.
In the early republic, by contrast, those vertical class tensions had to
be managed and to some degree given institutional expression, since both
the survival of Rome and the expansion of the empire relied on the active
support (and military participation) of an armed farming class. At the
very least, a senate dominated by landowners had to appease army vet-
erans and look after the interests of the small-farming class from which
they came. Indeed, the republic was replaced by the monarchy in no
small measure because the Roman nobility proved increasingly unwill-
ing to do just that: a nobility that was increasingly unwilling to protect
the interests of Rome’s lower classes by postponing the pursuit of any of
its own. Michael Doyle treats the crossing of the “Augustan threshold to
imperial bureaucratic rule” in 27 BCE as the moment in which Augustus
broke the power of the Roman nobility and put the finances of the early
empire onto a firm tax footing: plunder and booty from imperial expan-
sion being replaced by the systematic raising of funds across a stabilized
and only slowly expanding empire. He treats the Augustan threshold as
a moment of political reform. But it was also a moment at which a new
class compact was established between those who ruled Rome and those
whose labor sustained it: a compact that involved the granting of imperial

lands to returning soldiers and an increase in military pay, followed later

(under Tiberius) by the ending of conscription itself.
This particular class compact eased the immediate class tensions that
then threatened to tear Rome apart, but it did not remove those ten-
sions from the agenda of the later empire. On the contrary, class tensions
returned in force in the fifth century, as inequalities in land ownership
intensified and as ruling-class avarice grew. The imperial court under-
stood the danger of such avarice: in the late empire “there is no lack of
legislative rules intended to prevent the great estates from expanding at
the expenses of the free peasants.” But expand they did, “at the expense
of smallholdings that were ruined by the excessive fiscal burden.”87 As we
noted earlier, the reluctance of later generations of the Roman nobility to
pay the expanded taxation made necessary by the cost of imperial defense
then moved that tax burden down the class line, pushing living standards
for the mass and generality of Roman citizens back toward prerepub-
lic levels.88 As Barboni has it, “the huge estates of the Middle Ages did
not spring up all of a sudden; the antecedents are to be sought far back.
Already in the late empire complex and powerful forces were working
in that direction.”89 Or Doyle, who wrote that “when the state sought
resources from society in the West, it had to grant special concessions to
the powerful rich who not only owned the land but staffed the bureau-
cracy, and each new state demand progressively increased the enfeudaliza-
tion of the economy. A vicious circle of privatization and tax avoidance
left the state impoverished, the rich wealthy, and the mass of the people
destitute and dependent.”90
Nor should we assume that because citizenship was extended to all
members of the empire in 212 AD, any lingering center-periphery ten-
sions within the extended Roman Empire were completely eradicated by
the balm of the Pax Romana. They were not, because the empire remained
to the end one that was spatially as well as socially unequal. No matter
that formal citizenship was eventually extended across the entire empire,
areas conquered by Roman arms still remained subordinate members of
the imperial system, subject to control from the imperial center.91 And
in that way, as Amy Chua has noted, “while tolerance was essential to
both Rome’s rise to power and its maintenance of the Pax Romana, it also
sowed the seeds of Rome’s eventual disintegration” because “as the empire
grew and the diversity of the peoples included increased, so its increased
heterogeneity became more difficult to handle.” Diversity that was tol-
erated left local cultural autonomy intact as a basis for local resistance
to Roman hegemony. (This was at its most visible in the retention by

Goths within the Roman armies of the late empire of their own ethnic-
ity and language: there was no common identity as Romans for them.)
Diversity that was later denied to religions other than Christianity simply
fuelled cultural resistance from areas of the empire that remained sol-
idly pagan. “The earlier expansion of citizenship had managed to bring
people of many religions under Roman law; but connecting the state to a
single, monotheistic religion narrowed possibilities for inclusion even as
it defined a universalizing vision of imperial culture.”92 Diversity toler-
ated in the end split the empire into two halves, and diversity later denied
“helped to tear the empire apart.”93
Perhaps this should not surprise us, for the Roman Empire was never a
level playing field, and the subordination was never simply political
and economic: it was also cultural throughout. Like empires before and
after it, the mind-set of the dominant groups within the Roman Empire
was lubricated by hubris—hubris anchored in the very success of the
empire itself. Rome fell twice—once as republic and once as empire—
not simply because the avarice of the Roman nobility threatened its inter-
nal stability. It also fell because cultural arrogance undermined the martial
spirit that had first sustained imperial expansion, and because that same
cultural arrogance ultimately closed off the capacity of Roman ruling
groups to recognize their growing vulnerability both within the borders
of the empire and beyond them. Amy Chua, for one, remains convinced
that Rome fell when “the famous Roman tradition of tolerance . . . hit
a limit it could not cross.” Having absorbed whole swathes of Mediter-
ranean peoples into Roman citizenship, “in the late fourth century, Rome
for the first time adopted policies of apartheid against one of its subject
peoples”—namely, Germanic tribes by then living within the boundaries
of the empire. As she put it, “enmity escalated, and the destruction of
Rome came with astonishing rapidity.”94
The Possibility That America Is the New Rome

Not everyone sees value in exploring the Roman past when contemplat-
ing the American future. The differences of character and condition are
seen by many writers as simply too great. Vaclav Smil recently published
an entire text to establish that point, conceding “the limited value of some
of the parallels,” but insisting overall that the parallel is a barren one.
For him, the making of any meaningful comparison between the two is
inherently flawed in three vital respects: “First [such comparisons] entail
only superficial realities and hence can yield only questionable insights.
Second, they deal with universal human attributes and hence there is no
particular insight to be gained by contrasting Rome and Washington;

many other combinations of two societies or two capitals would serve as

well. Third, they use simple quantitative contrasts without attention to
vastly different qualities and hence end up with very misleading conclu-
sions.”95 For Smil, this is not a matter of comparing empires. The Ameri-
can Republic does not meet the definitional standards of an empire and
has never relied, as Rome did, “on the extensive occupation of foreign
lands” for the maintenance of its hegemony. Nor is it a matter of compar-
ing similar economies. The United States has a qualitatively different (and
a far more inventive and scientifically curious) economy than that of clas-
sical Rome: one in which its use of energy constitutes “a stunning differ-
ence of six orders of magnitude.” “An average American,” Smil wrote, “is
now served by machines whose capacity is about 1 million times greater
than that of inanimately energized machines serving an average Roman.”
It is this energy difference that, for him, “makes the two societies fun-
damentally incomparable”: with entirely different population dynamics,
wealth levels, and exposure to long-distance trade. The United States is
basically a postindustrial service economy based on wage labor; Rome was
a preindustrial agrarian economy based on slavery. America has a modern
middle class; Rome lacked its classical equivalent. As Smil has it, “by any
justifiable measure, an average Roman lived in misery, and the average
American enjoys a level of affluence unprecedented in human history.”
If classical Rome and modern America share any major common feature,
that feature for Vaclav Smil is “the vastly exaggerated perception of their
respective powers, be they judged in terms of territorial extent, effective
political influence, or convincing military superiority.”96
Vaclav Smil is not alone in arguing in this fashion. Many classical schol-
ars have emphasized the differences between Rome at its peak of power
and America now. “The closer you look at Rome,” Adrian Goldsworthy
has written, “the more obvious it is just how very different it was to any
modern state, let alone the United States.”97 Scholars and commentators
on US foreign policy have often made a similar point from the other end
of the same comparison. “Precisely because we do not administer foreign
territories, we do not engage in cultural imperialism in the Roman sense,”
Kimberly Kagan has argued. “The Pax Americana is different from the
Pax Romana. America does not control small states, such as Bosnia and
Afghanistan. It does not send governors, impose its laws, levy taxes, con-
script soldiers or permanently garrison its military forces abroad. America
is not an empire but a hegemon.”98 “The parallel does not work for the
USA”—this from Robert Cox—“U.S. power has provoked an affirma-
tion of difference on the part of other peoples. They do not strive to merge

into a homogenized imperial whole.”99 Or again, Thomas H. Madden:

“Has the American president become a new Augustus? Not even close.”100
Indeed, for some commentators, the question is more basic still—
namely, why would Americans like to see themselves as some kind of
modern Roman equivalent when we know just how horrendously the
Romans behaved both to themselves and to others (“pillage, enslavement,
looting, killing, destruction”101)? “Frequently outright aggressors . . .
they sacked cities, devastated landscapes and massacred or enslaved and
deported entire populations at the behest of their commanders.”102 Surely,
we should not want to see ourselves that way; on the contrary, “we should
be very glad indeed of these differences, for there was much about the
Roman empire that was brutal and unpleasant, even if it was no worse
and in most respects better than its neighbors” (Goldsworthy again).103
We shouldn’t want to model ourselves on a system built on “intimidation,
naked force and institutionalized slavery.”104 Watching Christian prison-
ers being torn to death by wild animals is not the same as watching the
Pittsburgh Steelers clash with the New England Patriots (no matter how
gladiatorial NFL games often appear to be), which was why, for as serious
a classical scholar as Simon James, “it seems . . . that outright admiration
for Rome is hard for any thinking person to justify.”105
Yet the parallels between classical Rome and modern America con-
tinue to pull: both parallels in detail and parallels in underlying process.
The parallels in detail are the easiest to spot. Cullen Murphy wrote a
whole book emphasizing six of them: the similarities of Rome and Wash-
ington, DC as world centers and military superpowers, as states poorly
served by the privatization of public services, as states beset by corruption
in government and degradation in civil society, as polities ignorant and
dismissive of the outside world, as states with major border problems,
and as states finding it impossible to deal adequately with their over-
whelming complexity.106 Murphy understands well enough the differ-
ences between the two and the dangers of superficial comparisons, but
he insists on the possibility and importance of learning lessons from his-
tory and is struck by the many important similarities between classical
Rome and modern America to which it is still possible to point. For him,
those include the two ways in which he thinks we most resemble Rome:
“the burgeoning corruption of our government and . . . our arrogant igno-
rance of the world outside.”107 These are troubling comparisons indeed.
Again, he is not alone. There is a whole body of commentary, from
those concerned about the growing role of money in American poli-
tics, comparing contemporary America to the midpoint of the Roman
Empire: to the moment when the republic fell.108 As Chalmers Johnson

had it, “the collapse of the Roman Republic offers a perfect case study of
how imperialism and militarism can undermine even the best defenses
of a democracy,” such that “if we choose to keep our empire, as the Roman
Republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the
eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”109 There is a whole body
of commentary drawing lessons for contemporary US foreign policy
from Rome’s inability to extend the boundaries of its empire into barbar-
ian lands. As Paul Kennedy put it, “smart, long-standing empires, such
as that of the Romans, recognized their limits and rarely went beyond
them”—a lesson in limits that Barack Obama would do well to contem-
plate.110 There is also, as we saw earlier, an extensive scholarly literature
now in existence that seeks to illuminate the fate of later empires and
hegemonic powers by locating similarities as well as differences with the
empire of Rome.111 Morris Berman, for one, sees parallels between what
he terms “the twilight of American culture” and the “decreased intellec-
tual abilities and spiritual death” he associates with the fall of Rome.112
Niall Ferguson, for another, believes that “the dilemmas faced by America
today have more in common with those faced by the later Caesars than
with those faced by the Founding Fathers.”113
There is even literature seeing Rome and America as similar and desir-
able kinds of empires, ones that succeeded by doing the same things.114
Thomas Madden’s Empires of Trust is already a classic of this genre. And
even analysts critical of America’s global role are on record as describing
the nature of the American nonterritorial empire by its similarities to the
imperial structures of Rome. In this last category, one striking example is
Susan Strange’s characterization of the global reach of the contemporary
United States. What is emerging, she has written, “is a non-territorial
Empire with its imperial capital in Washington DC. Where imperial capi-
tals used to draw courtiers from outlying provinces, Washington draws
lobbyists from outlying enterprises, outlying minority groups, and glob-
ally organized pressure groups. As in Rome, citizenship is not limited
to a master race and the empire contains a mixture of citizens with full
legal and political rights, semi-citizens and noncitizens like Rome’s slave
population.” As Simon James noted, both the United States and the city
of Rome proclaimed themselves mongrel nations—proudly assertive of
their immigrant construction.115 No empires of the blood here. Which is
perhaps why—if Martijn Konings is right—Americans still “find it much
easier to relate to the imperial grandeur of Ancient Rome than [to] that
of Britain” even though “some of the most central features of American
imperialism . . . would much more readily seem to invite comparisons
with more modern varieties of imperialism.” Rome, like America, began

as a republic, justifying its expansion in the interests of “the Senate and

people of Rome,” just as “America’s role in the world is invariably justified
in terms of the interest of the American people.”116 All of which under-
scores the degree to which Cullen Murphy is not alone in recognizing
what he calls “the eagle in the mirror.”117
Moreover and beneath these specific parallels, there could possibly
be general lessons of empire and domination available for discovery if
we look. After all, the Roman Empire in the west fell in the wake of
perpetual political turmoil (civil wars indeed) that weakened both the
empire’s defenses and its internal viability. The politics of the late empire,
as we might say now, were definitely broken. The costs of maintaining so
large a military eventually eroded the empire’s underlying economic base:
Rome, by its fall, had a huge trade deficit with the rest of the empire.118
The costs of that military endeavor put the issue of taxation at the heart
of Roman politics and set class against class in a way that parallels the
modern American predicament: the Roman Empire in the west fell in
the wake of a severe fiscal crisis in which its lower classes were too poor
to bear an increased tax burden and its upper classes too avaricious and
well connected to need to do so. And the Roman Empire fell (in the
west at least) with both a depleted currency and a depleted culture. It
fell to barbarians as it itself became less civilized. The culture of “bread
and circuses,” characteristic of the early empire, may have given way to
one of Christian intolerance, but that transition left in place a heady mix-
ture of depravity and fundamentalism of the kind that modern commen-
tators often cite as key features of our own cultural condition. Politically,
economically, fiscally, and culturally, it is possible to see parallels between
this empire long ago and America in its modern moment—parallels that
imposed logics of action on Rome in its declining years and that, if we are
not careful, might impose themselves on us too, whether we like it or not.
So no, America is not Rome. Modern-day America is not a slave-based
economy. It is not a monarchy. It is not a territorial empire. It does not
burn people at the stake or crucify those who challenge its power. But
modern America does sit astride the world that we know in very much
the same fashion as Rome once strode across the Mediterranean world it
knew. America’s capacity for global rule making, for international lead-
ership, and for cultural hegemony is at least as strong and developed as
Rome’s once was. And America is now beset internally with economic
difficulties, social inequalities, and a ubiquitous popular culture full of
violence, sensuality, and escapism. So too, in a different time and place,
was Rome. So in both the differences and the similarities between these
two great powers, there may indeed be powerful lessons to be gleaned

that might yet guide us to a better future. As we turn now to examine the
fate of empires closer to us, both in space and in time, it seems wisest to
at least leave the possibility open that the comparison between classical
Rome and modern America can throw light on problems we face now and
problems yet to come—leaving the possibility open, the better to return
to its deliberation later. Later, when we can set Rome as well as America
in some bigger understanding of empires built when the Roman one had
long gone but was still remembered.


CHAPTER 4
Spain
The Rise and Fall of a Dynastic Empire
Whatever else one can or cannot say about the Roman Empire,
of one thing it is possible to be entirely definitive. There was nothing
accidental about the existence of that empire. Empire was what Rome
did. The Spanish Empire, by contrast, was entirely different. From the
outset of the creation of what we now know as the modern state of
Spain, its internal construction and external expansion was overwhelm-
ingly accidental in design. The internal cohesion of the newly created
sixteenth-century state was the product of dynastic marriages between
families (and kingdoms) that had hitherto existed entirely apart. The
subsequent and rapid transformation of that state into Europe’s largest
and most belligerent power was the product of a seemingly endless series
of dynastic accidents: of marriages made and marriages missed, of hus-
bands unexpectedly dead, of princesses lost in childbirth, and of royal
babies stillborn or (in one crucial case) deemed mentally ill.1 And the
movement of this emerging European power onto the global stage was
the unexpected product of parallel but unconnected processes of private
enterprise by Spanish citizens (or, of course, in the most famous case,
by a first-generation immigrant son of Genoa). Though always sustained
by its Catholic mission, the Spanish Empire came together initially by
accident, not by design. Its accidental construction weakened it almost
from the outset and yet—in spite of those weaknesses—it lasted. Spain
lasted as a major European power until 1648 and as a significant one until
1808; and it lasted as a colonial power until its last imperial viceroys were
summarily ejected from most of South America in the 1820s and from
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in 1898. If we are to draw
lessons for our contemporary condition from this serendipitous but per-
sistent empire, we will need to discover much about its origins, internal
dynamic, and ultimate demise.

The Rise and Consolidation of the Spanish Empire

The first building block in the creation of the modern Spanish state was
the union of Isabella and Ferdinand, consummated in 1469. Isabella
was heir to the throne of Castile and Ferdinand to the lesser throne of
Aragon. Isabella was targeted by her brother for marriage to the stronger
king of Portugal, a union that would have directed Castilian dynastic
energies westward toward Portugal’s developing possessions on the coast
of Africa. Marrying Ferdinand redirected those energies south, toward
the clearing of the entire peninsula of residual Moorish power, and then
east into the cauldron of European politics focused on Italy and the
Papacy. After years of civil war and military incursions into the south,
Isabella and Ferdinand controlled the entirety of modern Spain by
1492, the year in which they also commissioned Christopher Colum-
bus’s first pursuit of a western route to the riches of Asia. By 1516, the
year of Ferdinand’s death, the united crowns also controlled significant
parts of the Italian peninsula—namely, the Kingdom of Naples and the
islands of Sicily and Sardinia. But by then, every dynastic avenue avail-
able to them to keep the thrones of Castile and Aragon out of the hands
of foreign control had died away; and the newly united Spain found
itself recast as simply one element in the more complex landholdings
of its new Habsburg rulers.
In that sense, “the Spanish empire did not spring from a strong and
united territory; nor was its leadership particularly Spanish.”2 Instead,
Isabella and Ferdinand—dubbed “the Catholic Kings” by popes need-
ing their military support in the years on either side of Columbus’s
departure—were succeeded by foreign princes linked to them only by
blood: first by Charles V, the product of the union between Philip of
Burgundy and Isabella’s mentally unstable daughter Juana; and then by
Philip II. These Habsburg princes were respectively kings in Castile and
Aragon, counts and archdukes in the Netherlands, and, most significant
of all, under Charles V, Holy Roman emperors in their scattered posses-
sions in Germany, Hungary, and Austria. In the space of less than a cen-
tury, monarchies in minor Spanish kingdoms had been transformed into
a major European power that was formally in total charge of significant
and large parts of the western European landmass; and, although in 1556
Charles split the empire in two, powerful links remained in place there-
after between the Austrian and Spanish wings of a common Habsburg
dynasty. Among those links was their shared role as defenders of Catholi-
cism, as the forces of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation clashed
with each other in the prolonged series of wars that culminated in the
Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

Spain 83
Alongside that territorial expansion across Europe—with its series of

attendant wars with other newly emerging European states and with the
Ottoman Turks—the newly emerging Spanish state also acquired (largely
again by accident) an unprecedentedly vast transatlantic empire. Pro-
logued by the deliberate Castilian capture of the Canary Islands between
1478 and 1493 and by the trio of transatlantic expeditions undertaken
by Columbus, the real spurt in imperial expansion in the Americas
came a generation later. “The years 1519 to 1540 represented the final,
heroic phase of the conquista—the years in which Spain won its great
American empire”3 through the defeat of the Aztec Empire by Cortés
(1519–21) and of the Inca Empire by Pizarro (1531–33).4 This “Spanish
imperial expansion into the sixteenth-century Americas was simultane-
ously an invasion, a colonization effort, a social experiment, a religious
crusade, and a highly structured economic enterprise.”5 It was also an
unprecedentedly successful expansion. At the end of the War of Spanish
Succession in 1713, though Spain’s influence on the western European
subcontinent continued its inexorable decline, the new Bourbon rul-
ers in Madrid found themselves in formal possession of a vast American
empire: lands that stretched from Chile up the western side of South
America, through the entire Central American landmass and out to His-
paniola, and into outposts in what is today Florida, the American plains
states, and California.
Yet unlike the dynastic wars sweeping across sixteenth-century west-
ern and southern Europe, the transatlantic military initiatives that cre-
ated Spain’s American empire were driven primarily by private ambition,
not by public policy. Cortés, for example, returned to Spain to see his
children marry into the nobility and himself become a marqués. Spanish
political power entered the Americas courtesy of the swords and horses
of private conquistadores—“empire by franchise” as Parsons called it6—
though it was a courtesy/franchise that from the outset was also state part-
nered and state supervised. It was supervised, but not initially prioritized,
because the acquisition of sovereignty over American land was “both sud-
den and unexpected”7—an unplanned imperial adventure framed within
a division of the New World between Portugal and Spain laid down by
papal decree in 1493 and confirmed by treaty in 1494,8 and one that was
initially nothing more than a sideshow to Spain’s increasingly demand-
ing European military involvements. It was a sideshow, that is, until the
unexpected discovery of silver at Zacatecas in Mexico and in the Potosí
mountain (in what is now Bolivia) in the 1540s transformed everything.
It was that silver, flowing back to continental Spain in annual armadas
from the 1550s, which then helped prolong the series of wars into which

Spain’s European possessions perpetually drew her. A territorial project

deliberately pursued for imperial purposes in Europe was thus financed
by one accidentally acquired in the Americas—an accidental empire that
persisted long after the original European territorial project had been first
blocked and then defeated.
Explaining the Longevity of the Spanish Empire
So there is an intriguing disjuncture in timing at the heart of the Spanish
story of empire: between the weakening of the core of the empire in one
period and the disintegration of the core’s control of the imperial periph-
ery in another. Historians have handled that disjuncture in at least three
ways. They have disputed the timing of the core’s political and economic
weakening—was it a late sixteenth- or an entirely seventeenth-century
phenomenon? They have disputed whether mainland Spain held on to
its empire by tight central control or by more relaxed local partnerships
and have insisted (when discussing decline and its causes) on differentiat-
ing Castile from Spain and Spain from its empire.9 And they have often
split their work into separate and only partially overlapping spheres: some
focusing on mainland Spain, with the imperial elements of the mix used
as simply one explanatory variable among many in the examination of
Spanish decline; and yet others focusing almost exclusively on political
and economic developments within the colonies themselves, treating the
diminished political potency of mainland Spain as the residual straw that
eventually broke the imperial camel’s back. Our focus here has to remain
on mainland Spain—the imperial core—the dispute around the timing
and causes of whose decline will occupy much of the rest of this chapter.
But before that becomes our central concern, it is worth noting now just
how carefully the Spanish monarchy originally designed and supervised
the transatlantic empire that so unexpectedly came its way, and, later
in this chapter, how in the playing out of that design the ability of the
center to control the periphery inevitably diminished over time.
What the early Spanish monarchs regularly attempted to do, as their
territories grew in number and scale, was to prevent colonial expansion
from falling into the hands and the control of major Castilian aristo-
crats. They wanted no strengthening of potential challengers at home. So
from the outset—and the outset here is the land settlement laid down for
Spain’s first acquired colony, the Canary Islands, in the 1490s—Isabella
and Ferdinand established specific contracts (capitulaciones) with the
private individuals actually doing the fighting and achieving the expan-
sion. Those contracts did more than guarantee to the participants that
their reward would be booty, land, and titles. They also closed out from

Spain 85
colonial landownership any Castilian magnates attracted to the enter-

prise and reserved for the Crown an extensive set of rights in the newly
conquered territories, including the right to specify in detail what those
private rewards would be.10 They then used these contracts to reproduce
in the New World, in as near an image as they could, the system of land
tenure already prevalent in Castile. Reproducing the Old World in the
new in this fashion, the Spanish crowns thus stimulated a flow of main-
land Spaniards to these new possessions—particularly young men whose
access to family land was blocked by the existence of an older brother—
mainland Spaniards whose subordinate social position in Castilian society
could be improved by moving up a colonial social ladder that was quint-
essentially Spanish in design. The encomienda system of land tenure “gave
Spaniards the Crown’s blessing to take large chunks of land, with the
obligation to convert the people on it and the right to turn their political
dependence into labor.”11 It was the Spanish crown that created an empire
of latifundista-based agrarian economies of a kind last seen in the Roman
countryside, and they did so for reasons of political control and not of
economic efficiency.
So the outflow of Spanish settlers was critical to the initial deepening of
Spanish control over the vast landmasses that the fall of indigenous South
American empires had placed so fortuitously in Spanish hands. But settle-
ment of this kind was, of course, the norm for all the European powers
seeking empire in the New World. What Spain added to this outflow of
its subjects—and what the British a century later failed to add—was a
strong central bureaucracy (in this instance, based in Seville) that, from the
very outset, ran those new settlements as sources of revenue for the central
state. Compared to the British, Spain “demanded more from her colonies
in the way of taxes, shares in gold mining, and religious orthodoxy, and
so needed a more constraining form of official influence.”12 More like the
Roman state at the start of the Principate, the sixteenth-century Spanish
state successfully passed its “Augustan threshold”: removing imperial pos-
sessions from the whims of aristocrats (and in this case, conquistadores)
and imposing tight central control from a great distance. That control was
initially established around issues of slavery and the treatment of native
peoples—the central state imposed severe limits on their superexploitation,
ironically fuelling the flow of African slaves to fill the void—but over time
it crystallized into a grand bargain between emerging colonial elites and the
governing forces in Madrid. As Doyle has it, “Spain guaranteed the social
position of the creole elite, protected them from slave and Indian rebellions
and from foreign conquest, and provided some market, however unsatis-
factory, for such American produce as hides and silver. In return, direct

bureaucratic rule from the metropole allowed Spain simply to decree . . .

Spain ruled by an effective and efficient bureaucracy and with the sup-
port of reciprocal interests in trade and cultural affinities. These were the
sources of her long and stable control over the American colonies.”13
Spanish control of its new empire required more than this, however,
and was again helped by factors beyond Spain’s immediate control. One
factor was simply the thinness of the control exercised locally by the two
empires that the conquistadores overthrew. Once fully overthrown—
there was prolonged resistance in Peru—they vanished without trace.
Another was the military advantage provided in that overthrow by the
Spanish possession of horses that, until then, no American-based military
force had possessed (or indeed even had knowledge of ). A third factor
was the unexpected impact on the health of native peoples of the interac-
tion of cultures hitherto entirely isolated from each other. It was disease,
not weaponry, which removed vast numbers of potentially resistant local
populations as South Americans of all classes fell victim to European ill-
nesses to which they had no immunity. A fourth factor was the manner in
which the Spanish Empire, like many before it and since, expanded only
with and because of the extensive amounts of local help that its frontline
conquerors fortuitously received. Cortés did not defeat the Aztecs alone:
he had effective and plentiful local allies. A fifth was the uncoordinated
and infrequent nature of the indigenous challenge to Spanish rule, a chal-
lenge that was real enough—the Guerra de Arauco, for example, persisted
as a low intensity struggle against Spanish rule right through to 1818—
but resistance that was sufficiently localized to eventually fall victim to the
sheer brutality of the eventual Spanish military response. And finally, as
always in the Spanish American story, there was the impact of silver itself,
the flow of which had huge colonial and metropolitan consequences. We
will trace its metropolitan consequences later. Colonially, its impact was
enormous and determining. From the 1540s, the flow of mineral wealth
from Mexico and Peru “sucked in new migrants from Spain and funded
the import of slaves from Africa. It paid for a colonial administration and
a judicial system” that was “vastly more elaborate than the semi-feudal
regime of the early conquest”; and “it helped to pay for the massive pres-
ence of the Catholic Church.” “In short,” as John Darwin put it, “it was
gold and chiefly silver that turned the brutal fact of conquest into a struc-
ture of colonial rule.”14 Flows of mineral wealth can rarely have had more
awesome and prolonged consequences than that, for their legacy remains
with us to this day.

Spain 87
Reasons for Decline: (1) Military

So as John Darwin, one of the greatest contemporary historians of
empire, put it, what the Spaniards came to possess was in truth simply “a
windfall empire,” one whose bounty Philip II then very rapidly wasted by
devoting the “royal fifth”—the monarchy’s share of the silver stream—to
the struggle to uphold Spain’s preeminence in Europe against rivals and
rebels. “The resources of America, and of Spain itself,” as Darwin tells
us, “were harnessed not to a vision of global predominance, but to the
insatiable demands of the king’s ‘messianic imperialism’—his mission
to defend the Catholic faith against its Protestant foes.”15 Ultimately,
“Spain’s demise as an empire was due to the fact that the struggle for
European supremacy stripped it of the resources that might otherwise
have stood the imperial periphery in good stead, and its fateful preoc-
cupation with military power may in turn be explained by the constant
outbreak of hegemonial wars.”16 The Spanish imperial project paid a high
price for all this European warfare. Like the French later under first Louis
XIV and then Napoléon, and Germany in its first Reich and indeed its
third, the Spanish monarchs found that they “had to face long wars that
not only hindered empire-building but lost them the hegemony they had
previously acquired.”17 Long ago, Ralph Davis put it this way:
At the heart of Spain’s troubles was the dynasty that involved it in the
affairs of all Europe. Too powerful among the states of Europe, so that it
attempted to don the mantle of supreme protector of Catholic Christianity
against the dual attack of Christian heresies and the old Muslim enemy in
Asia and Africa; too powerful at home once it had crushed the revolt of
the Communeros . . . in 1521 . . . the Habsburg dynasty was able to drain
the resources of Spain—or rather of Castile—in causes Castile had little
concern in. After 1521 there was no effective check to the dynasty using
Castile to support its own ambitions. No serious invader touched Spanish
soil but its own kings ravaged it.18
Those demands of Spain’s European wars were indeed insatiable—

and, in truth, they predated Philip II by at least a generation. Philip
inherited an empire at war. He did not create one. His father, Charles V,
faced repeated French incursions into northern Italy in each decade after
1520, responding with military incursions of his own. He faced a Turk-
ish assault on Vienna in 1529, and Catholic and Protestant armies were
clashing in Germany by the 1540s. Spain under its first Habsburg ruler
was therefore perpetually at war on one, two, or even three fronts until
temporary truces were negotiated with the French at Augsburg in 1555

and with German Protestants at Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. Thereafter,

the eastern branch of the then divided Hapsburg Empire knew a pro-
longed period of relative peace, but Philip II’s Spain did not. Spanish
forces were deployed against Turkish naval movements in the Mediterra-
nean from 1560 to 1581, the Dutch were in rebellion against Spanish rule
from the 1560s (a rebellion that lasted eight decades), and the English
were at war with Spain after Philip’s annexation of Portugal in 1580. In
those land- and sea-based struggles, Spanish arms knew both great suc-
cess (as at Lepanto against the Turks in 1571) and great failure (as against
the English with the dispersal of the Spanish Armada in 1588). In fact,
Philip, like Charles before him, basically knew military success in the
south and military defeat in the north.
Both the Dutch and English conflicts outlived Philip, each marking
in its way the limits of Spanish military power in northern Europe. Each
was then subsumed after 1618 into a thirty-year conflict that engulfed
much of central Europe, a conflict in which a series of Spanish armies par-
ticipated fully on the Catholic side. Initially successful, those armies met
increasingly effective resistance as the Thirty Years’ War dragged on: from
the Dutch in the 1620s, from the Swedes in the 1630s, and, eventually,
even from the French. The Treaty of Westphalia took Austria out of the
conflict in 1648, and established Dutch independence from Spain; but
that still left Spanish armies in the field, now aligned against both Catho-
lic France and Cromwell’s Protestant England. All this fighting proved, in
the end, to be too much for the resource base of the Spanish Habsburgs
and compelled (with very great reluctance on the Spanish side) the total
abandonment of any Habsburg ambition for unchallenged hegemony in
Europe, an abandonment marked by the signing of the Treaty of the Pyr-
enees with France in 1659 and by the recognition of Portuguese indepen-
dence in 1668. A Spain militarily dominant in the 1560s was by 1713
(and the Treaty of Utrecht) sufficiently militarily depleted as to have
become simply the issue over which more powerful European states—
France and England in particular—fought out their own aspirations for
hegemony. It was a mighty fall.
Partly, the fall was military. Spanish political and diplomatic domi-
nance in Europe in the 1560s reflected the particular strength of Spanish
armies in the field. At their core was the Spanish tercio, the three-thousand-
strong integrated regiments of pikemen, swordsmen, and arquebusiers
first put together by the “Great Captain”—Gonzalo de Córdoba—during
the Italian campaigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. The fury of those tercios
was legendary on European battlefields throughout the sixteenth century,
firmly grounded as it was in the aggressiveness of the Castilian gentry and

Spain 89
population who provided the bulk of the manpower in Spanish armies at

their peak. Under Charles V and Philip II, “the traditional willingness of
Castilian hidalgos to serve in the tercios stiffened its infantry regiments,”
as “for the first time in modern Europe, a large standing army was suc-
cessfully maintained at a great distance from the imperial homeland, for
decades on end.”19 Like the Romans before them, the Spanish initially
possessed military forces that were homegrown and infused with a nation-
alist arrogance; and it is significant in this regard, as Paul Kennedy noted,
“that Spanish power visibly cracked only in the mid-seventeenth century,
when its army consisted chiefly of German, Italian, and Irish mercenar-
ies with far fewer warriors from Castile.”20 But that power did crack, and
it wasn’t just for want of Castilian steel. It also cracked because, by the
1640s, the size of the military resources being deployed on both sides of
the main conflicts of the day had grown exponentially;21 and it cracked
because there were by then two equally potent sides, each capable of put-
ting ever larger armies into the field. Behind the rapid erosion of what had
once seemed an invincible Spanish military capacity, that is, lay issues of
cost, financing, and ultimately economic development—dimensions of the
political economy of warfare on which the Spaniards had started ahead
of their adversaries but on which Spain then fell quickly and irrevocably
behind.
Reasons for Decline: (2) Financial

The costs of all this warfare were ultimately overwhelmingly human ones.
As Henry Kamen properly reminds us, “Castilians died far from home.
Generations of mothers and wives would remember the fields of Flan-
ders as the ‘cemetery of Spaniards.’” And it was not just Spaniards: the
1,200 Dutch executed by Alba, the 8,000 men slaughtered by the Span-
ish army at Cajamarca, and the 8,000 dead in Antwerp on “the day
of the Spanish fury” when “the mutinous Spanish tercios sacked”22 the
city. The list of the dead goes on and on. But here we must deal with less
human though regrettably more potent costs—the financial costs of main-
taining all those armies over time—and to do that, we must explore what
Perry Anderson referred to as “the curious triangular relationship between
the American Empire, the European Empire and the Iberian home-
lands”23 in the Spanish case.
To take the last side of that triangle first: until South American silver
turned up to ease the immediate financial burden of war, that burden
was largely borne first by Dutch and then by Castilian taxpayers; and
because their taxes were never bountiful enough, it was a burden also
borne by Italian bankers on whom the Spanish state was then periodically

obliged to default. The problem was not immediately obvious early on.
“Much of the cost of Charles V’s wars had been met from his rich Neth-
erlands possessions, and though Spanish taxation was more than trebled
during his reign this increase was not vastly in excess of national income
(in the rising prices of the time).”24 It was the revolt of the Netherlands
that simultaneously escalated Phillip II’s military costs and cut off reli-
able access to Dutch income and wealth, putting the prime burden of
financing his wars back onto the taxpayers of Castile.25 “The Low Coun-
tries were Spain’s 80-year Vietnam.”26 Total revenues to the Crown rose
fivefold in Philip’s reign—partly from American silver but still primar-
ily from Castilian taxes: sales taxes, customs duties, and from 1590, the
new tax on certain categories of goods—the aptly named milliones. Those
taxes “provided nearly two thirds of the crown revenue at the end of Phil-
lip II’s reign.”27
There was clearly a limit, however, to just how much European war-
fare Castilian taxation could sustain before the burden of that taxation
began to eviscerate the Castilian economy that generated it; and even
then, that taxation limit was far below Habsburg military requirements.
So it was fortunate, for Philip and his successors at least, that Castilian
revenues were increasingly supplemented (particularly after 1550) by a
steady flow of gold and silver returning to Seville from Spanish posses-
sions in the New World. Sir John Elliott reckoned that “over the 160 years
between 1503 and 1660 some 16,000,000 kilograms of silver arrived
at Seville—enough to triple the existing silver resources of Europe—as
against 185,000 kilograms of gold, which increased Europe’s gold sup-
plies by one-fifth.”28 One-fifth was also the royal take from those flows:
enough, at their peak, to account for 20–25 percent of royal revenues,
but never enough to remove from the Spanish crown the necessity to bor-
row against those flows from a banking system that was predominantly
Italian in location. As Paul Kennedy put it, “the fact that the Habsburg
territories contained the leading financial and mercantile houses—those
of southern Germany, of certain of the Italian cities, and of Antwerp—
must be counted as an additional advantage, and as the fifth major source
of income”29 after American silver and the taxation flows from Castile,
Italy, and the Netherlands. An advantage, certainly, but not a guarantee
of solvency: as witnessed by the repeated defaulting on loans by Spanish
monarchs in 1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, and 1628.
The critical thing to note here is that the Spanish crown was teetering
on the edge of bankruptcy even before the Dutch rebellion added to Philip
II’s military agenda and costs and before the full arrival of American sil-
ver. It was Charles V, not his son, who began the funding of military

Spain 91
campaigns through the sale of annuities (juros) at high rates of interest

to what was effectively a rentier class in Castile, “investing its money
not in trade or industry but in profitable Government bonds.” Inter-
est payments on those bonds were already swallowing 65 percent of the
state’s ordinary revenues by as early as 1543, sending the first Habsburg
king of Spain off to German, Genoese, Flemish, and Spanish bankers for
loans collateralized against the annual arrival of silver from the Americas
or against future Castilian tax flows. So even before Philip II turned his
father’s Flemish-based European empire into a genuinely transatlantic
Spanish Empire30, the crown has already established what Elliott called “a
regular system of deficit financing.”31 In 1542, Charles V had a normal
annual revenue of 1.5 million ducats but was able to borrow 39 million
by signing contracts (asientos) with these bankers. Loans of this scale had
serious long-term negative consequences, as Elliott among others noted.
For “as the asiento system became regularized and the Emperor’s needs
increased, one after another of the Crown’s sources of income came to
be alienated to the bankers, and a larger and larger share of its annual
revenues was diverted to debt financing.”32 Elliott was particularly criti-
cal of what he termed “dangerous developments” consolidated under
Charles V rather than Philip II, developments that left sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Spain with irresolvable financial problems: the dom-
inance of foreign bankers in the control of Spanish wealth, the placing
of the main fiscal burden on the Castilian economy, and the manner in
which the burden of that taxation fell most heavily on those classes least
able to bear it.33
Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, at the very latest from the 1590s,
it became increasingly clear that the Spanish military effort was of a scale
far beyond the capacity of its many sources of revenue to sustain. That
incapacity was partly, as we have seen already, the consequence of the
escalating costs of war: no Spanish army in the 1520s ever exceeded thirty
thousand men in total. Philip IV commanded armies ten times that size
a century later, and by then, a century of inflation triggered by the influx
of American silver had taken the total cost of military preparedness to
greater heights still. “The general inflation, which saw food prices rise
fivefold and industrial prices threefold between 1500 and 1630, was a
heavy blow to government finances; but this was compounded by the
doubling and redoubling in the size of armies and navies.”34 The incapac-
ity of the Spanish state to maintain the number and size of the armies it
required was, by the 1630s, also a consequence of the number of Euro-
pean fronts on which it was fighting and of the damage done by its taxa-
tion policies to the Castilian economy that remained its prime and most

reliable tax base. That erosion will concern us next: what we need to note
here is the additional difficulties created for Spanish borrowing by its
repeated patterns of default.
Henry Kamen is right to caution us. The financial problems of the
Spanish state can be given too much explanatory weight when explor-
ing issues of decline. It was true: “The empire never lacked men . . . and
it never lacked money: foreign traders and financiers—and even foreign
pirates—continued to underwrite the empire’s regional economies even
while they were trying to undermine the extent of control from Madrid.”35
But that control did weaken over time. The “almost continual struggle for
solvency” inevitably took its toll, and it was not so much immediately
fatal as it was incrementally debilitating. When Philip II had defaulted
on loans in 1575, his Genoese bankers had suspended payments to his
armies fighting Dutch rebels, “provoking the army to mutiny and sack
Antwerp, turning the city to support the eventually victorious rebels.”36
That was bad enough, but at least then the promise of next year’s silver
armada enabled Philip to restructure his debts and continue.37 Not so by
the 1620s, because by then “Spain’s existing debt made it increasingly dif-
ficult to finance multiple wars [and] the consequent weakening of Spain’s
military power made that financial predicament worse, causing further
Military problems.” And not just minor military problems, but rather
major ones: as Helen Thompson has it, “Spain was unable to increase its
military expenditure through two decades of direct combat with France.
Its consequently weakened army proved no match for the French, and
after its defeat at the Battle of the Dunes, Spain never recovered its exter-
nal power.”38
It was Spain’s growing financial indebtedness caused by incessant war-
fare that ultimately undermined its military capacity and in its turn gen-
erated serious civil internal social and political unrest. As Yegor Gaidar
later put it, when drawing lessons from the demise of the Spanish Empire
for the post-Soviet Russia of which he was the first prime minister, “Spain
in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is an example of a state that
suffered no wartime defeats, but whose economy collapsed under the
weight of its disproportionate ambitions, which were based on unreliable
revenues from American gold and silver.”39 Kennedy again: “This, then,
was to be the Spanish pattern for the next thirty years of war. By scraping
together fresh loans, imposing new taxes, and utilizing any windfall from
the Americas, a major military effort like, say, Cardinal-Infante’s interven-
tion in Germany in 1634–35 could be supported; but the grinding costs
of war always eventually eroded these short-term gains, and within a few
years the financial situation was worse than ever. By the 1640s, in the

Spain 93
aftermath of the Catalan and Portuguese revolts, and with the American
treasure flow much reduced, a long slow decline was inevitable.”40 It was
inevitable and, while the monarchy was in Habsburg hands, clearly irre-
versible because of the inability of Habsburg monarchs to put down the
Counter-Reformation torch bequeathed to them by Philip II. Empires,
like economies, experience path dependency: once set in motion, their
lines-of-march are phenomenally difficult to reset. At least, they are phe-
nomenally difficult to reset unless the empire (or its economy) is hit by
some externally generated major crisis. Otherwise, all that empires seem
capable of doing is periodically trying to reform themselves modestly and
incrementally from above. The Soviet Empire would try it in the 1980s
with disastrous consequences. The Spanish monarchy under the Bour-
bons would try it from the 1760s, with equally unimpressive long-term
consequences. But the seventeenth-century Spanish state did not even
make the attempt. Sir John Elliott characterized Spain’s political class in
that key century as “heirs to a society which had overinvested in empire,
and surrounded by the increasingly shabby remnants of a dwindling
inheritance, they could not bring themselves at the moment of crisis to
surrender their memories and alter the antique patterns of their lives.”41
And because they could not, Spain’s imperial glory continued to fade
through one shabby debt-crisis to another.
Reasons for Decline: (3) Economic

Behind the growing indebtedness was the growing evisceration of the
Castilian economy on which Spanish global greatness had first been con-
structed. The rise of Spain, first under the Catholic kings and then under
Charles V, had been paralleled by the rising prosperity of Castile “at a time
of population increase and of sharply rising prices.”42 Even before the
arrival of a Habsburg monarch tied the fortunes of the Iberian Peninsula
and the Low Countries directly together, the economic linkages between
the two were already strong, based as they were on the export from Castile
of the wool produced by Castile’s well-developed and centrally coordi-
nated Mesta. In the battle between crop production and sheep farming
on Castile’s arid heartland, sheep farming had by then already won out,
supported by the Castilian state because of the importance of sheep and
wool as sources of tax revenue. “Castilian towns and Cantabrian shipping
benefited from the prosperity of the pastoral economy of late medieval
Spain, which was linked by a complex commercial system to the textile
industry of Flanders.”43 The profits from that commercial system were not
widely dispersed in Castile: even in the first half of the sixteenth century
when the economy was flourishing, the living standards for the Spanish

peasantry remained obstinately low. But aristocratic landowners experi-

enced rising incomes—incomes that the state lacked the political power
to tax heavily and that sustained urban life and industry on a renewed
scale. The evidence is clear that “Castilian industry expanded vigorously
through the first half of the sixteenth century, and maintained itself in
the face of growing difficulties into the 1580s.”44 Wool, silks, leather, the
Basque iron industry, vineyards, olives groves, and orchards all flourished
in Castile right through to the last quarter of the 1500s.
That prosperity did not survive, however, the eighty years of war that
the Spanish monarchy then imposed on the Castilian economy in the
century after the death of Charles V. There is an ongoing controversy in
the relevant academic literature about whether Castile’s economic decline
was largely externally triggered (the deleterious impact, via inflation, of all
that American silver) or internally generated (all that Habsburg taxation,
borrowing, and militarism).45 But what is not in dispute is the decline
itself: “The coincidence of extremely abundant evidence pointing to a
decline in herding, agriculture, industry and trade in the Spain of the
seventeenth century.”46
That decline manifested itself steadily from the 1590s on each of the
three fundamental bases of previous Castilian economic strength: its
population, its productivity, and its overseas wealth. The population fall
was particularly dramatic—Hamilton estimates it at 25 percent for the
seventeenth century as a whole and Davis at 20 percent. It was a fall
fueled by the expulsion of the Moors, by military casualties, by the grow-
ing number of celibate clergy, and—most important of all—by repeated
plagues sweeping through populations already weakened by poverty and
food shortages. The years 1598–1602 were particularly bad for plague
and famine in Castile, as were the years 1629–31 and 1647–52, as well as
1676–79 and 1683–85. Seville, for example, “lost half its population in
the mid-century epidemics and did not fully recover.”47 Hamilton’s esti-
mate of the total population loss has been challenged,48 but what seems
less in dispute is the degree of rural depopulation tucked away inside
those totals and the inadequacy of local food supplies facilitating depop-
ulation. There was a clear indication that the output of Spanish cereal
production was failing to keep pace with the scale of urban demand and
“that the position of the Castilian peasant and agricultural laborer was
deteriorating” even as early “as the second half of the sixteenth century.”49
And well it might have been, given the tax burden then being borne by
producing classes in Castile. “Taxed more heavily than any other people
in Europe, modern calculations have shown that . . . by 1590 one-third
of the average peasant’s income in a good year was consumed in tax.”50

Spain 95
The drying up of the overseas wealth of the Castilian economy was

equally dramatic. In 1640, the silver armada failed to appear at all, and
from the 1600s the annual value of the silver that did reach Spain fell
away decade after decade: from a peak of 8.7 million pesos in the half-
decade 1586–90 to just 1.2 million pesos in the half-decade 1646–50.51
That fall was partly a matter of quantity: the peak years for the quantity
of silver arriving in Spain were 1606–10. But mainly, it was a matter of
inflation and rising production costs. The flow of silver brought down
its price just as the costs of extracting it began to grow, with the low-
hanging fruit having been entirely exhausted by then. “American output
of bullion increased the world supply of silver and drove its market value
downward” while “rising production costs contributed to the seventeenth
century recession; but such a fate was inevitable irrespective of diminish-
ing returns. When market value withered compared to production cost,
no economic profits remained for merchant or Crown, and the Span-
ish empire collapsed upon itself.”52 It was not simply that population
loss and agricultural stagnation lowered internal levels of demand in the
seventeenth-century Castilian economy, or that the establishment of a
more broadly based set of colonial economies over time began to erode
colonial demand for Castilian exports—though the latter certainly hap-
pened from the 1590s.53 It was also that the growing crisis of production
in the silver industry (a crisis not just of profits but of people, as intensive
exploitation physically depleted the stock of available labor) augured a
century of depression in the colonial as well as the Castilian economies.
A Mexican population of perhaps 11 million at the time of the conquest
in 1519 was down to 2 million or less by 1600. It wasn’t only in metro-
politan Spain that epidemics decimated populations. “The century that
followed the great Indian epidemic of 1576–9” has rightly “been called
‘New Spain’s century of depression’—a century of economic contraction,
during the course of which the New World closed in upon itself.”54
But the starkest evidence of economic weakness was neither in people
nor in silver. It was in trade and shipping. “From the last quarter of the six-
teenth century to the last quarter of the seventeenth the tonnage of ships
plying between Spain and the Indies fell by approximately 75 per cent;”
and control of all but one-sixth of it passed into foreign hands.55 By 1700,
shipbuilding in Spain had virtually ceased. The number of sheep moving
in the great migratory herds of the Mesta “diminished after 1560 and fell
precipitately in the seventeenth century,”56 while all the time continuing
to be “extremely destructive of arable farming.” Indeed, Spain became “a
major grain-importing country for the first time in the 1570s.”57 Span-
ish dependence on “foreign markets for masts, tar, hemp, sailcloth and

other naval supplies” also grew after 1660, reflecting a decline in Spain’s
internal industrial capacity. “Complaints of impoverishment from such
important manufacturing cities as Toledo, Cordova, Seville, Granada and
Valencia received the attention of the Crown in 1655”58 amid reports of
the “disappearance of numerous craft guilds, including workers in iron,
steel, copper, tin, sulphur and alum.” And most striking of all, by 1674,
“the manufacture of arms, the one industry that should have flourished
under the stimulus of perpetual wars, reached such a low ebb that the
Cortes [Spanish parliament] petitioned the crown to import artisans to
revive it.”59
The structure of Castilian rural society was already unlike anything else
in Western Europe. Dependent tenants and peasant small-holders were
a minority in the countryside. In the 16th century, more than half the
rural population of New Castile—perhaps as much as 60–70 percent—
were agricultural laborers . . . and the proportion was probably higher in
Andalusia. There was widespread unemployment in the villages, and heavy
feudal rents on seigneurial land. Most striking of all, the Spanish’s censuses
of 1571 and 1586 revealed a society in which a mere one-third of the
population was engaged in agriculture at all; while no less than two-thirds
were outside any direct economic production—a premature and bloated
“tertiary sector” of Absolutist Spain, which prefigured secular stagnation
to come.60
The decline of basic agriculture and industry, so destructive of living

standards for vast swathes of Spanish society in the seventeenth century,
might have been corrected by intelligent public policy. It was a decline,
after all, that was well recognized at the time; and indeed, under the
Bourbon monarchs put in place in 1713, public policy did shift and a
degree of economic strength did return. But that shift was ultimately
a matter of adjustments in public policy being too little and too late.
In the six key decades from the 1590s to the signing of the Treaty of
the Pyrenees in 1659, public policy did nothing to help revive Castil-
ian economic fortunes. On the contrary, the Spanish crown under the
Habsburgs persisted in its support of sheep farming over crop cultiva-
tion. It continued expelling productive groups because of their religious
beliefs (more on this in the next section). It persisted in exempting the
growing number of Spanish clergy and the majority of Castile’s privileged
classes from most taxation; and when it changed that strategy (under Oli-
vares from the 1620s), it simply triggered resistance and rebellion in both
Catalonia to its east and Portugal to its west. Its trading policy before the
Bourbon reforms privileged the development of just one city in mainland

Spain 97
Spain—Cadiz—and just four in South America: Veracruz, Lima, Carta-

gena, and Panama City. And the growing sale of annuities by succes-
sive Spanish monarchs—annuities sold to make up for revenue shortfalls
and to pay back interest on annuities sold before—continued to feed the
appetites of an ever larger and more powerful rentier class both at home
and abroad. This latter is particularly significant in the light of what will
happen in later empires, those consolidated when capitalism was a greater
global force than it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spain
would not be the last empire in modern times in which its political and
military leaders would either stand idly by or prove to be entirely impo-
tent as the strength of their economy’s manufacturing base gave way to
the economic and political dominance of finance capital. In many ways,
Spain was simply the first of many to face and endure this apparently
unavoidable truth: that as finance rises in prominence and power, the
economic underpinnings of empire inexorably slip away.
Reasons for Decline: (4) Cultural

What the early Habsburg monarchs built for Spain was not just any
old empire—it was an empire on a mission, a Catholic mission. Unlike
its Roman predecessor, this empire did not expand by assimilating the
cultural artifacts of the societies it conquered. It expanded by excluding
them. The Catholic monarchs marked the initial unification of the Span-
ish peninsula in 1492 by expelling the Jews. Philip III responded to the
crisis of the 1590s by expelling the Moriscos (1609–14); Philip II launched
the full might of Spanish arms against non-Catholics both within Chris-
tendom and beyond it; and within the Habsburg lands, as imperial power
was consolidated, heresy was pursued within the ranks of Catholics them-
selves. If the characteristic cultural institution of the Roman Empire in
all the centuries before Constantine was the new temple created to a new
god, the characteristic cultural institution of the Spanish Empire was the
Inquisition. The pre-Christian Romans welcomed new deities; the Span-
ish, by contrast, did not.
At the heart of the Spanish imperial system, therefore, was this unique
mixture of certainty and doubt: certainty in the truth of the Catholic faith
and doubt about the ability of that truth/faith to prevail without the active
support of a powerful Habsburg state. This mixture of confidence and inse-
curity had serious long-term negative consequences for both the core and
periphery of this first hegemonic phenomenon of the modern era.
At the core of the empire, the orthodoxies imposed by the Inquisition
closed down the initial intellectual stirrings that had been such a feature
of late medieval Castile and pushed out of the newly united economies

some of the most commercially minded groups that had been key to
Iberian prosperity in the late medieval period. The Spanish expansion
across the Atlantic was part of a much more general western European
awakening—part of the general transition from feudalism to capitalism
that, in the end, wholly transformed the global order and the nature of
empires within it. The Spain of Isabella and Ferdinand was at the fore-
front of that awakening, but their bid for Christian supremacy over both
Islam and Judaism had unfortunate and unanticipated consequences.
By creating the Inquisition in 1478 to evaluate the genuineness of the
conversos—those members of the Jewish community who chose to remain
in the newly united kingdom by renouncing their faith—the Catholic
kings created a mechanism for the establishment of cultural orthodoxy
within Catholicism itself.61 So that when Catholicism was challenged
after 1517 by the forces of the Reformation, and Spanish power was chal-
lenged from the 1560s by rebellion in the Netherlands, the institution
was already in place to supervise the transformation of Spanish intellec-
tual life from openness and curiosity to closure and introspection: by as
early as 1560, “the ‘open’ Spain of the renaissance had been transformed
into the partially ‘closed’ Spain of the Counter-Reformation.”62 With the
full flowering of the Inquisition—including its prohibition of books by
the Index of 1559—Spain increasingly cut itself off from trends in west-
ern European thought and action that modernized other economies and
motivated the self-interest of new and rising social classes. Through the
Inquisition, the Spanish Empire increasingly positioned itself on the back
burner of history, and cultural closure made its own contribution to long-
term imperial decay.
This weakness was there almost from the outset. Sir John Elliott writes
of a long fifteenth-century battle for control of Spanish commerce and
trade between a Catalan and Castilian middle class on the one side and an
Italian middle class (often from Genoa and Florence) on the other, and
documents the ultimate victory of the Genoese. The expulsion of the
moriscos—mainly a laboring class—did not adversely impact the trajectory
of the Spanish economy, but the earlier expulsion of the Jews undoubt-
edly did: “the year 1492 saw the disappearance from Spain of a dynamic
community, whose capital and skill had helped to enrich Castile. The gap
left by the Jews was not easily filled, and many of them were replaced not
by native Castilians but by colonies of foreign immigrants—Flemings,
Germans, Genoese—who would use their new opportunity to exploit
rather than enrich the resources of Spain.”63 Even the northern middle
class, in cities such as Burgos, seems to have retreated during the sixteenth
century from industry to finance and from the pursuit of profit to the

Spain 99
pursuit of aristocratic status. The long years of Spanish military dominance

was matched at home by the consolidation of a hidalgo culture—one that
privileged land ownership and militarism as routes to status and down-
played or devalued the social worth of commerce, investment, and manual
work. We saw a similar cultural shift in the later Roman Empire, and we
will see it again in more modern colonial empires of the British type. It
is a cultural shift that allows economic dynamism to pass from imperial
power to nonimperial challenger: a challenge that, in the Spanish case,
was particularly acute from the Dutch who broke away fully in 1648 and
effectively took over Spain’s monopoly of trade with its American colo-
nies, even capturing the entire treasure fleet in 1628.
On the edge of the Spanish Empire, by contrast, this Catholic cultural
certainty had a quite different and equally damaging effect, character-
ized there by what Henry Kamen labeled “the silence of Pizarro.”64 Spain
took over the control of cultures it did not understand, initially ruling
people whose languages it did not even comprehend; as Tzvetan Todorov
put it, “Columbus . . . discovered America but not the Americans.”65
In the plaza of Cajamarca in which Pizarro faced the Inca emperor Ata-
hualpa, there was no understanding on either side of the culture or mores
of the other. All Pizarro could do (and all he chose to do) was to slaugh-
ter Incas as though they were animals—a Spanish blitzkrieg, as Michael
Doyle labeled it66—and if, on occasion, more sophisticated conquistadores
sought knowledge of local cultures (as Cortés did, for example), it was
knowledge sought for the purposes of domination not for that of partner-
ship. Spain built its empire on the back of a belief in Castilian superior-
ity, which its early interactions with Aztecs and Incas only reinforced.
Instead of building on the strengths of the indigenous cultures it con-
quered, Spain engaged in a systematic process of conversion. The motives
behind that conversion were often high-minded, but the process itself was
invariably brutal, and the religious zeal that accompanied and legitimated
Spanish conquests in the Americas consolidated in the minds of those
who colonized in the name of Spain a way of understanding the world
that is visible in each colonial empire of the modern period. It consoli-
dated a belief in the natural superiority of Europeans, and a view of non-
European peoples as lesser mortals who can be legitimately dominated,
exploited, or even exterminated. And in doing so, it encouraged metro-
politan Spain to use its colonies as something from which to extract sur-
plus rather than something in which to invest for development. But you
can only raid something for so long without draining it of the resources
that triggered the initial raiding. Spain transposed the social relations
and economic practices of old feudal Europe into its colonial possessions

and then in consequence presided over an empire that was progressively

less and less able to compete with superior capitalist economic practices
and social relationships on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Spanish Empire: The Last Rites

The last rites of this empire were long and drawn out. Spain did not fall
in a day, as Rome did in 476 AD. Nor did Spanish governments quietly
retreat from empire, as the British were to do in the space of one gen-
eration after 1945. Instead, Spanish power in the Americas was literally
dragged out of its hands—whittled away—by a series of prolonged and
bloody civil wars within the empire and by a series of Spanish military
defeats beyond its shores.
The military defeats came first. Spain’s Bourbon kings made an unfor-
tunate family pact with their French equivalents late in the Seven Years’
War (1761) and paid the price in 1763: failing to regain Gibraltar and
losing the Malvinas (the Falkland Islands) to the British. They paid the
price again in 1805, when Nelson sunk virtually the entire Spanish navy
at the Battle of Trafalgar, removing Spain’s ability to suppress the early
stages of the independence struggles in its American colonies. The French
came next: in 1802, Napoléon forced Spain to hand over Louisiana to
his control, territory that he then sold on to a grateful United States.
Napoléon prevailed again in 1808, this time invading Spain and impris-
oning the Spanish monarch, entirely destroying the political legitimacy of
imperial control from Madrid in the process. Finally, the United States,
first taking Florida in 1819 and then Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Phil-
ippines in 1898, forcing the Spaniards to concede Cuban independence
as it did so. The very existence of the United States as an independent
power is evidence, of course, that Spain was not alone in losing its Ameri-
can empire. The British lost theirs a half-century before the great rebel-
lions against Spanish rule in South and Central America. But the reasons
for these losses were different in each case. The British lost their North
American colonies because they tried and failed to exercise a degree of
central control—taxation without representation—and did so when their
capacity as a global military power was growing. The Spaniards, by con-
trast, had been successfully running their American empire on the basis
of taxation without representation for more than two centuries by the
time Jefferson drafted The Declaration of Independence, and the Spanish
crown retained elite support against Napoléon in many of its American
colonies as late as 1807. Spain followed the British off the American
continent—it met resistance from colonial elites, first in Argentina and
Venezuela and then in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, and Ecuador,

Spain 101
which it ultimately could not contain—only when Spain’s global military

power had been reduced to a pale shadow of its former self. The British
went on to build another empire. The Spanish, by contrast, did not.
There is a rich and ongoing academic debate on quite why Spain’s
American colonies did eventually break away, and why they did so in
so fragmented and disunited a fashion.67 Partly, it would appear that
they did so, in the manner of many colonies in other empires before and
since, because the linkages—of economy, peoples, and cultures—between
core and periphery had necessarily and inadvertently thinned over time.
Tight central control within the empire had been tolerable, even welcome
to the settlers if not to the natives, in the early years of Spain’s settle-
ment of the Americas. Spain provided a market for colonial exports. It
provided military support against native resistance and foreign capture,
and Spanish society remained the model to which colonial elites con-
tinued to cling. But over time, settler societies in each of Spain’s various
and scattered American possessions developed social structures and eco-
nomic needs that were independent of the imperial society that had origi-
nally spawned them, making the subordination of the one to the other
increasingly irksome to the subordinated over time. This was particularly
true of Argentina and Venezuela by the 1800s, both of which “had boom-
ing export economies for which Spain alone could not provide a large
enough market.”68 And it is telling in this regard that when two millennia
previously Rome had conquered Spain, “there were senators of Spanish
extraction in the Roman Senate” within a century and “fifty years later a
Spanish emperor.”69 Yet it was not until 1810—at the eleventh hour of
the Spanish Empire as it were—that, amid the fight to rid Spain of its
French occupiers, the Cortes in Cadiz did get around at last to including
colonial representatives in its number: but even the liberal wing of main-
land Spain’s political class, liberals who were briefly in the ascendancy in
1810, still proved unwilling to share power equally with representatives
from what were by then Spain’s larger and more prosperous American
possessions.
Changes at the edge of the empire, that is, weakened the capacity
of successive Spanish governments to control the empire tightly from
Madrid. The logic of settler colonialism70 pulled the core and periphery
apart in the Spanish case, as it would later in the French and British
Empires as well. But in this case, the core—Madrid—hung on doggedly
and only finally let go when forced to do so by the strength of rebel arms.
As Sir John Elliott put it, “the most effective grave-diggers are usually
the imperialist[s] themselves,”71 and that was certainly true in the Span-
ish case. Spain under the Bourbon monarchs of the eighteenth century

experienced a considerable degree of reform, especially under Charles III

from 1759, that strengthened the Castilian economy, increased the tax
flow into Madrid from the Americas, and revitalized Spain’s military. But
those reforms, predicated as they were on the thinking of the Enlighten-
ment and the new theories of enlightened despotism, served simply to
undermine the traditional justifications for tight imperial control;72 and
though Spanish absolutism did briefly reassert itself after the defeat of
Napoléon, by then the only way the Spanish monarchy could hold on
to its colonies was by fighting and winning a series of bitter wars in the
colonies themselves. Those were really civil wars (as well as wars between
Spain and her colonial subjects), but regardless of their character, they
were by then too extensive and expensive (and too well led on the rebel
side) to allow victory to a limited number of underfunded and demoral-
ized Spanish armies. Spain held Cuba for nearly another century, but the
bulk of its American empire was effectively gone by 1825.
Final Thoughts
It is a feature of modern empires that they do not last long; the moment
between their inception and their demise is significantly shorter than it
was in the Roman case two millennia ago. Depending on how you mea-
sure it, of course, the arc of the Spanish Empire was either remarkably
short (a mere century of military prowess on the continent of Europe) or,
for a modern empire, remarkably long (three centuries between the arrival
of Cortés in Mexico and the establishment of an independent Mexican
republic). Either way, the Spanish achievement was, in imperial terms,
remarkable in at least two other ways as well. It was remarkable in the
modesty of the resources with which Spain began its imperial adventure,
and it was remarkable in the scale of the legacies that Spain’s imperial
adventure left behind.
Spain in 1492 looked the least likely of the emerging European powers
to establish a large and semipermanent global footprint. Newly united
as a collection of kingdoms, populated by a variety of ethnic groups and
faiths, the “Spain” that was led by Isabella and Ferdinand was uniquely
impoverished: “a dry, barren, impoverished land: 10 percent of its soil
bare rock; 35 percent poor and unproductive; 45 percent moderately fer-
tile; 10 percent rich.” The new kingdom possessed “no natural center,
no easy routes”; on the contrary, it was uniquely “fragmented, disparate,
a complex of different races, languages, civilizations.”73 And yet, from
such an inauspicious beginning, Spain “succeeded to an unusual degree
to impose its language, its faith, and culture on its new subjects.” After all,
“more than 300 million people speak Spanish today, and it is the primary

Spain 103
language in 21 countries. Roman Catholicism [is] the dominant faith of

Central and South America, while Spanish architecture, town planning,
art, music and literature” has long mixed there with indigenous cultures
to “form a vibrant new culture that has become very much a part of the
Western cultural tradition.”74 The ubiquity of the Spanish language, and
the physical and cultural legacy of Spanish power, is a truly remarkable
legacy for an empire that spent the last hundred years of its existence (or
nearly two hundred if you date its final demise to 1898) visibly in decline.
That decline was ultimately a mixture of internal weaknesses and
external challenges. We have documented those external challenges here:
as early as 1938, Earl Hamilton listed what he referred to as “most of the
[internal] evils leading Spain to ruin—such as primogeniture, mortmain,
vagabondage, deforestation, redundance of ecclesiastics, contempt for
manual labor and arts, indiscriminate alms, monetary chaos, and oppres-
sive taxation.”75 The list is not exhaustive, as hopefully is now clear, but
the very existence of such a list is indicative of one last general lesson
that we would be wise to take from the Spanish story. The Hamilton list
was not invented in 1938. It was simply gathered at that time from the
work of a series of Spanish economists writing while Spain was still an
empire—writing in the seventeenth century. What was wrong with Spain
in its imperial decline was obvious to its economists at the very time the
decline was under way, and those economists were not marginal men.
They were well connected and able to speak truth to power, but even their
clarity and their prominence were insufficient to give their message force.
Empires, as they emerge, build powerful logics of path dependency. When
set on a course, they are extraordinarily difficult to deflect by the force of
words alone. Empires come with interests and consolidate other interests,
and those interests persist in power long after the empire has peaked and
long after imperial interests have passed their appropriate sell-by date.
What is alarming about the story of Spain’s imperial decline—for those
of us keen to learn from it, the better to guide American public policy in
the contemporary period—is not just how long Spain took to rid itself
of empire. That is alarming enough. But what is even more alarming is
just how long intellectuals and policy makers close to the Spanish crown
knew why, both at home and abroad, Spain was in decline—knew, but
were unable to do anything effective about it.


CHAPTER 5
The Rise and Fall of
the British Empire
It was conventional in the first two decades of the twentieth century

to refer to the Westminster parliament in London as the “imperial parlia-
ment” and to refer to the monarch (both Edward VII and George V) as
the king-emperor. Neither parliament nor monarch carries those titles
today. Indeed, it would be an embarrassment if either of them did, for the
British Empire is now gone and the idea of empire is widely discredited,
not simply in countries once subject to British rule, but also in mainland
Britain. Yet it was not always so. Over the previous six centuries, the Eng-
lish monarchy and its London-based parliament had made more than one
attempt to create an empire; had won and lost territory by its own efforts;
and had, on occasion, acquired elements of empire without making any
conscious effort at all. So if there was ever an empire that looked both as
extensive and as accidentally created as the contemporary American one
might turn out to be, it was the British Empire. Accordingly, its rise and
fall has much to teach us about our condition and about the possibilities
and dangers that now lie before us—more to teach us than possibly any
other empire.1
The Scale of the British Empire

THE FORMAL EMPIRE
The first attempts at imperial construction by governments based in
London were both consciously made and broadly successful, with the
establishment of control by the early modern British state over immedi-
ately adjacent areas whose ruling groups were initially resistant to Eng-
lish control: Ireland from the twelfth century, Wales in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, and Scotland (via a voluntary union) in 1707.2
Of the three, Ireland was the least willing to succumb to English rule

and was therefore the most rebellious. Indeed, it took a bloody suppres-
sion of Catholic resistance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an
organized colonization of the north by mainly Scottish settlers, and the
violent defeat of a Presbyterian-led uprising in 1798 to bring Ireland to
heel. From 1801, Irish MPs sat in the London parliament—those from
the north of Ireland still do—and by then the London state had renamed
itself twice: submerging England and Wales into something called Brit-
ain from 1707 in order to include the Scots and into a self-proclaimed
United Kingdom from 1801. This proclamation helped obscure the degree
to which the kingdom was anything but united so long as Irish involve-
ment was fundamentally so reluctant and so forced.
By 1801 too, the London-based government had the makings of a
more globally distributed empire. It had already established and then lost
possession of 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard of north America, had
fought for and won control over a string of Caribbean islands and of
Canada, and had acquired governing rights on the Indian subcontinent
through the political dominance there of the UK-based East India Com-
pany.3 Violent resistance in parts of India to Company rule eventually
(1858) persuaded the government in London to take explicit public own-
ership of that particular project: replacing the East India Company with
the India Office as a formal branch of the British government. Then, a
generation later, the imperial ambitions of other European nation-states
(some old, like France and Holland; some new, like Germany and Italy)
triggered a global carve-up (J. A. Hobson called it the “new aggressive
imperialism”4) that eventually gave the London-based government con-
trol over significant parts of the Middle East and Africa, adding maybe
“4.25 million square miles and 66 million people to the empire.”5 And
emigration of British settlers to even farther-flung corners of the globe
had meanwhile added a string of what the English euphemistically chose
to call the “white dominions” (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and
from earlier, Canada), so named because their native populations had
been either suppressed or exterminated and because, though largely self-
governing, they were still technically loyal to the English Crown.6
The result was less a coherently planned and internally consistent
imperial structure and more something that came together by accident
“like the booty of an obsessive collector whose passions had come with a
rush and then gone with the wind.”7 As Bernard Porter has rightly writ-
ten, “most people have got the wrong idea about the British empire. It is
usually seen as a vast system of control in the world, immensely powerful,
founded on British strength, fuelled by acquisitiveness, both for com-
mercial profits and for territory, riding roughshod over foreign societies

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire 107
and peoples.”8 But in truth, it was not. The United Kingdom’s overseas
territorial possessions came together, for the most part, without conscious
design over more than a two century period. It was an empire made up
of a jumble of territories picked up and retained from eighteenth-century
wars, private trading companies, the private enterprise of people volun-
tarily leaving UK shores, commercial needs for naval protection, defen-
sive responses to the imperialism of others, and also—especially toward
the end—from deep seated jingoism and racism in sections of UK society
and its ruling groups. If the jumble of territories ever coalesced into a
more coherent system, it did so only during the high Victorian period.
The imperial historian John Darwin wrote this way about what he called
“the British world system”:
The years from the 1830s to the 1870s were the critical phase of Britain’s
emergence as a global power in command of a world-system. This was
partly a matter of geographical range. Before 1830, Britain had been over-
whelmingly an Atlantic power with a great eastern outpost. By the 1870s,
the scale of British activity in the Pacific, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the
Middle East and East Africa, as well as Latin America, showed that almost
no part of the world outside Europe and the United States was immune
from their interference. But it was also a measure of the rapid maturity of
Britain’s connections with the three different kinds of empire that mid-
Victorian expansion had made: the “sub-empires” of settlement, trade and
rule. It was by drawing them together into a closer relation (more of func-
tion than of form) and exploiting the different benefits that each had to
offer, that the British preserved in the more competitive world of the late
nineteenth century the geopolitical advantage won in 1815.9
So if John Darwin is right, it makes more sense to think of the Brit-

ish Empire at its height as being made up of a variety of subempires.
These included “colonies of rule (including the huge ‘sub-empire’ of
India), settlement colonies (mostly self-governing by the late nineteenth
century), protectorates, condominia (like the Sudan), mandates (after
1920), naval and military fortresses (like Gibraltar and Malta), ‘occupa-
tions’ (like Egypt and Cyprus), treaty ports and ‘concessions’ (Shanghai
was the most famous), ‘informal colonies’ of commercial pre-eminence
(like Argentina), ‘spheres of influence’ . . . like Iran, Afghanistan and the
Persian Gulf, and (not least) a rebellious province at home.”10 It was this
scattered set of territories that, by 1914, was referred to by both its advo-
cates and its critics as “the British Empire”: the one so globally scattered,
indeed, that London could proudly boast of it being the only empire ever
created on which the sun never set.11 Adding those territories altogether,

and making a rough guess at their various population sizes, it was possible
to claim, on the eve of World War I, that the government in London for-
mally “possessed the largest empire the world had ever seen, some twelve
million square miles of land, and ruled over perhaps a quarter of the
population of the globe”12—more than five hundred million people in
all.13 Certainly, for a small island, it was a very large empire.
THE INFORMAL EMPIRE
But there was more: behind this enormous formal empire, governing
groups in and around the London-based state had by 1914 created an
even larger and more complex set of informal commercial and financial
relationships. This is a set now often referred to as the United Kingdom’s
“informal empire” and is often treated in the relevant literature as the more
potent, and certainly the more permanent, face of British imperialism.
This greater potency of the informal over the formal empire was partly a
product of the gap between appearance and reality in the politics of the for-
mal empire. For all the red on the global map as World War I approached,
British rule in its imperial holdings was, Ireland apart, normally thin and
indirect rather than deeply intrusive and tightly constraining. In fact,
“throughout the empire . . . the British were generally a paramount not a
dominant power—controlling the upper echelons of government to extract
revenue and safeguard economic and strategic interests, rather than trying
to reshape indigenous societies.”14 As John Darwin put it, “the hallmark of
British imperialism was its extraordinary versatility in methods, outlook and
object. In particular, Britain excelled at recruiting local elites and interest
groups as collaborators without whose consent little would have been pos-
sible.”15 But the greater potency of the informal empire was also a product
of the centrality of commercial and financial concerns to the entire British
imperial project. “Indeed it has become conventional to argue that the Brit-
ish were reluctant imperialists and that much of the empire was acquired
as a by-product of the larger process of British economic expansion round
the world.”16 That may be too strong a claim, but certainly throughout the
nineteenth century, as we will see in more detail later, successive British
governments used both hard and soft power to steadily extend the range
and penetration of UK-based commercial entities, including manufactur-
ing, trading, and financial entities. It was this “invisible empire”17 that, over
time, drew more and more countries into a web of economic subordination
to British power.
Between 1850 and 1914, it was not simply London’s global area of
direct political control that expanded exponentially. So too did the scale

of Britain’s overseas economic interests and relationships. It is worth

remembering that if “capital’s first historical incarnation in England was
agrarian, its second was mercantile,”18 and that it was “the speed with
which British merchants moved out to search for new business, their suc-
cess in constructing new commercial connections and their dominant
position in long-distance trade” that “made Britain the great economic
power of the nineteenth century world.”19 To a significant degree, indeed,
as the United Kingdom’s formal empire ran into increasing challenges
prior to 1914, those challenges were more than offset by the expansion
of the informal empire. It was between 1850 and 1914 that “Britain’s
overseas interests underwent massive expansion” with “capital flows fund-
ing economic development and ‘nation building’ across the world.” It
was between 1850 and 1914 that for the first time “the City stood at the
center of an increasingly complex network of multilateral payments, and
Britain acquired the managerial obligation of ensuring that the system
functioned smoothly.”20
The British Empire at its height contained more than the white
dominions; the Indian subcontinent; and a string of African, Asian, and
Caribbean colonies. It also contained what John Darwin called the “vir-
tual India” of British assets overseas. These included the deep-sea marine,
British-owned foreign railways, banks and insurance companies, ship-
ping agents and packers, “and a mass of installations including utilities,
harbour-works, telegraph companies . . . plantations, mines, and conces-
sions for oil”; all of which helped ensure that, by the 1890s, “the profits
Britain drew from the growth of world trade were second to none.”21
So we do well to remember the role of finance as well as industry in the
establishment of the United Kingdom’s nineteenth-century global hege-
mony. In the years after 1815, the United Kingdom “established a clear
lead in finance, commerce and industry, and London was recognized as
the undisputed center of the world’s financial and commercial system.
By 1870 the London market was twice as large as the capital markets of
its rivals combined, and sterling had become the leading international
currency.”22 By 1914, UK foreign investments exceeded £4,000 million
and the income they generated exceeded £200 million. By then, “with
over 40 percent of the total exported capital of the world raised on its
financial markets, London had become the leading center for the issue of
foreign loans and equities,”23 a fully capitalist rentier class had come into
existence, and the viability of London as an imperial center had come to
depend heavily on its role as a financial entrepôt rather than as a major
manufacturing center with global leadership capacities.

The Basis of Empire: (1) Military

The British like to tell the story of their Empire as one of benign devel-
opment: the transmission onto the global stage of the good things that
the British do well and that others would do well to copy—the British
language, British culture, British television, British humor, and the Brit-
ish commitment to tolerance and fair play.24 It is all nonsense, of course.
Building empires is always a bloody business. In the case of the British
Empire, the establishment of a degree of global dominance by govern-
ments based in London required the fighting of at least seven wars over a
150-year period simply to ensure that the global dominance to be estab-
lished would be British and not French (in addition to three earlier wars
with the Dutch).25 The defense of that dominance, once established, then
required the maintenance of a globally significant military capacity. Partly,
that military capacity required a land army. Nineteenth-century British
governments were regularly willing to fight small wars—and occasionally
even big ones (in the Crimea in the 1850s, in Egypt in the 1880s, and in
South Africa at the turn of the century.) Indeed, the number of military
interventions by British arms quickened significantly after 1870, “includ-
ing small wars with Arab slave traders in Nyasaland (1885–1889), attacks
in West Africa on the Yonni (1887–1889), war with the Zulus (1887),
the 1885 attack on Khartoum, the 1877–78 Kaffir War, the 1878–80
Anglo-Afghan War, and the Boer War, among others.”26 But throughout
the period of imperial expansion and dominance, the UK state held back
from creating armies sufficiently large and well equipped to win and hold
continental power. Perry Anderson called that lack of a mass conscript
army one of three key silences in UK state practice that would later help
to bring the United Kingdom down.27 Certainly UK land forces proved
inadequate to the task when challenged by the unconventional warfare of
the American revolutionary army from 1776–83, and British arms alone
were never enough to defeat German militarism either between 1914 and
1918 or again after 1939. The only major army that the United Kingdom
sustained during its years of imperial dominance was the Indian one, and
that was an army staffed by British officers but mainly manned by native
Indian troops.28 It was an army strong enough to help the United King-
dom fight German and Japanese imperialism, but it was not an army pre-
pared to stand firm against the rising tide of Indian nationalism. Native
armies rarely prove reliable for defeating their own. Indeed, the mutiny by
sections of the East India Company’s army in 1857 took loyal forces more
than a year to put down and has been characterized by at least one leading
imperial historian as “one of the largest popular anti-imperial uprisings in
the history of empire.”29

In the British case, given the nature of its empire as one largely built
around trade and commerce, the key military resource was actually naval.
The UK state spent heavily throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to ensure that the United Kingdom’s capacity at sea far exceeded
in scale and quality that of its potential enemies. The key for the Brit-
ish Empire was water, not land, and UK naval power at the peak of UK
imperial dominance was truly remarkable. As Paul Kennedy noted, “the
salient feature of the eighty years that followed Trafalgar was that no other
country, or combination of countries, seriously challenged Britain’s con-
trol of the seas . . . Despite a steady reduction in its own numbers after
1815, the Royal Navy was at some times probably as powerful as the next
three or four navies in actual fighting power.”30 And what was true for the
nineteenth century was also true for the century that preceded it, when
“in government after government, the elite justified the money spent (on
ships of the line, naval canon and on seamen) in terms of a range of
spin-offs and complementarities between public investment in sea power,
on the one hand, and the merchant navy, shipbuilding, the develop-
ment of ports, dockyards, mercantile information and intelligence, the
protection of the nation’s commerce and the inflows of hard currency
(which replenished the nation’s war chest and provided a reserve asset for
the extension of credit) on the other.”31 The eighteenth-century British
navy sank French ships in the Caribbean in the name of mercantilism.
The nineteenth-century navy kept trade routes open in Asia and Africa
in the name of free trade, but in each century, the result was the same—
the military establishment of a growing commercial and industrial global
hegemony for UK trading and manufacturing classes.32
The Basis of Empire: (2) Economic

One of the reasons why the British ultimately beat the French in the
series of wars that culminated in 1815 was economic rather than mili-
tary: the fact that throughout the long eighteenth century (1688–1815),
the British were better at financing wars than were their French oppo-
nents. This is no small matter. On the contrary, it serves to remind us that
military superiority is invariably rooted in a particular kind of economic
superiority and survives easily only as long as does its accompanying eco-
nomic strength. What Britain came to possess in the eighteenth century
was a distinctive “fiscal-military state, able to raise, chiefly by borrow-
ing, but at low interest rates, and to devote to war large and increasing
amounts of money.”33 It was the superiority of the British financial sys-
tem over the French that left the French navy ill-equipped relative to the
British during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). It was the financial and

manufacturing strength of the UK economy, and the superiority of its mil-

itary equipment, which gave British arms the edge against first Napoléon’s
navy and then (with Prussian help at Waterloo) his land army too. Politi-
cal and economic superiority normally go together in the rise of empires,
and they certainly did in the British case.
At the heart of the British imperial story stands a parallel story of
economic development. It is a story in which, slowly through the eigh-
teenth century and more rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, internal industrial developments (first in the textile industry, and
later in transport and heavy industry) unexpectedly turned the United
Kingdom into the manufacturing center of a developing transnational
economy. What the United Kingdom created in the nineteenth century
was arguably “the first large, truly transnational” economy, one in which
an advanced industrial core exported “manufactures and services to pay
for its imports of food and raw material.”34 Based on a clear philoso-
phy of free trade that was placed in political dominance by the 1846
victory of the Anti-Corn Law League, mid-Victorian UK overseas trad-
ers rapidly consolidated an international division of labor of “epic pro-
portions,” one in which “Britain produced finished manufactures and
other regions sold raw materials and food to Britain.”35 It was an inter-
national division of labor that initially relied on supplier economies
over which the London-based government exercised no direct control—
particularly the slave-based economy of the American South—but after
1865, it became a trading system focused more and more on imperial
markets, giving the United Kingdom a distinct imperial economy as well
as a more generally global one. It was also an international division of
labor that was actively supported by the global weight of the UK state.
From the 1780s right through to the 1910s, successive British govern-
ments consistently sought “to extend an open trading system within and
beyond the boundaries of the empire for the benefit of national com-
merce,”36 and those governments were very successful at doing so. In
consequence, the export sector of the UK economy that had generated
about 13 percent of national income in 1800 regularly generated between
16 and 20 percent annually between 1870 and 1914; and those percent-
ages were significantly higher for key industrial sectors. Forty percent of
all UK iron and steel production in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury was exported, as was nearly four-fifths of all UK textile production,
from an economy in which, by 1900, the textiles industries and metals
(and machinery) employed between them maybe one worker in two.37
The importance to the growth of empire of this UK nineteenth-
century global dominance in the production and export of manufactured

goods should not be underestimated. As John Darwin put it, “industrial-

ism changed the context and equation of imperial power.”38 But for the
United Kingdom at least, that dominance did not miraculously appear
overnight. It was a dominance firmly grounded in the increasing contri-
bution made by imperial and transoceanic trade during the long eigh-
teenth century to the eventual industrialization of the British economy.
It was in that long eighteenth century that the global standing of the UK
economy and state was slowly transformed, initially through “an acceler-
ated growth of exports, an even faster growth of invisible trade and a
marked shift in sales of British manufactures away from Europe towards
the Americas, Africa and Asia.”39 The capital accumulated in this long,
eighteenth-century explosion of agrarian production and global trade—
not least from the trade in slaves—then financed a late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century industrial transformation: in the process trig-
gering the world’s first sustained industrial revolution and briefly turning
mid-Victorian Britain into the undisputed “workshop of the world.”
The Loss of Empire

The loss of empire, when it came, was very rapid. The empire was effec-
tively lost in the adult years of just one generation—the one that came
of age in 1945. Of course, it was always unlikely that “a nation with only
2 percent of the world’s population could control over a fifth of its land
surface, maintain half its warships and account for 40 percent of its trade
in manufactured goods for very long,”40 and in the end, it did not. The
loss of empire story—in the UK case at least—was not a unilinear one:
it was rather one of “decline, revival and then fall.”41 The clash of impe-
rialisms that produced World War I began the rot: the United Kingdom
lacked the military capacity to defeat German arms alone and exhausted
much of its treasure (its informal empire) in the process of attempting to
do so. But since UK global power was always power relative to the power
of others, the interwar dislocation of Russia, China, Germany, and France
gave the British Empire one last hurrah. In 1938, the United Kingdom
still strode the world as the major imperial presence. German and Japanese
militarism ended that global dominance at a stroke; and though much
of the United Kingdom’s global possessions were restored in 1945, the
die had by then been well and truly cast. Economic and military superior-
ity had passed from the United Kingdom to the United States, leaving the
United Kingdom with insufficient foreign funds, or the ability to trade
internationally with sufficient success, to generate the resources necessary
to defend the possessions it held in the face of movements of national
resistance. India and Burma were surrendered in the 1940s; Malaya,

Kenya, and Cyprus followed after violent independence struggles in the

1950s; and the winds of change (Macmillan’s telling phrase in 1960) saw
independence for a steady succession of former British colonies in the
wake of Ghana’s independence in 1957. By 1970, the formal empire was
largely gone—Rhodesia and Hong Kong being its only remaining sig-
nificant bits—and Margaret Thatcher’s governments disposed of those
without much ceremony in the 1980s.
Instead of the reality of an empire, the governing classes in the post–
World War II United Kingdom held on to the fiction of an empire vol-
untarily transformed into a Commonwealth—into nothing more than a
club of countries formerly under the British flag, united now by loyalty
to the English crown and by trade patterns inherited from the colonial
period. Indeed, governing classes in the post–World War II United King-
dom held on to more than one fiction in the wake of empire. The role
of UK arms in the defeat of fascism guaranteed a UK presence at the
head of all the international institutions created as that war ended and as
the Cold War began: guaranteeing to the United Kingdom a permanent
seat on the UN Security Council, a leading position in the IMF and the
World Bank, a key role in the creation and arming of NATO, and even
for a while sustaining a sterling area subordinate to and distinct from the
dollar-based exchange system created at Bretton Woods in 1944. In con-
sequence, frozen in the international architecture of the mid-1940s, the
UK governing class spent the postwar years “punching above its weight,”
as its politicians now liked to put it: acting as second-in-command to a
capitalist world order led by the United States, periodically engaging in
gung-ho military adventures of the former imperial kind (at Suez in 1965
and in the Malvinas in 1982), and steadfastly refusing to lose the United
Kingdom’s global independence by too complete an immersion in the
emerging European Union. UK politicians periodically strode the world
stage after 1945 in the manner of their nineteenth-century imperialist
predecessors. Churchill did when calling down the iron curtain. Margaret
Thatcher did when invading Iraq in the First Gulf War. Tony Blair did
when joining George W. Bush in the Second Gulf War. But these perfor-
mances were increasingly posturings without substance, as the UK politi-
cal class—and particularly its prime ministers—continued to struggle
with the reality of an empire gone for good, and gone in very quick order.
This loss of empire was accompanied by a prolonged period of eco-
nomic decline. The loss of global power was absolute. The loss of
economic position was only relative, but it was no less real for being only
that. The loss of empire visibly began immediately after World War II.
The loss of competitiveness did not. A decade of postwar dislocation

in the former axis powers gave the UK economy its own last period of
superiority through the 1950s. But from the balance of payments cri-
sis that broke in 1961, the economic writing was also on the wall. The
United Kingdom, as still the second most successful major capitalist
economy in the 1950s, slipped steadily down international economic
league tables with striking consistency over the next four decades, as UK
governments tried without notable success to recapture former global
economic greatness. James Carville’s famous maxim (“It’s the economy,
stupid!”) certainly applied to post-1961 UK politics: as first corporatist,
then monetarist, and finally third way prescriptions failed to restore the
international competitiveness of UK manufacturing industry. The Brit-
ish economy by the century’s end was “incomparably richer and more
productive . . . than in 1900 but it was no longer the world leader or
the powerhouse of the world economy. It remained one of the richest
economies in the world, but its position and performance relative to other
economies in the leading group had substantially weakened.”42 In 1900,
“Britain generated one-third of the world’s exports of manufactured
goods, a quarter in 1950, . . . less than 10 percent by 1980,”43 and even
less now that China has become so significant a global economic player.
Currently, “the U.K. continues to be the sixth largest manufacturer in the
world, ahead of France, Brazil, Russia, India and Canada. However,” as its
Business Department reported in 2010, “the difference in manufacturing
output between the U.K. and the two leading manufacturing countries—
the U.S. and China—has increased further.”44 The United Kingdom had
ranked sixth in GDP per person in 1950. By 1973, the United King-
dom ranked eleventh. By 1994, it ranked seventeenth.45 In 2010, at just
10 percent above the EU average, GDP per person in the United King-
dom fell well behind the equivalent figure for Luxemburg, the Nether-
lands, Ireland, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Finland,
and the United States.46
It is true that the financial institutions of the City regained their posi-
tion of world leadership in the decades after World War II, and that UK
manufacturing in certain key sectors (especially aerospace) did likewise,
but in general, and alongside the loss of empire, the rest of the UK econ-
omy slipped into the second tier of capitalist economic powers. Impe-
rial decline and economic decline occurred in parallel, so that as Andrew
Gamble has correctly written, understanding general British decline as a
historical process necessarily “requires analysis of the complex interplay
between the decline in British power and the decline in British competi-
tiveness.”47 The question for us, as we seek to draw lessons for our con-
temporary circumstances from UK experience, is whether that complex

interplay is UK-specific or imperially endemic. If, as I suspect, it is the

latter, then the relationship between global power and economic perfor-
mance that is so central to the UK story will need to be center stage in the
later American conversation as well.
The Reasons for Imperial Decline
Empires invariably fall partly from outside and partly from within. The
outside forces are often the more visible, but invariably the internal forces
are the more corrosive. That was certainly so in the British case.
Externally, the British Empire grew because of the weaknesses of others
and fell as those weaknesses declined. The nineteenth-century scramble
for Africa is a classic case: a whole continent subsumed into European
control because of the differences in economic (primarily military) devel-
opment between the industrializing world and the rest. Internal divisions
within both India and China let the British in. The British really did get
an empire on the cheap, and that empire was never strong enough to
impose itself on the Western European landmass. Instead, the British hid
away in their island fortress, bullied or conquered peoples less industri-
ally developed and militarily advanced than they were, and then lived
through a series of global conflicts and national resistance movements
that exposed the weakness of their empire and brought it crashing down.
The imperial superstructure looked solid. The imperial substructure was
not. The empire was genuinely only “a house of cards,” and once set up,
it collapsed with a speed and finality that those impressed only by the
façade of empire failed to see coming. As Corelli Barnett put it, “it was
the most beguiling, persistent and dangerous of British dreams that the
empire constituted a buttress of United Kingdom strength, when it actu-
ally represented a net drain on United Kingdom military resources and
a potentially perilous strategic entanglement.”48 Winston Churchill was
probably the most blind of the blind in that section of the British rul-
ing class who thought the British Empire would last forever, but though
superblind on this key question, he was certainly not alone in his belief
in the empire’s future.
Internally however, the forces eroding the capacity of successive Brit-
ish governments to sustain their global power were less easy to spot and
more structurally anchored in their invisibility. The very economic forces
and political orientations that had made the empire grow incrementally
became the very things that brought the empire down. Empires fall not
simply because they are challenged from outside. They fall too because
the very capacities that allowed their dominance to emerge prove less
than ideal for the maintenance of dominance in a world that is necessarily

transformed by the dominance itself. Legacies of the past come to act as

barriers to the future because practices, institutions, and attitudes consoli-
dated as empires rise are shed too slowly as empires decline. In the British
case, the “winners’ curse,” as Colin Read called it,49 played itself out in
the following fashion.
Reasons for Decline: (1) The Loss
of Manufacturing Dominance
Alexander Gerschenkron once wrote of “the advantages of backward-
ness”:50 the way in which developing economies can learn from the mis-
takes of already successful economies, leap over those mistakes to acquire
only the latest technologies and the most effective managerial and labor
practices, and in that way rapidly defeat the already developed econo-
mies at their own game. The data sets he used to support his argument
included those covering the critical half century in which the United
Kingdom ceased to be “the workshop of the world.” Earlier developers
like the United Kingdom do, of course, have certain market advantages
over those who would copy and replace them as manufacturing powers.
The initial technological advantage lies with the early developers. They
acquire the necessary social capital. They build up the commercial and
financial networks that spread their products worldwide, and they have
an entrepreneurial class already in place, confident in its skills and expe-
rienced in manufacturing processes. So there are “advantages of hege-
mony” that Gerschenkron’s argument ignored or discounted, but these
were advantages that the UK manufacturing class progressively squan-
dered as competition intensified from the 1880s: competition coming
from manufacturing classes in Western Europe (particularly Germany)
and in North America. The United Kingdom’s manufacturing capacity
had outcompeted nonindustrialized, artisan-based manufacturing both
inside the expanding empire and across the divided political units of
post-Napoléonic Western Europe. But with Germany (and indeed Italy)
united from 1870, with the new German state determined to make up for
lost time by overseeing rapid industrial development, with the emerging
American and German markets protected from British products by high
tariff walls, and with a new slew of industries coming to prominence that
relied on electricity rather than coal as their main source of power—the
“Second Industrial Revolution”—UK manufacturing by 1900 needed to
give itself a total makeover. In the end, it did not.
Instead, the late-Victorian UK manufacturing industry fell victim to
what Elbaum and Lazonick termed “institutional rigidities.”51 So much
of the United Kingdom’s existing industrial capital was sunk in industries

of the first wave of industrial development (e.g., textiles, coal mining,

shipbuilding, iron and steel) that its rapid redeployment to chemicals,
munitions, and the like was never going to be easy; and why should that
voluntary redeployment occur when profits were still to be made by the
more intense use of existing technologies and markets. The new tech-
nologies required new skill sets and new cohorts of both managers and
workers to deliver them; and in the critical first decades of the twentieth
century, the United Kingdom lacked the institutions capable of deliver-
ing both. The expanding global market made possible enormous econo-
mies of scale, but the bulk of UK manufacturing was still concentrated in
small factories and scattered between a myriad of small family-run firms.
The move from “proprietary capitalism” to “managerial capitalism”52
made necessary by the second industrial revolution was slow to occur in
the UK case.53 Britain “suffered from what might be called the disadvan-
tages of priority, in particular vast accumulations of capital in relatively
backward technologies and a financial sector geared primarily to overseas
investment.”54
Instead of structural reform on a massive scale, an unreformed and
increasingly uncompetitive UK manufacturing base retreated for a gen-
eration into the safer markets of empire.55 By 1913, around two-thirds
of Britain’s exports were going to the semi-industrial and nonindustrial
regions of the world.56 Imperial preference cushioned UK manufacturing
from the full force of global competition and left that manufacturing base
open to rapid contraction once the empire had gone.
The result, after 1945, was twofold. First, although the UK manufac-
turing industry did eventually restructure itself—moving from a focus
on Victorian industries to post-Victorian ones, going from ships to cars
and from coal to electricity—it did so in only a limited and ultimately
inadequate fashion. By 1961, the UK car industry was the main employer
of manufacturing labor and the most significant source of manufactur-
ing exports, and yet that car industry still manifested the weaknesses of
its own “flawed Fordism.”57 Its factories were too small, its ownership
structure was too scattered, its level of investment was too low—and it
must be said, its workers were too strong on the shop floor—to compete
adequately with first German and then Japanese car production as those
economies emerged from their brief period of postwar dislocation.
The result—the second feature of the United Kingdom’s postwar man-
ufacturing condition—was that from 1966 (the peak year for manufactur-
ing employment in the postwar United Kingdom), the car industry and
others began to experience “negative de-industrialization.”58 Like more
successful economies elsewhere, the entire UK economy deindustrialized.

Service employment and output came to play a greater and greater role
in the construction and delivery of the United Kingdom’s GDP, and
manufacturing employment shrank by 2000 to half its 1966 peak. But
unlike those more successful economies, the bulk of UK deindustrializa-
tion was increasingly negative rather than positive in form: it was the
product of factories shedding jobs because they could not compete, rather
than shedding jobs because they were becoming ultraproductive.59 These
days, economies with strong manufacturing bases run large balance of
trade surpluses. Those with weak manufacturing bases run balance
of trade deficits. The United Kingdom moved into a trade deficit on its
manufacturing ledger in 1983 and has been in deficit ever since.
Reasons for Decline: (2) The Separation

of Industry and Finance
All capitalist economies contain, to varying degrees between individual
capitalisms and to varying degrees over time, different circuits of capital:
merchant capital, agrarian capital, industrial capital, and financial capi-
tal. Moreover, it is a feature of hegemonic economies that, as their hege-
monic presence grows, so too does the weight of financial capital in the
circuits that constitute them. That increasing weight is partly a product
of the surpluses earned by global dominance then coming back to the
hegemonic center. It is partly a product of other economies coming to
the center to buy the technology that first established that hegemony
and needing to borrow local finance to do so; and it is partly because the
export needs of a dominant economy initially require the outflow of local
funds to lubricate its export sales. In hegemonic economies, this outflow
of capital is initially functional to all its key capitalist strata—to mer-
chants, farmers, and industrialists as well as to bankers—but over time it
inevitably creates a gap between finance and industry that can undermine
the capacity of local financial institutions to later help the hegemonic
industrial base retool itself in order to meet overseas competitive chal-
lenges that its hegemony has helped call into existence. In the UK case,
this gap was particularly visible from as early as the 1880s.
The story has often been told of how initially Britain’s world monop-
oly position gave its industrial capitalists surpluses on which internally
financed long-term investment could proceed apace, how that world
monopoly position also gave sterling a particular role in the nineteenth-
century world economy (broadly similar to that of the dollar between
1944 and 197160), and how it attracted to London foreign borrowers
keen to draw on those surpluses for their own industrial takeoff. From
the 1870s in consequence, the English banking system found it more

profitable to finance foreign trade and to handle portfolio investment

abroad than to seek out domestic industrial demand for long-term
finance. This established both a distance between industrial and financial
interests as well as an international focus for British banking practices that
had no close, contemporary parallel elsewhere.
Initially, this fracturing of interests between nationally based industrial
and internationally oriented financial capital was mutually beneficial. So
long as Britain was the principal source of both capital and consumer
goods, “this specialization did not constitute a serious obstacle to indus-
trial accumulation in Britain but actually stimulated it through the cre-
ation of overseas demand.”61 But once British domination of world trade
and industrial production had gone, the interests of the two sections of
British capital proved increasingly incompatible in at least two senses,
both of which would “later affect Britain’s relative power in the world.
The first was the way in which the country was contributing to the long-
term expansion of other nations, both by establishing and developing for-
eign industries and agriculture with repeated financial injections and by
building railways, harbors and steamships which would enable overseas
producers to rival its own production in future decades.”62 The second
was the way in which nationally based industrialists found themselves
locked into increasingly outmoded industries and production meth-
ods, while at the same time being both disadvantaged in their access to
long-term credit relative to their competitors and subject to a political
class in which financial interests had a disproportionately strong voice.
Unlike their counterparts in Japan and Germany, British industrialists
found their bankers geared to the export of capital and preoccupied with
maintaining the “conditions in which exported capital was safe, sterling
defended and international commercial and financial operations could
freely function.”63 They found it difficult to persuade bankers to make
long-term loans to industry on any scale, or to put up risk capital in suf-
ficient quantities, and hence were driven back into a disproportionately
heavy reliance on their own by now inadequate sources of internal funds
to fuel the investment process.64
After 1870, capital exports regularly surpassed capital formation at home;

by the last years before the First World War, their volume was twice as
large. The value of U.K. holdings abroad in 1913—no less than 43 per
cent of the world total—was probably greater than that of U.S. corpora-
tions in 1973. This enormous outflow generated rentier incomes that for
a brief Edwardian spell even exceeded the City’s commercial and financial
earnings. Yet the latter were the real prize of the fin-de-siècle economy.
The dominance of London within the networks of international exchange

binding the world market together increased as Britain’s national perfor-

mance within it slipped.65
“The result of this two-track development of capital” in the late

nineteenth-century UK economy “was a marked division within the
propertied middle class.”66 The division was partly a geographical one,
split between a commercial middle class in London and an industrial
middle class in the English north. But it was also a political division—a
gap of empathy and social standing between an industrial entrepreneurial
class located far from London and a political elite still dominated by an
aristocracy whose own income base was increasingly shifting from rents
to interest. The United Kingdom’s industrial owning class was, from
the outset of the United Kingdom’s rise to brief global manufacturing
dominance, heavily concentrated regionally away from London and, as a
class, never replaced in political dominance more traditional elites whose
income depended on banking and on land. “The political dome of the
dominant bloc,” as Perry Anderson put it, “had indeed been essentially
landowning throughout most of the nineteenth century,” and “when
agrarian property lost its weight it was not industry but finance which
became the hegemonic form of capital, in a City socially and culturally
in many ways closer to the wealth of estates than of factories.”67 What
the United Kingdom’s brief period of global manufacturing dominance
then consolidated was effectively a system of “gentlemanly capitalism”:68
a fusion of aristocratic and banking interests and the dissemination of a
social culture that prioritized the making of money from money over the
making of money from industrial enterprise.
The key analysts of the character and significance of “gentlemanly
capitalism”—the economic historians Cain and Hopkins—insisted
throughout their scholarship on the critical link between the City (Lon-
don’s financial district) and imperialism:
The imperial mission was the export version of the gentlemanly order. In
some respects indeed, the gentlemanly code appeared in bolder format
abroad in order to counter the lure of an alien environment . . . Gen-
tlemanly capitalism undoubtedly helped promote expansionist forces of
investment, commerce and migration throughout the world, including
Europe and the United States. Its main dynamic was the drive to create
an international trading system centered on London and mediated by
sterling . . . British manufactured exports were a very visible part of this
panorama, but the design was not drawn by industrialists and . . . their
interests were not paramount. This vision was not inevitably imperialistic,
nor were its imperialist forms invariably militaristic. Nevertheless, there

was a tendency for expansionist impulses to become imperialist, especially

where they came up against societies which needed reforming or restruc-
turing before expansionist ambitions could be realized.69
This London-based gentlemanly capitalism sat more easily with the

expansion of empire than had the liberal capitalism of Manchester’s
industrial elite partly because the imperial project was from its outset—
both in personnel and in culture—far more an aristocratic than a mid-
dle class phenomenon. Throughout the nineteenth century, the sons of
privilege ran the formal empire.70 By century’s end, the sons of privilege
headed the financial institutions of the City. Increasingly over time, the
protection of both became the top priority of a political class that was
equally privileged. “The pattern of class relations and financial institu-
tions which developed was well adapted for a role of servicing the inter-
nationalization of capital, but it was a major obstacle to rapid industrial
transformation.”71 The empire and the City worked together to reori-
ent the priorities of late nineteenth-century politics outward, toward
the United Kingdom’s global role and the strength of its naval military
underpinnings. In the process, attempts to reinforce the United King-
dom’s dwindling manufacturing fortunes—attempts that prioritized an
inward focus by the UK state—regularly fell afoul of the City’s need
for unfettered commercial and financial access to global markets. In the
clash between industrial interests and financial ones, the more the empire
grew the more did political weight shift toward the financial, and away
from the industrial, lobby. Twentieth-century UK governments regularly
put the defense of sterling and the interests of the City before the defense
of UK-based manufacturers and the interests of labor. They did so in
1903, rejecting Joseph Chamberlain’s call for imperial preference; and
they were still doing so a century later, stoutly defending the autonomy
of the City by declining to submerge sterling into the euro.
The longevity of this prioritizing of international financial interests
over national industrial ones points to a further consequence of imperial-
ism that we would do well not to discount—namely, the degree to which,
over time in an imperial economy, industrial interests themselves diverge:
the way in which manufacturing industry splits into a small- and medium-
size sector still predominantly dependent on the domestic market, and
into a series of large firms who are themselves global players. The mod-
ern UK economy is currently home to a disproportionately large number
of such firms, firms that share with the City a commitment to global
sourcing, global production chains, and global markets. The “hollowing
out” of British manufacturing that was such a feature of the post-1961
UK economy was not just the consequence of local underinvestment and

subsequent negative de-industrialization. The other process in play in the

hollowing out of modern UK manufacturing we would now recognize as
“outsourcing”: the shifting by large UK-based firms of their production
processes (and markets) more and more overseas. The result, potentially
devastating to center-left political forces seeking to harness state and pri-
vate enterprise in an alliance for national economic reconstruction, is a
new and fundamental difference between UK industry and UK capital.
UK capital flourishes by going abroad. UK-based industry stays home
and flourishes less.
Reasons for Decline: (3) Liberal Militarism72

Globally hegemonic powers spend money on armaments and on war.
The United Kingdom did (and still does) both. Globally hegemonic
powers develop and sustain a large military-industrial complex. The
United Kingdom still has that: a manufacturing sector disproportion-
ately focused on (and holding global leadership capacities in) military
rather than civilian industrial production. And globally hegemonic pow-
ers of the United Kingdom kind (those that industrialized prior to domi-
nance with only the minimum of direct state economic leadership) carry
forward in time a propensity for what David Edgerton properly called
“liberal militarism”—namely, a state propensity to regularly reconfigure
military-focused manufacturing while deliberately abstaining from simi-
lar leadership in the civilian sector. To the growing burden of the City on
the United Kingdom’s long-term general economic health, we need to
add the long-term costs of the asymmetrical relationship between succes-
sive UK governments and the two wings of its economy’s manufacturing
base—military and civilian.
David Edgerton has characterized “liberal militarism” as “a ‘British
Way in Warfare’ which has relied on technology rather than manpower,”
now copied by the United States.73 “Four features of ‘liberal militarism’
need highlighting. Firstly, it does not involve the use of mass conscript
armies. Second, it relies on technology and professionals to make up for
this deficiency in manpower. Third, ‘liberal militarist’ armed forces are
not only directed at enemy armies but also at their civilian populations
and economic capacity. Fourth, ‘liberal militarism’ advances under the
banner of its own universalist ideology and conception of a world order,
whether Pax Britannica or Pax Americana.” Liberal militarism is of long
standing in the UK case. It is hard to conjure now, but the eighteenth-
century British state was a genuinely fiscal-military one,74 strengthening
its global role by the deployment of the very latest military technolo-
gies, relatively regardless of cost. Remarkably, over the long eighteenth

century from 1688 to 1815, “between 75 per cent and 85 per cent of
annual expenditure” by successive British governments “went either on
current spending on the army, navy or ordnance or to service the debts
incurred to pay for earlier wars.”75 This was money spent on a land army,
normally heavily concentrated in Ireland; on a local militia; on foreign
allies and mercenaries; and—out-consuming all the rest—on a develop-
ing naval capacity and a supporting naval-industrial complex. The sums
of money involved were, for the time, enormous. Lord Nelson’s flagship,
The Victory, cost five times more to build (in 1765) than the capital out-
lay for the then largest iron works in Britain—Ambrose Crowley’s. The
personnel on a single major ship of the line, of which The Victory was
one—some nine hundred souls—made that ship the largest single con-
centration of organized labor anywhere in the eighteenth-century British
economy; and the naval dockyards and victualing centers that supported
a navy of this scale employed more people than any single British industry
of the time. Indeed, “naval dockyards were, by the standards of the day,
immense enterprises. They were the largest industrial units in the coun-
try” with “the navy . . . one of the largest single employers of civilian labor
in eighteenth-century England.”76
This focus by the UK state on the maintenance of naval superiority
lasted through to 1914, even though by then the cost of large battle-
ships had grown exponentially.77 Immediately prior to World War I, the
military outlay was considerable and the distribution of naval power simi-
lar in scale to that of the United States today. John Darwin described it
this way:
The Navy was deployed on nine stations, each embracing a vast area of
sea. On the Home Station were eighteen battleships and sixteen cruisers as
well as a mass of smaller craft . . . In the Mediterranean . . . the British . . .
kept a large force of twelve battleships and thirteen cruisers in a fleet of
more than forty ships. On other stations, with the exception of China,
they relied on cruisers to maintain their seaborne supremacy: ten in the
western Atlantic . . . ; two off the east coast of South America; four in
the Eastern Pacific; seven to patrol the Cape of Good Hope and the West
African coast; four on the East Indies station; and eight on the Austra-
lian . . . On extra-European stations, the most visible sign of British sea-
power was often the gunboat . . . but the workhorse of British sea-power
beyond European waters was the faster, well-armed, long-range cruiser,
patrolling the sea-lanes.78
And it was not just ships but also bases: in 1914, British naval supremacy
rested—according to its senior admiral—on “five strategic keys that ‘lock

up the world’—the great British bases at Dover, Gibraltar, Alexandria, the

Cape of Good Hope and Singapore.”79
There is an ongoing debate in the relevant literature about the size
of UK military spending in the nineteenth century relative to the size of
the UK economy of that period—Paul Kennedy paradoxically arguing
in that debate against his own “imperial overstretch” thesis that, in the
UK case at least, “the most remarkable feature of the post-1815 Pax Bri-
tannia was its cheapness.”80 It was the twentieth-century military cost of
empire that eventually brought the empire down and left the UK civilian
economy with a disproportionally large military-industrial complex. Even
after full-scale demobilization at the end of the Great War, UK military
expenditure in the 1920s was the still the highest of any major power (and
that included the United States).81 Even after full-scale demobilization
after World War II, in relation to GDP, defense expenditure in the United
Kingdom “was about twice as great in the late 1940s as in 1935 and three
times greater in the early 1950s.”82 It was also consistently higher as a
proportion of GDP than that of any other major European state.83 UK
defense expenditure was to remain at these unprecedented peacetime lev-
els right through to the 1990s, as in the decades after 1945, “a high level
of defense spending became a distinctive feature of the British economy,
and a key factor influencing high-technology industry.”84 As late as 1957
indeed, a full “40 percent of all civil servants were in defense depart-
ments . . . about the same number (423,000) as in the whole British state
in 1929 (434,000).”85 As late as 1988, Britain’s defense budget remained
“the third- or fourth-largest (depending upon how China’s total is mea-
sured), its navy and air force the fourth-largest” and its global strategic
commitments still “very extensive . . . not only in the 65,000 troops in
Germany as its contribution to NATO’s Central Front, but also in gar-
risons and naval bases across the globe—Belize, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Hong
Kong, the Falklands, Brunei, the Indian Ocean.”86 Even today, the United
Kingdom’s main arms producer, BAE Systems, remains the manufactur-
ing sector’s largest single employer of labor.87
Well into the post–World War II period, therefore, it made sense to
think of the twentieth-century UK state not simply as a welfare state
but also as a warfare state88—one quite capable, for example, of rapidly
restructuring aircraft production for military purposes (as it did in 1958)
even when the political leadership of the UK state was firmly in Con-
servative hands. Little wonder then that state procurement of weapons,
and state funding of military research and development, should have
remained such a feature of post-1945 UK political practice; or that the
UK civilian economy should have been such a center of world excellence

in militarily related technologies (not least aircraft engines) and such an

exporter of weaponry. Overall defense spending is now down, slipping
well below the 2.5 percent of GDP that it averaged through the late Victo-
rian period;89 but even so, and as late as the 1970s, of the major capitalist
powers, Britain still “spent the highest proportion of total national R&D
spending (approximately 28 per cent), and between 1976 and 1981 the
highest proportion of government R&D spending (over 50 per cent), on
defense.”90 Even under New Labour in 2005, almost a third of all public
spending on research was funded by the Ministry of Defence—totaling
£2.6 billion in 2004, far outspending even the NHS.91 France and Britain
may have competed in the 1930s to be the world’s largest arms exporter,
but more recently the main competition has been American; and in both
competitions, UK-based arms manufacturers have excelled. UK-based
arms manufacturers now regularly capture 20 percent of the global trade
in arms, and in 2010, the United Kingdom’s BAE Systems actually topped
the list of the world’s largest arms manufacturers. BAE’s arms sales in
2008 exceeded the GDP of at least one hundred countries. Moreover, it
cannot be without long-term economic significance that, from the 1980s,
“Britain remained a net exporter of armaments but became a net importer
of manufacturers.”92 Strong economies would presumably have had those
net flows set the other way round.
As we saw in Chapter 2, there is a huge and long-standing debate in
the relevant academic literatures about whether military expenditures of
this scale and proportion help or hinder the growth and competitive-
ness of the rest of the economy’s manufacturing base.93 That debate
is huge and prolonged in part because ultimately the answer varies by
circumstance. Certainly, high naval expenditures in the two centuries
before 1914 do not appear to have slowed or distorted general UK eco-
nomic growth. On the contrary, naval power was a vital prerequisite for
that growth, keeping global markets and world sea routes fully open for
trade. But post-1945, the balance of advantage and disadvantage associ-
ated with heavy military expenditure seemed to shift. Certainly by the
1960s, Labour governments at least were bemoaning the disproportionate
concentration of UK research and development in the military-industrial
sector and beginning what would be an ultimately futile half-century
search for an effective industrial policy (and associated structures of gov-
ernance) capable of reconstituting a general UK global competitive edge.
But by then (by 1964), catching up would prove far too difficult to do. For
an opportunity had been wasted in the 1950s—an opportunity created
by the temporary postwar dislocation of both the German and Japanese
economies—to establish UK global leadership on the basis of economic

strength rather than of imperial possession. It was an opportunity that

first the Attlee-led Labour government, and then a series of Conservative
ones, declined to take. Stephen Blank put it this way:94
The external constraints on British economic performance differed from

the internal constraints in that, to a large extent, they were the result of
a series of political choices made by post-war governments to restore and
preserve Britain’s role as a world power. For much of the post-war period,
domestic and international economic policy was dominated by and sub-
ordinated to the goals of foreign policy: goals which Britain was incapable
of realizing. Yet the attempt to achieve these goals led successive govern-
ments to sacrifice the domestic economy again and again . . . Eventually,
although not until the second half of the 1960s British political leaders
came to see that the international role Britain had sought to play since
1945 was beyond its capacity. By then, however, enormous damage had
been inflicted on the domestic economy. Moreover, largely because of the
retardation of economic growth that had been the result of those earlier
policies, Britain was in a poor position to cope effectively with the new
challenges of the 1970s: domestic and international.
This subordination of domestic to foreign policy should not entirely

surprise us, however, since the state apparatus over which those initial
postwar UK governments presided was an apparatus created for empire
rather than for economic catch-up.95 Its strongest institutional nexus in
the years before 1964 was the one linking the Treasury to the Foreign
Office and to the Ministries of Supply and Defence. As the United King-
dom’s global power then waned, so also did the standing of the Foreign
Office, replaced within the core institutional triangle by various iterations
of a civilian industry ministry. To this day, the UK state remains a triangu-
lar structure linking the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, and the Indus-
try Ministry (with the last perennially renamed and persistently denied
real purpose and purchase). There is an important “industry ministry”
story to be told for postwar Britain, and sadly it remains (as we witnessed
once more with Vince Cable in the coalition government after 2010)
largely a story of failure.96 Even today, after years of attempts of civilian
modernization and a curtailing of the UK defense budget, arms sales still
rose globally during the recent economic downturn, and BAE (as we have
just noted) still tops the list of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers.
So on balance, in the case of the postwar United Kingdom at least, the
economic costs of liberal militarism came to outweigh the advantages; and
with hindsight we can now see that, for far too long for the competitive
health of the United Kingdom’s manufacturing sector, postwar UK gov-
ernments attempted to retain the possessions and strappings of empire.

For far too long, “both Labour and Conservative governments . . . pur-
sued an expensive strategy of keeping Britain’s military industries at the
leading edge.”97 For far too long, a disproportionately large proportion
of UK research and development (and the associated scientists and engi-
neers) remained focused on military, not civilian, production. All this at
the very time when “countries such as Japan were investing in the long-
term technological development of motor vehicles and other manufac-
turing industries”98 under strong state leadership. That this was allowed
to happen was ultimately a consequence of failed political leadership: a
genuine, postwar “wasting of the British economy.”99 As the conservative
historian Corelli Barnett put it, “the world-power men in London sim-
ply failed to heed the evidence of the 1930s and the Second World War
that the Commonwealth was a strategic liability to Britain, not an asset,”
and that “the British Empire was one of the most outstanding examples
of strategic over-extension in history.”100 Those same world-power politi-
cians also failed to adjust immediate postwar policy to meet the United
Kingdom’s new economic standing—one in which “Britain, which had
once been the world’s greatest creditor nation, had become the world’s
greatest debtor.”101 Writing to the same conference as Barnett, the far less
conservative Andrew Gamble put it this way: “the question of decline
only makes sense by considering the interrelationship of the relative eco-
nomic decline and the absolute decline in world power. It was always
the absolute decline that mattered most to the British political elite, and
measures to stave that off and preserve Britain’s traditional global role
always took preference over the task of modernizing the British economy
and British society.”102 Contemporary Britain continues to pay a heavy
price for that preference.
Reasons for Decline: (4) The Consolidation

of an Imperial Mind-Set
In the modern era, the legacies of empire are not simply institutional and
economic; they are also cultural. In empire after empire, predominant
patterns of thought emerge to reinforce the imperial project, patterns that
then help undermine the very imperialism that first created them. In the
UK case, those ideational legacies are at least twofold: legacies of hubris
and inertia.
There is a legitimate debate in the relevant historical literature about
how deep and wide support was for the British Empire even at its height.
It is possible to point to critics of imperialism throughout the nineteenth
century: free trade liberal critics as the United Kingdom began to lay
claim to more and more territory from the 1840s and center-left (social

democratic) critics at century’s end, when imperial jingoism was at its

height. But there is no escaping the fact that those critics remained a minor-
ity voice within the British political class prior to 1914—imperialism at
its height was politically popular—and that although the proportions
shifted thereafter, the empire project left a generalized hubris among Brit-
ish politicians and state administrators that has still not entirely gone
away, a lingering belief that the British Empire benefited those fortunate
enough to have had it imposed on them. Though the evidence against
such a claim is overwhelming, the British—if Chalmers Johnson is to be
believed—“seem to have no qualms about distorting the historical record
in order to prettify their imperialism,” by downplaying the degree to
which “racist attitudes spread throughout the British empire and retained
a tenacious hold on English thought well into the twentieth century.”103
At the height of the British Empire, imperial apologists liked to com-
pare their empire to that of Rome, but in one key sense at least that
comparison was and is a false one, forgetting that “the Romans were
largely color blind and . . . created a genuine sense of universal imperial
citizenship, something the British never achieved.”104 Instead, the British
abroad quickly became adept at deploying “a new ideology of enlightened
reform and disinterested trusteeship . . . based on the claim that British
control brought a ‘rescue from chaos’ and offered escape from supersti-
tion, predation and violence towards the sunlit uplands of order.”105 It
was all nonsense, of course, and hard to square with, for example, the
British record of torture in colonies such as Kenya for which later govern-
ments had to apologize and make recompense;106 but it sold well at home.
At its height, the British Empire was one in which the majority of the
monarch’s subjects were nonwhite, capable of being kept in their place
only by the articulation and imposition of a powerful sense of racial and
cultural superiority by their imperial masters. It was a sense of superior-
ity and global importance that persisted long after the empire itself had
faded away.
Given the disproportionate involvement of residual aristocratic ele-
ments in the staffing of the Empire and the general propensity of right-
wing politics to emphasis issues of national (rather than class) interest,
the persistence of an imperial hubris on the right of British politics is
perhaps only to be expected. What is less clear is why center-left parties
in the United Kingdom should still be so vulnerable to the same thing.
That vulnerability has a structural, as well as a personal and accidental,
origin. Tony Blair’s personality may explain some of the reason for Brit-
ish involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it does not explain it
all.107 The vulnerability of the British center-left to the residue of imperial

hubris lies in the manner in which the relatively slow transformation of

the precapitalist UK economy into an industrial capitalist one, and the
associated slowness (or in the US case, the entire absence) of the destruc-
tion of a traditional peasantry, combined in the nineteenth century to
moderate early working-class politics in both the United Kingdom and
United States: moderate, that is, when compared to labor politics in later
industrializers like Germany, Russia, and Japan.108 It was this modera-
tion which was then reinforced in Britain by the bounty of empire, with
the contradictions of early capitalist accumulation being softened in the
core of the global system by being pushed out to its edge. It is not just
conservative politics in the United Kingdom (and the United States) that
is anchored away to the right in the wake of empire. The whole center of
political gravity shifts that way, to the extent that entire labor movements
are suborned into the imperial project. This incorporation is both extreme
and unavoidably visible in the contemporary US case, but it is there too
in the United Kingdom. British laborism was always less radical than
mainstream European social democracy and in large measure remains so.
Remember with what ease Gordon Brown could articulate a discourse of
“Britishness,” and with what speed the post–New Labour parliamentary
leadership moved, in 2012, to condemn the renewed Argentinean claims
on the Malvinas.109 Across the entire political spectrum in Britain, the
mental legacies of empire remain visibly intact.
There is more. When many scholars go back to the nineteenth-century
heyday of the British Empire, looking for the seeds of its internal decay,
they often point to what they term “the loss of the industrial spirit” and
to a supposed softening of dominant British attitudes to a whole array
of issues, from powers abroad to the poor at home. Corelli Barnett, for
one, has written extensively of this supposed softening, laying the blame
squarely on the nineteenth-century revival of religion that later fed into
the welfare reformism of the British Labour Party, as well as on the cre-
ation of a system of elite schools that trained the sons of privilege in the
ways of benign governance rather than in those of ruthless conquest.110
Martin Weiner’s work is often cited alongside that of Barnett; his work
focused on the way in which the making of money from the making
of things (a bourgeois culture) was replaced in the hierarchy of social
prestige by the making of money from the circulation of money itself
(an aristocratic one)—what Weiner called “the cultural domestication of
the industrial revolution.”111 But both theses have been effectively chal-
lenged on the historical data. Public schools did far more than teach the
sons of privilege how to run an empire. They taught them science and
mathematics too; and Victorian bourgeois culture was as strong on the

values of enterprise and capital accumulation as it was on the importance

of finance and the superiority of gentlemen. Where Barnett and Weiner
saw ideational change (and retreat), others more valuably have seen ide-
ational inertia. Victorian imperial supremacy went hand in hand with
the global opening of markets and the light regulation of industry: ideas
appropriate to the strongest economy in the global system. But when that
superiority slipped, ideational slippage did not occur in parallel. Rather,
twentieth-century dominant thought in the United Kingdom remained
wedded to free trade maxims long after their sell-by date had passed.
What Empire did to British politics was to trap it in a Victorian mind-
set. As David Marquand put it, “having made one cultural-revolution in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century . . . Britain [was] unable to make
another in the twentieth century. In the age of the industrial laboratory,
the chemical plant, and later of the computer, she stuck to the mental
furniture of the age of steam.”112
Possibly there is a general truth here: that ultimately the whole cen-
ter of gravity of UK (and indeed US) politics can only be explained the
imperial way. The ease with which UK (and later US) industrial capi-
tal established a powerful global presence—without any direct and sys-
tematic state intervention for that purpose—reinforced in conservative
circles, once their economies became globally hegemonic, an equation
of business interests with limited government at home and with market-
opening policies abroad. It was in catch-up capitalisms, not in early capi-
talisms, that conservative political elites and supporting business leaders
readily deployed state-led civilian industrial modernization programs. It
was business and political elites in economies like Germany and France
(and indeed, even in the United States after the Civil War and in Japan
after World War II) who deployed protectionism against the penetration
of their domestic markets by manufactured goods from stronger econo-
mies abroad. Political and industrial elites in early capitalisms, by com-
parison, became wedded to limited government and free trade maxims
during their period of global dominance, when they needed open mar-
kets to keep their export factories in full production, and then proved
slow to shed that noninterventionist and free trade mentality when their
economic supremacy began to wane. We invariably see the persistence
of a “strong state, free market” classical liberalism in imperial capitalisms
that was functional in the beginning of their imperial story, but not to
its end. Ultimately, ideas too, and not just institutions and policies, help
bring empires down.

The Retreat from Empire

UK governments were forced in the end to exercise some degree of sense.
The very scale of the empire they governed made its post–World War II
defense too costly to bear, especially once the fight to defeat Nazism had
left the UK treasury entirely depleted. India—the jewel in the crown—
was immediately abandoned when the European fighting was over; and
after several unsuccessfully attempts in the 1950s to maintain the last
vestiges of direct colonial rule in the face of internal resistance (in Malaya,
Kenya, and Cyprus), successive UK governments quickly learned their
lesson. As we noted earlier, they reset the empire as a commonwealth of
free nations and entirely gave up the formal imperial game.
Modern American commentators have on occasion commented favor-
ably on that,113 seeing in it a wise and voluntary process of imperial decon-
struction. But the reality was otherwise. The British did not voluntarily
retreat from empire. Rather, they were driven out: driven out of India by
carefully orchestrated and long-sustained campaigns of civil disobedience
and driven out of other key colonies later by more violent campaigns
of national resistance. To both peaceful and violent protest movements,
successive postwar UK governments responded with a mixture of limited
reform and state violence, with that violence being at its most acute where
the colonies being defended had large white settler populations already in
place.114 We noted in Chapter 4, and will again in Chapter 7, the exis-
tence of what we might term “the logic of settler colonialism”: the emer-
gence of a gap in interests between colonial settlers and the metropolitan
government that had initially settled them. What established that gap was
the challenge to settler power and colonial rule by movements of national
liberation that invariably sought freedom from metropolitan control as
well as the redistribution of power in the former colony from settlers to
native populations. The settlers invariably resisted the latter, and did so by
clinging all the more firmly to the metropolitan link that initially created
(and now guaranteed) their positions of colonial privilege. And the more
they resisted, the wider the gap eventually became between the settlers
on the one side and the retreating imperial government on the other, a
gap captured rather graphically by the views of settlers expressed by one
London politician in the Kenyan case: “What do I care about the f***ing
settlers, let them bloody well look after themselves.”115
But it was not always so. In fact, metropolitan governments in all
the colonial empires established by European powers after 1870—in the
Congo by the Belgians, in North Africa by the French, in East Asia by
the Dutch, as well as in South Asia and Africa by the British—proved
perfectly happy to sustain those white colonial privileges until national

liberation movements made the military (and ideological) price of empire

too high. Indeed, many of the governments proved equally happy to see
their imperial control reestablished after 1945 in areas “liberated” by the
Japanese during World War II. But eventually, and actually quite quickly in
imperial terms, governments in Western Europe—including the British—
found that they lacked the resources and the will to sustain their far-flung
imperial possessions. The settlers, by contrast, made no such finding and
instead engaged in bitter internal struggles with national liberation move-
ments that often produced—after years of low-intensity warfare that
cost thousands of lives—settlements in former colonies in which politi-
cal power went to the leaders of the resistance movements but economic
power remained in settler hands. Where the colonies were physically close
and their settler populations had direct political representation in the met-
ropolitan system of government, as with the northern Irish in the United
Kingdom and the pied-noirs in Algeria, the abandonment of settlers by
retreating imperial governments was particularly controversial and pro-
tracted. Where the geographical gap was greater but the resistance equally
determined, the abandonment of settlers by metropolitan governments
tended to be more abrupt. But near and far, the British (like the Dutch,
Belgians, and French) were, in the end, driven from empire by resistance
from former colonial subjects to both their presence and their rule: driven
out directly from certain colonies by the subjects who chose to fight them
there and driven out indirectly from other colonies by the fear that, without
rapid withdrawal, similar patterns of resistance would emerge there as well.
Lessons for America

This rapid and broadly based retreat from empire by the postwar British
was therefore not entirely voluntary, but it was, as Chalmers Johnson said,
entirely wise, for empires always do more than rise. They also fall; so that
ultimately the only issue—for imperialists and anti-imperialists alike—is
whether, regardless of its apparent power and permanence, the empire
will fall involuntarily and with bloodshed or be quietly dismantled in
some managed incremental fashion. At the peak of any empire, there are
invariably voices insisting that its global dominance can be maintained if
only enough resources and willpower are directed to the imperial project:
but those voices mislead. For that is the thing about peaks: after them, it
is always downhill all the way. The only real choice is between “the ava-
lanche” and the “steady as you go,” and the bigger the empire, the steeper
the incline that needs to be managed.
The management of that incline by the British is particularly relevant
to the underlying purpose of this volume because, as Bernard Porter put

it in his Empire and Superempire, the United States and the United King-
dom “are comparable, whether as empires or not.” Indeed, the thrust of
Porter’s argument was less that “America was imperialistic as that she was
not much less imperialistic in her history than one other country, Brit-
ain, which is generally labeled imperialistic, even when she was not being
much more imperialistic than America.” As he said,
American commercial and the financial sway in the world in the second
half of the 20th century bears an obvious resemblance to Britain’s in the
nineteenth, whatever we want to label them. Both were widespread, enter-
prising, pushy, sometimes unscrupulous, and more successful than most
other contemporary nations’ investments and trades. Both were sometimes
aided by their governments, though this was not supposed to be allowed
in strict free trade theory. Each could lead to “exploitation,” in the pejora-
tive sense of the word, that is, the abuse of human labor; especially where
local people were needed to grow or extract the things Britain and America
needed to import or—latterly—to manufacture goods cheaply for them.116
So perhaps there are general lessons here on which we will be able to

draw later. One lesson (similar to that evident in Spain) is that coun-
tries can end up with empires by accident rather than by design: so just
because the US political class regularly eschews the idea of empire, this
does not automatically mean that it might not acquire (or indeed have
already acquired) one. A second lesson, rather different from the evidence
of Spain, is that empires in a fully developed capitalist world can be as
much informal structures as formal ones, and can be rooted as much in
commerce and finance as they are in industry and the military. Ameri-
ca’s global dominance does not have to be solely military to be imperial,
because the British dominance certainly was not. Yet a third lesson is
that, if the British are any guide, the strength of an empire can be quickly
undermined by the very success of the empire itself. Empires at their peak
face a future of resistance from those they dominate. Empires at their
peak face a future threatened by imperial overreach; and they face the
possibility of their military capacity being undermined by the shifting
balance of finance and industry within their domestic economic base.
They may even face a future of increasingly damaging competition from
economies that they originally dominated and then helped modernize. A
fourth lesson might be that empires at their peak come with a culture of
arrogance. Indeed and paradoxically, a particular kind of cultural parochi-
alism is probably the strongest imperial legacy of all, at least in the British
case; the consolidation of a mind-set (in governing classes and also for a
while in their local electorates) that treats the culture predominant in the

imperial center as naturally superior while remaining woefully ignorant

of cultures at the imperial edge. Karl Marx put it best when contemplat-
ing the weakness of the empire of Napoléon III, writing of “the tradition
of all dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brain of the
living.”117 Empires fall as self-delusion sets in—that is, as they begin to
swallow their own propaganda. The British Empire certainly did, which is
why intelligence (and indeed self-knowledge) is so crucial a requirement
of any political project concerned to protect American global strength in
the decades ahead.


CHAPTER 6
Russian Empires
Old and New
We are now poised to examine the last of the four major empires
whose past has helped create present-day America and whose fate might
yet help us shape the America to come. We have looked at Rome, whose
classical architecture is replicated in so many of the public buildings of con-
temporary Washington, DC, and whose fate prefigured that of so many of
the empires to follow. We have looked at imperial Spain, without whose
rise America would not exist in its contemporary form and from whose
fall the new United States acquired territory that we now think of as quint-
essentially American. We have looked at the British Empire from which
the young United States successfully broke away and from which a more
mature America took up the reins of global leadership as that empire waned.
It is now time to look at both tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union—at an
empire that unexpectedly came twice—from the first of which at its peak
the United States bought Alaska, and from the second of which, at its fall,
modern America acquired temporary total global dominance.1 Since “Rus-
sia is by some measures the most successful imperial enterprise in history,
surpassed in size only by the British and Mongol empires” and “far more
durable than either one,”2 there are likely to be lessons for contemporary
America from the emergence and demise of both these Russian empires.
These are lessons to which we now need to turn.
The Rise and Fall of Two Imperial Russias

The most striking feature of both Russian empires was their territorial-
ity. Unlike the empires of Spain and Britain (or of Portugal and France),
the Russian Empire did not expand by capturing territory overseas, or
where it did, as with Alaska, it eventually and deliberately shed the land
it had colonized.3 Instead, Russia became a big country by becoming

a land-based empire, drawing into its direct political control signifi-

cant land masses that lay immediately to the west, south, and east of its
original location. The first moves in territorial expansion went east
and north under Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov (1564–1613) and
then west under the Romanovs (1613–1917), as the Muscovy princes
“expanded their control of people and resources over land in all direc-
tions,” in the process creating for themselves “a multiethnic and multi-
confessional empire.”4 Under first Peter the Great, then Catherine, and
later Alexander I—in the long eighteenth century that culminated in the
Congress of Vienna in 1815—Russian military might was regularly used
to help redesign the political architecture of central and Eastern Europe
and to expand the scale of the Russian state, in what Brendan Simms
called Russia’s “meteoric ascent pushing deep into the Ottoman empire
and central Europe.”5 The ascent was indeed meteoric, as the tsarist
state proved to be “one of the most effective mechanisms for territorial
expansion over known. In 1462 the grand prince of Moscow ruled over
24,000 square kilometers. In 1914, Nicholas II ruled over 13.5 million.”6
The Russian state acquired parts of the Ukraine from Sweden in 1709
and parts of the Baltic coast in 1721. It partitioned Poland in alliance
with Prussia and Austria in 1772, and again in 1793 and 1795 (tempo-
rarily removing Poland entirely from the map). The Russian Tsar took
advantage of Napoléon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 to follow him right
through to Paris: in 1815, Alexander I publicly inspected 150,000 Rus-
sian troops and 540 artillery pieces on the plain of Champaign, close to
the French capital itself.7 And by then, Russian military might was suf-
ficiently developed to permit predominantly nineteenth-century territo-
rial gains southward against a weakening Ottoman Empire and eastward
against a disintegrating China. Amid a whole string of territorial acqui-
sitions, Russia acquired the Crimea in 1783, Finland in 1809, north-
ern Afghanistan in 1829, vast territory along China’s northern border in
1858 and 1860, much of Muslim Central Asia after 1870, and Manchu-
ria after the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901. In so doing, Russia
under the Tsars turned itself into the fastest growth imperial entity in the
nineteenth-century world.
The limits of that empire were then met only when industrialization in
the states bordering this expanding empire fundamentally tipped the mil-
itary balance of power against Russia’s hitherto-invincible peasant-based
armies. Russian armies were strong enough to suppress a popular uprising
in Hungary as late as 1849. Yet by then, as Paul Kennedy later put it, “at
the economic and technological level, Russia was [already] losing ground
in an alarming way . . . at least relative to other powers.”8 Farther Russian

Russian Empires Old and New 139
expansion south was blocked by Britain and France in the Crimea in the
1850s. Russian military expansion eastward was blocked—very unexpect-
edly as it happened—by Japanese forces in 1904; and the entire tsarist
enterprise (both as an empire and as a state) was entirely destroyed after
1914, first by German military power on the eastern front and then by
internal revolutionary upheavals triggered by that military defeat.
The tsarist Empire fell, as did the tsar himself, first to bourgeois and
then to socialist revolutionaries who initially held power only close to the
original centers of the tsarist state. As the state created by the Romanovs
over three centuries collapsed, the entire empire disintegrated with it: and
from its relics another Congress—this one at Versailles—eventually cre-
ated a new set of Eastern European states over which Russian govern-
ments exercised no direct control at all. As Dominic Lieven put it, “in
1917–18 it appeared that the history of empire in Russia was over. All
the traditional nightmares of tzarist statesmen were realized. Finland, the
Trans-Caucasus, the Baltic provinces and the whole Western Borderlands,
including Ukraine, were lost. German domination in Europe loomed.
Russia was pushed back to her borders before Peter I made her a great
power.”9 But as Lieven also reminds us, the subsequent Allied victory in
World War I did more than prevent that much-feared German domina-
tion. It also “created a great vacuum in Eastern Europe,” one that “the
victorious Western powers were too far removed, too exhausted by war
and too indifferent to fill . . . themselves.” All they managed to do was
“create a cordon sanitaire of pro-Western client states to keep Bolshevik
Russia safely distant from the European economic and cultural heart-
land.”10 It was a safety and a distance that the Soviets eventually used to
create a second empire of their own.
That second Russian Empire came into existence only as an accidental
by-product of the civil wars and foreign interventions to which the 1917
revolutions then gave rise. Troops from 14 foreign armies invaded Russia
in 1919 to aid white counterrevolutionary forces whose ultimate defeat by
Trotsky’s Red Army left the Soviet Union not simply geographically and
politically isolated but also in charge of virtually the entire Asian land-
mass previously captured by tsarist forces—a landmass eventually orga-
nized into a set of national republics. By the time the Japanese withdrew
from Siberia in 1922, as John Darwin put it, “the empire was back.”11
Back, but in a different form: the tsarist Empire had now been replaced
by a soviet union of socialist republics in which the basic principle of
regional organization was initially one of genuine national representation
and autonomy (Stalin later rather mudded the water on that principle by
indulging in a 1930s campaign of terror against national separatism, and

in a heavy post–World War II dose of ethnic cleansing and the forced

relocation of national minorities).12 It was this eastern (and by now com-
munist) empire that German armies reinvaded from the west in 1941.
When that invasion was over, the surviving Soviet state found itself with
military forces deep in Germany itself and in all the buffer states that had
hitherto separated Nazi Germany from the young Soviet Union. These
were buffer states—from Latvia in the north of Europe to Yugoslavia in
the south—that on this occasion the Soviet Union declined to surrender.
They were asked to do so on a regular basis by a series of popular upris-
ings (from Berlin in 1952 and Hungary in 1956 to Czechoslovakia in
1968, Poland in 1970, and Afghanistan in 1989) that in each case—with
the exception of the last—the Soviet Army successfully, if ruthlessly, sup-
pressed. They were asked again—this time by popular protests in the Bal-
tic States in 1989—requests that on this occasion were largely acceded to.
It was this accommodatory response by a reformist Soviet leadership
to calls for national independence, and the abject failure of the Russian
army in Russia’s last colonial war (Afghanistan), which together opened
the floodgates of anti-imperial resistance within the Soviet Empire as a
whole: resistance that brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989 and two
years later the entire Soviet state.
Explaining the Rise and Fall of the Tsarist Empire

The dynamic behind the initial rise of tsarist power was a complex one,
still much discussed by historians of the period. John Darwin explained
it as “the remarkable combination of favorable circumstances in the cen-
tury after 1613: the consolidation of a social order whose savage disci-
pline reflected the mentality of the ‘armed camp’; its receptiveness to
cultural innovation from elsewhere in Europe; Russia’s profitable role as
an entrepôt between Europe and the Middle East; its open land frontier,
which helped fuel expansion and lubricate the rise of autocratic power;
its pivotal role in ‘steppe diplomacy’; and the geostrategic fortune that
allowed the exclusion of its European rivals from the whole of Eurasia
North of the Black Sea after 1710.”13 But behind those specifics, at least
three general forces were at work.
One was the consolidation from 1649 of what became known as “the
second serfdom.”14 The Romanovs tightened control of agrarian produc-
tion within their expanding territories and won the loyalty of landown-
ing classes there by tying the agricultural producing class firmly to the
land, at the very moment when an equivalent feudalism was being decon-
structed in Western Europe and avoided in the North American colonies.
The uneven economic development that this would trigger over the next

two centuries would ultimately bring the first Russian Empire down;
but initially tight agrarian control was a source of economic and mili-
tary strength, not of weakness. It provided successive Russian tsars with
an almost endless supply of peasants for their ever-larger military forces
as well as a flow of aristocratic cavalry and high quality military leader-
ship that other smaller neighboring powers found progressively harder to
replicate. “Catherine II conscripted one million men in the course of her
34 year reign, a figure no other European monarch could match”; and
“faced by the Napoléonic threat, Alexander I conscripted two million
men in just 24 years.”15
A second was the capacity of a regenerated tsarist state to organize—
under autocratic state direction—a highly effective military-industrial
complex, borrowing the best technology and attracting the appropri-
ate skills from Western states whose military and intellectual develop-
ment tsarist Russia could not initially match internally. As Lieven has
it, “behind the armed forces there already stood in the eighteenth cen-
tury an almost entirely self-sufficient defense industry and the largest
iron industry in Europe.”16 This military-technological advantage gave
the expanding Russian state the competitive edge over both the disinte-
grating Ottoman Empire to its south and the nomadic peoples and clan
systems then dominant on the vast open plains of Central Asia. “Its status
as a ‘gunpowder empire’ enabled it to defeat the horsed tribes of the east,
and thus to acquire additional resources of manpower, raw materials and
arable land which in turn would enhance its place among the Great Pow-
ers.”17 That status did not, however, give Russian armies any equivalent
edge over military forces raised in Western Europe. On the contrary, and
at the start of the eighteenth century, it took the emerging Russian state
more than two decades to defeat even a power as modest as that of Swe-
den; and at the start of the nineteenth, it took a brutal Russian winter and
a vast array of anti-Napoléonic forces to see off the French. But as long
as Russian arms were not up against more technologically sophisticated
military forces, the combination of a Russian state organized for war and
a Russian society structured to generate large peasant-based armies guar-
anteed the steady expansion of the Russian Empire over time.
The third general factor at play in this persistent expansion of tsar-
ist power is harder to isolate but no less vital. Russia expanded as an
imperial power with huge self-confidence—particularly in the nineteenth
century—and did so, where needed, with breathtaking cruelty. The sense
of superiority with which successive Russian generals organized colo-
nial expeditions into central and northern Asia is a case in point. The
equivalent arrogance of the Russian sweep south through the Caucasus is

another. In the latter case, the mission was understood by the key players
involved partly in religious terms as the protection of the interests of East-
ern Orthodox Christians inside a Muslim empire. But more normally, it
appears to have been a military movement south and east that was based
on a strong sense of Russian cultural superiority as a European (and not as
an Asian) nation: a superiority that allowed Russian military commanders
to ethnically cleanse whole areas of its Asian empire, if thought appro-
priate, and to slaughter would-be opponents in excessively large num-
bers.18 Genocide (and indeed rampant anti-Semitism) will be a feature of
the spread of the Stalinist Empire later, but that antipathy to particular
national minorities had clear tsarist precedents. There was nothing pretty
or civilized about the Russian colonization of central and northern Asia.
On the contrary, as Dostoyevsky put it, “in Europe we were hangers-on
and slaves, whereas in Asia we shall go as masters.”19
The cultural confidence that had underpinned such colonial brutality
was then severely shaken by the fall of Sevastopol in the Crimean conflict
with France and Britain in 1855. Faced with the new reality that it was
taking longer to move Russian troops from Moscow to the Crimea than
it was to move British/French troops from their home bases in Western
Europe because of the underdeveloped nature of Russia’s internal trans-
port system (“there was no railway south of Moscow”20) and inadequacies
in Russia’s military command and logistical structures, it became clear
to the new tsar that survival as a military power in an industrial age required
the resetting of Russia’s entire economy and society. Russia needed to
change itself from being an international player capable of generating
peasant armies to one capable of generating armies equipped with the lat-
est industrially produced military hardware. Defeat in the Crimea forced
a realization in tsarist ruling circles that Russia’s survival as a great power
depended on the economy’s rapid industrial modernization, no matter
how threatening that modernization process would necessarily be to the
traditional social structure on which tsarist rule had hitherto depended.
For without it, if the Crimea was any guide, Russian losses in future
wars would be heavier still (Russian rifles in the 1850s shot accurately
only over 200 yards, while French and British rifles were accurate to over
1,000 yards) and Russian military expenditures would likely bankrupt
a state that, in 1854–55, found its ability to borrow on international
money markets seriously constrained by the falling international value of
the ruble.
So in a dramatic “reform from above” that initially met fierce resis-
tance from sections of the nobility, serfdom in Russia was abolished by
a series of tsarist decrees from 1861, and state-led modernization for

military purposes was begun in earnest in the 1890s. Lacking an indepen-

dent industrial bourgeoisie—the key cause of Russia’s relative economic
backwardness—the tsarist state had no option but to attempt to fill the
void. Hence the paradox of a feudal state presiding from 1893 (under
chief minister Sergei de Witte) over rapid capitalist industrial develop-
ment with policies that “involved heavy government expenditures for
railroad building and operation; subsidies and supporting services for pri-
vate industrialists; high protective tariffs for Russian industries (especially
for the heavy industries and mines whose products were purchased for
railroad building and military modernization); increased exports; stable
currency; and encouragement of foreign investments.” All this state-led
industrial modernization was then financed by heavy “taxation on articles
of mass consumption, and by foreign loans (which had to be dependably
repaid).”21
This tsarist dash for growth required foreign loans (and the importa-
tion of foreign capital and technology) because Russia lacked the very
things it now needed most, including modern steel works, armament
factories, and rail track that could carry soldiers to the western front.
All that essential military equipment (and the capacity to build it inter-
nally in the years to come) therefore initially had to be bought abroad,
and that required the tsarist state to rapidly acquire foreign currency and
foreign loans. Given the underdeveloped nature of the Russian economy,
the revenue and collateral critical to that foreign lending could, in its
turn, only come from a steady supply of Russian agrarian exports; and
persuading an underperforming and recently fully feudal agrarian sector
to generate those exports required nothing less than a still tighter squeez-
ing of peasant living standards through the imposition of new and heavy
taxation. The parallel need rapidly to create a modern military-industrial
complex also required the establishment of large industrial factories and
the intense exploitation of a newly formed industrial working class. Paul
Kennedy writes of “enormous factories, often employing thousands of
workers,” springing “up around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other major
cities,”22 factories and workers that the state could then control only by
the regular deployment of police and Cossacks:
All the reforms and changes which went to make up the modernization
of Russia from the middle of the century to 1914 were in the grip of a
profound contradiction. Intended to maintain absolutism and the social
structure upon which it depended, and to enable tsarism to play an inde-
pendent power role on the international scene, this process set in train
forces which tended towards quite opposite results. Every step to modern-
ize Russia brought into play influences which acted corrosively on what

the autocracy sought to preserve and revealed its incompatibility with

industrial capitalism. At the same time, these efforts, far from enabling
Russia to play an independent role in foreign affairs, made her increasingly
dependent on foreign capital and military alliances.23
When the Russian modernization process began in earnest in the

1860s, “by comparison with western Europe and the United States, Rus-
sian industry remained very much behind. Its advanced sectors remained
outposts in a vast ocean of backward peasant agriculture and small-scale
production carried on by hand methods in cottages and small work-
shops.”24 By 1914, in contrast, although two-thirds of Russian workers
remained on the land, “the industrial sector, although it only employed a
small part of the total population, was dominated by large-scale, techno-
logically efficient units.”25 The predictable result of these forced economic
changes was social unrest and political disturbance: a wave of famines and
peasant uprisings in the Russian countryside from the 1890s and a series
of bitter industrial disputes in urban Russia in the first half decade of the
new century.26 Racing to catch up and still overconfident of European
superiority over Asian peoples, the tsarist regime then clashed disastrously
with Japanese military forces in 1904—Japan being so much farther
ahead in this capitalist modernization process than the Russian ruling
elite realized—and was so suitably discredited that by 1905 the tsarist
regime found itself fighting revolution at home. The regime survived that
internal rebellion—just—but could not escape the next one, triggered by
an even bigger military defeat after 1914. Defeated by the contradictions
of a feudal social order obliged to survive by rapidly creating a capitalist
economy, an empire built on the military technology of late feudalism
proved no match for empires—in this case, the new German one—whose
capitalist industrial base was so much more developed than its own.27 A
land empire built on military prowess fell apart immediately once the
prowess was gone.
The Rise and Fall of the Second Russian Empire

The rise and fall of the first Russian Empire—the tsarist—may actu-
ally have less to teach us about our contemporary condition than the
rise and fall of the second Russian Empire, the Soviet one: and that is
both true and paradoxical. The paradox rests in the defining difference
between the Soviet system and the American—the one communist, the
other capitalist—because on the surface of economic life at least, it is
hard to see how systems so different should share features in common.
The truth rests in the fact that those similarities do nonetheless exist,

most notably the similarity of stance that each system initially adopted
in relation to its surrounding global order. Both the early Soviet state
and the post–World War II American one told themselves and others, and
did so regularly, that they had no interest in creating any new imperial
structures. The Soviet Union began to build Russia’s second empire as an
ardent anti-imperialist.
To a generation of Americans brought up during, or in the immediate
wake of, the Cold War, this claim about initial Soviet intentions must
seem intuitively false, but then very few people caught up in the Cold War
on either side were prepared to concede just how qualitatively the Soviet
Union had by then changed from its original revolutionary character. Ini-
tially, the Bolshevik state understood itself to be simply a sideshow in a
bigger global story whose trajectory it could shape but whose politics it
would never dominate. The second revolution in 1917—the Bolshevik—
was made by Marxists who knew that Russia was, at most, half-feudal
and half-capitalist. As Marxists, they remained convinced that genuine
socialist revolutions could only emerge in fully developed capitalist societ-
ies whose bourgeois classes had fulfilled their historic mission, which was
to develop the forces of production to such a point that the class division
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was no longer necessary. Con-
ventional Marxists in underdeveloped capitalisms of the Russian kind
therefore had to wait, encouraging capitalist development and protecting
worker rights as they did so, but certainly not seizing power in the name
of a working class that was then only in the early stages of its own growth
and consolidation. But the Bolsheviks, of course, were not conventional
Marxists. By April 1917, they had additionally come to subscribe to Leon
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and thus to the notion of the
spark.28 They understood that the contradictions of capitalism as a global
system were necessarily pushed out to the system’s edge. Russia was on
that edge. Labor conditions in peripheral capitalisms were sufficiently
savage as to trigger proletarian revolution there—that was why the Bol-
sheviks came so quickly and so easily to power—but it was a peripheral
revolution whose main purpose was to spark similar proletarian uprisings
in the core capitalisms of the system. The Bolsheviks seized power in
October 1917 on the clear expectation that similar seizures would soon
take place in Berlin, Paris, and London, seizures inspired by the Bolshevik
example; and they immediately created a global network of Bolshevik-
like communist parties (united in a new international organization, the
Comintern) to deliver that expectation. To quote Trotsky,
Without the direct support of the European proletariat the working class
in Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary dominance

into a lasting socialist dictatorship. Left to its own resources the work-
ing class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counterrevolution
the moment the peasantry turns its back on it. It will have no alterna-
tive but to link the fate of its political rule, and, hence, the fate of the
whole Russian Revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in
Europe . . . The revolution in the East will infect the western proletariat
with a revolutionary idealism and provoke a desire to speak to its enemies
“in Russian.”29
Lenin and Trotsky, that is, expected one of two things to occur. As
leaders of the Russian Revolution, they expected either that working class
revolution would spread, creating socialist republics to the west of Russia
whose governments would assist Russia’s internal economic development,
or, if those revolutions were eventually suppressed, that counterrevolu-
tionary forces would then roll through Russia, in the process sweeping the
Bolsheviks away. What the theory of permanent revolution never antici-
pated was that working-class revolutions would eventually be put down
in core capitalisms but that the counterrevolutionary wave in Russia itself
would also fail. Lenin and Trotsky never anticipated that the Bolsheviks
would end up still in power—isolated in a country that was largely still
agrarian and vestigially feudal. They never anticipated that they would
have to build “socialism in one country.” It was that impasse, and the
building of that kind of socialism, which caused the degeneration of the
Soviet state into the Stalinist terror and turned a Stalinist Russia into a
serious, if self-denying, global imperial force.
Even then, the initial moves by the Soviet state were entirely defen-
sive ones. As Grigor Suny correctly noted, “the Soviet Union became an
empire despite the ideology and intentions of its founders.”30 We must
remember that “the first generation of Bolsheviks were the true believers
who hoped, with all the power levers of the modern state at their disposal,
to carry out their grandiose mission: the elimination of all traditional
empires and states, equality for all ethnic groups and races.”31 We must
also remember that “the original Soviet state was ideologically conceived
as temporary, provisional, transitory from an era of capitalism, national-
ism, and imperialism to the moment of successful international socialist
revolution.”32 Trotsky’s Red Army got to the edge of Warsaw in 1920
as part of the Bolshevik attempt (successful as it transpired) to keep the
Russian Revolution alive as an inspiration to socialist forces across the
entire global system; and Russian leadership in the Comintern was used
(at least in its first decade) genuinely to encourage revolutions abroad
Rather than simply to further Soviet expansionism. That Russian leader-
ship proved misguided—revolutions failed again in Germany in 1923

and in China in 1927—but the initial motivation was revolutionary

rather than imperialist.
Over time, however, as Russia itself slipped into a new tyranny, the
Comintern’s policies increasingly took on a “Russia-first” form. The most
visible example of that shift in focus before World War II was the role that
Spanish Communists were obliged to play, on Moscow’s instructions, in
moderating the policies of the Spanish Republic during the 1936–39
civil war in Spain. The last thing Stalin wanted by then was a successful
working-class revolution at the other end of Europe, a revolution that
would inevitably have driven French and British capitalists into an alli-
ance with Hitler and into an invasion of the Soviet Union. For by 1939,
a degenerated Soviet state had a new and powerful weapon of foreign
policy to deploy in its defense: the misguided loyalty of a generation of
socialist revolutionaries in country after country, a generation of the best
on the left prepared to subordinate their politics to the defense of the
Soviet Union as the home of the one genuine socialist state to emerge
from World War I. When Stalin bought time for Soviet rearmament by
signing the Nazi-Soviet pact and partitioning Poland in 1939, those loyal
communists defended even that line. When the pact broke down and the
German army invaded Russia anyway, those same loyal socialists (with
greater enthusiasm, it should be said) led the resistance movements to
fascism in both Italy and France. But by then, Stalin had decided that
he (and the Soviet state) needed a stronger buffer against future German
aggression than simply a cadre of loyal comrades abroad: hence his closing
down of the Comintern in 1944 and his refusal to withdraw Soviet forces
from Eastern Europe and Germany itself after 1945.
What this imperial creation did was to put a second lie at the heart of
Soviet politics. The first lie—that the Communist Party represented the
genuine interests of the entire Russian working class—was a lie that built
up from very early on in the post-1917 Russian context. From as early
as the assassination attempt on Lenin’s life by Left Social Revolutionar-
ies in 1918, the Bolsheviks began systematically to suppress opposition:
first opposition from outside the Communist Party and then opposition
from within. As early as the Kronstadt revolt against Bolshevik rule in
1921, the gap between Bolshevik claims and working class reality in Rus-
sia was already wide. The shipyard workers and naval cadets based on
the Finland shore had been among the strongest supporters of the Bol-
sheviks only three short years before. Yet two decades later, the whole
Russian political structure had become so tyrannical that, in truth, the
Communist Party under Stalin was best understood as by then constitut-
ing a new social class: less “the advanced section of the working class” as

they liked to claim and more a new, state-anchored bourgeoisie that was
effectively acting as the substitute for an independent middle class in the
forced industrialization of the Soviet Union. It was this “new class”33 that
then ran both the prewar Asian empire and the postwar Eastern Euro-
pean one with an iron fist, using local Communist Party elites to break
away entirely from Lenin’s initial vision of the Soviet federation as one of
voluntarily integrated national republics enjoying high levels of regional
autonomy.34
To that first lie—that the Soviet Union was a genuine workers’ democ-
racy under Stalin—the creation of an empire of buffer states in Eastern
Europe (each similarly Communist-led and secret-police terrorized) then
added another: the lie that rule from Moscow was in the interest of East-
ern European peoples. The rhetoric remained the same as before the inva-
sion by Germany—that empires and imperialism were phenomena of the
capitalist world to which the Soviet Union remained resolutely opposed.
But so did the underlying exploitative reality: that the Soviet Union was
the tsarist Empire reincarnated, only this time as an empire run ruthlessly
from the center and in the interests of the governing Communist Party.
The notion of the two lies is vital here, because eventually it was their com-
bination that brought the Soviet Union down. When the Soviet Empire
eventually fell, it fell from the edge inward. The imperialist lie on which
its empire rested lacked credibility and legitimacy. The repressed masses
in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, and the
Baltic never bought it, so that eventually the dam broke on the very Baltic
shores where Bolshevik support had once been so evident. But when the
imperial dam broke, the whole system did not simply shrink. Instead,
it collapsed from its center; and it did so not because of the second lie
but because of the first, the lie that maintained that the Communist-led
Soviet state actually spoke for (and acted purely in the interests of ) the
Russian people. The external lie brought down the empire. The internal
lie brought down the state. What the Russian imperial story gives us,
therefore, is two empires and two lies: and now a post-Soviet Russia that
is struggling to deal with the legacy of all four.
The Military Burdens of Empire

The tsarist state was organized for war; and though, as we saw, there were
times in the pre- and immediate Napoléonic period when Russian armies
were very large, there is no compelling reason to think that the cost of
military mobilization on that scale was in any way destabilizing of the
general social order. There were peasant rebellions under the preindustrial
tsars, but none (not even the prolonged Pugachev revolt in the 1770s)

in the end pushed the regime over the edge. On the contrary, it was the
adequacy of their military forces for both foreign expansion and internal
security that sustained tsarist power. Military expenditures only became
a burden to the tsarist state when what was required for military suc-
cess was a modern industrial economy. Creating that—by forced indus-
trialization based on foreign loans—certainly destabilized the regime, by
eating away at peasant support for aristocratic rule. And of course, the
burden of mobilization for World War I put huge strains on the Rus-
sian domestic economy, generating in the end not simply military defeat
but also extensive urban as well as rural famines. Support for the tsarist
regime was corroded inside Russia, before the revolution, by the financial
costs and economic consequences of full-scale military mobilization. It
was that mobilization, once the initial euphoria of war had died away,
that brought tsardom in Russia to a close.
But if the tsarist state experienced the heavy burden of modern mili-
tary preparedness, it was as nothing compared to the burden experienced
by the later Soviet state. That burden was enormous in the creation of
the modern Soviet military. It was enormous in the deployment of that
military against Nazi invasion; and it was enormous again in the steadily
escalating arms race that underpinned the Cold War.
Part of the horror of the 1930s inside the Soviet Union was the prod-
uct of the Stalinist terror, and not even the military high command were
immune from that burden. Remarkably, a full 90 percent of the generals
and 80 percent of the colonels in the Soviet army in the 1930s were casu-
alties of the frenetic Stalinist purge. But the terror was not just the product
of the Stalinist madness that transformed Soviet Russia from a party-led
state to a personal dictatorship. It was also part of a panic reaction to the
military vulnerability of the Soviet state prior to the forced industrializa-
tion of its economy. Stalin faced the same dilemma in 1933 as had the
tsarist regime in 1893: how to avoid being colonized or occupied by supe-
rior German forces. The answer in 1933 was the same as de Witte’s four
decades earlier: the rapid development of a modern military-industrial
complex put together by extracting surplus product (and surplus labor)
from the Russian countryside and town.35 De Witte in the 1890s lacked
Stalin’s key weapon in the 1930s: namely, a Communist Party able to
control the Russian working class, the weapon that alone enabled Stalin
to achieve that extraction without the loss of political power that had fol-
lowed in the tsarist case. In the process of Stalin’s forced industrialization,
Russian living standards froze or fell for an entire generation, as whole
populations were geographically relocated or physically eliminated and an
entire gulag of prisoners was put in place: cumulatively constituting the

price ordinary Russians were obliged to pay for the creation of a modern
industrial economy capable of generating vast quantities of high-quality
armaments but only small quantities of low quality food, housing, and
consumer goods.36
Twenty million of those Russians then perished as Stalin’s rapidly
constructed modern war machine first rode out the initial Nazi inva-
sion before pushing that invasion back deep into Germany itself.
And with Nazism gone, the collapse of the wartime alliance of Russia and
the United States quickly followed; so that the Soviet Union found itself
from the late 1940s both depleted by war and engaged in a major arms
race—an arms race that went up to and included nuclear weaponry—
with an America convinced that Soviet foreign policy intentions were
both expansionary and threatening to American global interests. The
financial and economic costs of that arms race for the now imperial Soviet
Union were truly enormous, outdoing in scale and consequence even the
costs of the rapid military buildup of the 1930s.
The financial costs of the Cold War to the Soviet state are the easiest
to compute. As Paul Kennedy put it, “given the need to rebuild the econ-
omy, it was not surprising that the enormous Red Army was reduced by
two-thirds after 1945, to the still substantial total of 175 divisions, sup-
ported by 25,000 front-line tanks and 19,000 aircraft,” but as such it was
still “the largest defense establishment in the world.”37 To that conven-
tional armed force, the Soviets later added a much expanded navy and, of
course, a new and extensive nuclear capacity. The result was a dramatic
increase in Soviet military spending: up from an estimated $13.1 billion
in 1945 to a staggering $72.0 billion by 1970.38 By 1985, during what, in
retrospect (though not at the time), can be understood as the twilight
years of the Cold War, Soviet military expenditure was actually outstrip-
ping its US equivalent (3.8 billion as against 3.5 billion, in 1995 US
dollars), in the process absorbing 13.1 percent of Soviet GDP as against
6.1 percent in the US case. With the Afghan war then at its height, the
Soviet armed forces and military production systems contained 3.9 mil-
lion men and women against just 2.2 million in the US case: military
forces drawn from an imperial population that was slightly greater in
number than America’s but with a GDP per head less than half that prev-
alent in the United States.39
Problems of Economic Backwardness

Such a scale of military preparedness had considerable effects on the rest
of the Soviet economy—effects that were predominantly negative in
kind. The mobilization for war in the 1930s had been accompanied by

“dramatic decreases in every other sector—consumer goods, retail trade,

and agricultural supplies”;40 and the subsequent Cold War escalation of
military spending had similar if less dramatic consequences, as military
expenditures running at 11–13 percent of GDP by the 1960s inevita-
bly “siphoned off vast stocks of trained manpower, scientists, machinery
and capital investment which could have been devoted to the civilian
economy.”41 It would be quite wrong, however, to lay primary blame
for post–World War II Soviet economic underperformance on the size
and character of its military spending. Prime responsibility there lies
with the limits of centrally planned economies of the state-socialist kind,
but clearly military expenditure of the Soviet scale did not help. A weak
economy required to sustain a military capable of competing with the
armed forces of stronger capitalist economies abroad could not help but
be weakened farther by that military competition.
The Soviet dilemma here merely replicated in the twentieth century
the problem that the tsarist Empire had faced a century before—namely,
the way in which its political structure required a particular form of eco-
nomic organization in order to survive. That form of economic organiza-
tion both reflected and compounded Russia’s basic problem of economic
backwardness—a backwardness that then undermined the domestic and
international standing of the Russian political class. It is striking in this
regard that as late as 1851, when the British were showing off their indus-
trial superiority in a grand exhibition in the Crystal Palace (i.e., in a pal-
ace built of industrial glass) and the United States was sliding into the
first fully modern and industrially powered civil war, tsarist Russia was
still struggling with a serfdom that had been imposed in the seventeenth
century, years after the deconstruction of serfdom in the advanced parts
of Western Europe. From the 1640s, the Romanovs may have been con-
solidated politically, but only at the price of a Russian countryside locked
into low-productivity agriculture that held back incomes and living stan-
dards across Russian society as a whole. Trotsky put the tsarist agrarian
dilemma this way in his reflections on the revolution of 1905: “The real
significance of expropriation would be that a free farming economy at a
high technological level, which could multiply the overall income from
the land, could be developed on the estates torn from the idle hands
which now possess them. But such American-type farming is only con-
ceivable in Russia if tsarist absolutism, with its fiscal demands, is bureau-
cratic tutelage, its all devouring militarism, its debts to the European
stock exchanges, were totally liquidated. The complete formula for the
agrarian problem is as follows: expropriation of the nobility, liquidation
of tsarism, democracy.”42

The low productivity of the Russian countryside was an issue that

tsardom only fundamentally addressed in its last decade in power. The
Stolypin reforms initiated after the 1905 revolution did at last begin to
create a class of commercial farmers—the kulaks—which, if given time,
could have generated both an agrarian revolution and a solid base of rural
conservative support for the tsar. But tragically, it was that conservatism
that Stalin saw as the kulaks’ prime threat to Bolshevik rule, which is
why he ordered the physical liquidation of five million of them in the
terror of the 1930s. The Soviets imposed collectivization on the Russian
countryside instead, and Russian agriculture remains, in consequence, a
low-productivity system to this day.43 Indeed, so unproductive was Soviet
agriculture in the post-Stalin period that by the 1980s the USSR had
become the world’s largest importer of food.44
What the tsarist regime did from the 1890s was begin to catch up on
Western Europe’s emerging military-industrial complexes, and that was
also Stalin’s great—if horrendously brutal—achievement in the 1930s.45
But the Stalinist command economy created in that decade found it
immensely more difficult thereafter to generate, alongside its military
production systems, any equivalent consumer-based industrial growth.
Postwar Russian living standards rose through to the 1970s but then
they leveled off, as the post-Stalinist Russian leadership struggled, and
failed, to modernize an economy burdened with outdated heavy indus-
trial plants and depleted social capital. The Russian military was a major
political barrier to that parallel development, drawing off key resources
for military purposes as we have seen.46 But the real barrier was the inher-
itance itself: a centralized planning system too bureaucratic to sustain
modernizing initiatives47 and a capital stock too anchored in outmoded
industries and technologies. As Stephen Kotkin put it, “socialism’s politi-
cally driven economy proved very good—too good—at putting up a rust
belt; and unlike a market economy, socialism proved very bad at taking
its rust belt down.”48
How to balance military and civilian economic spending was problem
enough in the Russian case when foreign invasion was likely and general
global living standards were low. It became altogether more acute a prob-
lem later when foreign invasion was unlikely and familiarity with better
living standards elsewhere seeped steadily into the consciousness of the
Soviets’ recently acquired satellite societies. It is true that by the 1970s
in Russia, “there were significantly more goods than before, yet much of
the Soviet population [still] queued for hours to obtain basic necessities
and had to turn to the more expensive ‘shadow economy’ of informal
production and exchange for children’s clothes, proper-sized adult shoes,

and other scarce items. That was because consumer goods production
lagged behind military and heavy industry, and central planning empow-
ered producers, not consumers.”49 By the 1980s indeed, the USSR had
turned itself into a major importer of grain. For by then, “every third ton
of baked goods was made from imported grain [and] cattle production
was based on grain imports.” The USSR was accordingly “forced to make
long-term contracts on grain deliveries, guaranteeing the annual purchase
of no less than 9 million tons from the United States, 5 million from Can-
ada, 4 million from Argentina, and 1.5 million tons from China.” And
the main problem that this presented for the Soviet regime, as Yeltsin’s
first prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, later reported, was that “unlike many
other commodities that could have been obtained through barter with
Comecon countries, grain had to be paid for in convertible currency.”50
The problem for the Soviet Union in its dying moments, as for the tsarist
regime long ago, was where to obtain that currency without so transform-
ing the Russian economy as to bring the regime down.
The basic dilemma facing the Russian political elite in the last years
of the Soviet Union was clear to commentators like Paul Kennedy even
before its collapse. “Like every other one of the large powers,” he wrote
in 1988, “the USSR has to make a choice in its allocations of national
resources between (1) the requirements of its military . . . (2) the increas-
ing desire of the Russian populace for consumer goods and better living
and working conditions, not to mention improved social services to check
the high death and sickness rates . . . [and] (3) the needs of both agricul-
ture and industry for fresh capital investment, in order to modernize the
economy, increase output, keep abreast of the advances of others, and
in the longer term satisfy both the defense and the social requirements
of the country.”51 His judgment then was “unless the Gorbachev regime
really manages to transform things, guns will always come before butter
and, if need be, before economic growth.” In the event, however, guns
and butter clashed almost as soon as his text was published, and both
economic growth and the Soviet system fell cataclysmically as they did so.
The accompanying result—in military terms—was the rapid collapse of
the entire Soviet military machine. As Stephen Kotkin put it, “in 1989,
the USSR built seventy-eight submarines and ships: a decade later, Russia
built four, one of which, the Kursk, blew itself up and sank.”52 “Drained
by the arms race and weakened by the costs of empire,”53 the Soviet state
and the Soviet military eventually disintegrated together, and did so in
double-quick order.

Pushback and the Crisis of Legitimacy

To a far greater extent than any of the other empires surveyed thus far, the
postwar Soviet Empire was a seriously contested system of rule from
the very earliest days of its creation. Even before it had expanded into
Eastern Europe, the empire’s Central Asian and Trans-Caucasian prov-
inces had only been won back by military force. The first response of both
sets of provinces (and of the Ukraine) to the fall of the tsar was to cre-
ate independent states answerable only to themselves. It took the arrival
of the Red Army to put a stop to that. And two decades later, it took
not only the Red Army but also a whole apparatus of secret police, jails,
and gulags to keep Eastern Europe quiet within the post-1945 expanded
sphere of Russian control.54 Workers in Berlin rose in 1953 and were
ruthlessly crushed. Workers rose in Hungary in 1956, only to see their call
for freedom put down by Russian tanks as the West looked on. In 1968,
with riots in Paris and antiwar protests in Washington, the Czechoslo-
vak attempt at democratic socialism—the so-called Prague Spring—fell
to a similar tank invasion (if this time with significantly less subsequent
repression). There were mass riots in Poland in 1970 (and again in 1976),
and serious working-class protests in the shipyards of Gdansk a decade
later. And the unrest spread through the entire system of Eastern Euro-
pean satellite states by 1988–89, when the Soviet Army was then heavily
engaged in a struggle with the Afghan mujahidin.
The early postwar resistance to Soviet rule was confidentially crushed
by a Russian state convinced of the superiority of communism over capi-
talism as well as of the vital leadership role of the CPSU in the protection
and development of that superiority. That confidence was then slowly
drained out of the Russian political system by a mixture of political paral-
ysis and economic underperformance. The economic underperformance
was stark. Nikita Khrushchev had promised that Russia would outper-
form the West in living standards in a generation. It did not, and the
drabness of life in Eastern Europe stood in ever-growing contrast to
the prosperity of, in particular, a reconstituted West Germany as that
economy moved into a leadership position within the expanding Euro-
pean Union. Sarah Palin told the 2008 US electorate that she could see
Russia from her doorstep. Well, the Eastern European satellites could
see Western prosperity from theirs, which was why, in 1961, the Russians
built the Berlin Wall to stop the hemorrhaging of Eastern European skilled
labor into the west. That wall trapped Russia’s reluctant colonial subjects
inside the Warsaw Pact. To that degree, it succeeded entirely as intended;
but it did nothing to reduce the growing imbalance between income and
wealth on either side of the Cold War divide. Nor did the wall in any way

erode a growing sense of economic failure at the leadership levels within

the communist hierarchy, a growing sense both in the Eastern European
satellite leaderships in Hungary and Poland (where reforms were tried and
failed) and in the Russian leadership itself, as living standards stalled
and agrarian productivity remained dismal by Western standards.55
That is why, for a commentator like Dominic Lieven, “the most basic
reason for the decline and fall of the Soviet Union was therefore extremely
simple”:
At the core of this empire was an ideology that failed. Marxism-Leninism

created an economic system that proved less efficient than capitalism. Its
predictions about the economic collapse of capitalism and of unending
war between the major capitalist states proved wrong, at least between
1945 and 1991. Partly for this reason Soviet ideology and the Soviet politi-
cal and economic system lost credibility and legitimacy in the eyes both of
significant parts of the population and of the ruling elite. Other ideologies
such as nationalism and Western individualism and capitalism began to fill
the void as Soviet self-confidence evaporated. When the regime came to its
final crisis in 1991 it had remarkably few truly committed supporters will-
ing to suffer, act resolutely, and if necessary kill in its defense.56
The Berlin Wall may well have lasted longer, had the CPSU not also
experienced its own crisis of confidence—a crisis that undermined the
willingness of later Soviet leaders to crush opposition in the manner of a
Stalin. That crisis came in two waves. Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956
began a long process of de-Stalinization that helped delegitimize com-
munist rule in the minds of more and more Russians; and the long years
of economic stagnation under the aging Leonard Brezhnev merely com-
pounded the gap between the communist elite and the society it claimed
to govern democratically. By 1985 at the very latest, “there was enough
evidence,” as the renowned Soviet analyst Alec Nove later commented,
“to justify a number of observers, including this one, speaking of ‘a crisis
of system,’ a crisis of confidence, deeply affecting the ruling stratum
itself.”57 When a new and younger leadership eventually emerged, the
decision was taken slowly to ease the tight repression hitherto exer-
cised within Russia itself as well as in its satellite societies. Glasnost and
perestroika were the Gorbachev solutions to the continuing impact of
Russia’s two lies. But limited reform from above simply invited exten-
sive reform from below; and where Gorbachev and his colleagues
saw the possibility of socialist renewal, his critics—on both the right
and the left—saw the dangers/hope of total system collapse: of liqui-
dationism. It was the critics, and not the reformers, whose expectations

then rapidly won the day. “Perestroika,” as Kotkin observed, “uninten-

tionally, destroyed the planned economy, the allegiance to Soviet social-
ism, and, in the end, the party, too. And the blow to the party unhinged
the Union, which the party alone had held together.”58
Pushback from the empire brought a collapse of Soviet power in East-
ern Europe. A pushback from within and beyond the CPSU brought
the rapid end of its political majority; and with its collapse, the entire
disintegration of the Soviet Empire from Berlin to Vladivostok. The
Russian communists then discovered that it was no more possible to
be half-imperial than it was to be half-pregnant. A soft imperialism is
soon aborted. The very thing Gorbachev tried to reform simply pulled
him down, taking the empire with him. But though his reforms were
the trigger, he was ultimately not the cause. The ultimate cause was the
growing lack of belief, at all levels of Russian society and certainly across
its empire, in the truth and relevance of Marxism as that had been passed
down to this generation of Soviet citizens first by Lenin and then by Stalin.
Stalin indeed had purged all the true believers in the terrors of the 1930s,
and though Alec Nove remains convinced that Khrushchev still kept the
faith (and others have treated Gorbachev as the last romantic socialist59),
Nove was pretty certain that “whether, during Brezhnev’s long reign,
he and his comrades believed in communism, or in Marx, is open to
doubt,” and that people in the satellites most likely did not. Their disillu-
sionment mattered less than the cynicism and erosion of faith at the top:
because what that erosion did was then weaken, to the point of totally
emasculation, the ability of the top communist leadership (first in the
satellites and then in the center) to impose their rule by force in the name
of a Marxism in which they no longer themselves had any faith.
This is the key explanation to what Stephen Kotkin has called the
“major riddle” of the Soviet collapse: how and why a ruling party
of twenty million people—two or three million of whom were part of
the Soviet elite—equipped with a fully functioning secret police and a
nuclear-equipped army of five million soldiers, could simply stand by
and let their whole system collapse around them without raising a finger
(or a rifle) to stop that collapse from happening. There was a desultory
last-minute military coup designed to do that very thing, but it was so
halfheartedly executed that it simply speeded the disintegration it was
designed to stop. The key lesson of the Soviet Empire, for any empires yet
to come, is surely that they fall with remarkable rapidity when those who
govern them lose any belief in the legitimacy of their imperial rule. Faced
with rebellion in the Eastern European satellites and a string of civil wars
in the Caucasus, “the foremost leader, namely Gorbachev, chose to preside

over the dissolution of the empire and the state, rather than to use force to
preserve it.”60 Well therefore might Alec Nove ask, “Why did Gorbachev
let them go?” His answer is that “surely, much like the British faced with
demands from India, Nigeria and the rest, there was no longer any sense
of having the right to dictate their form of government. In the name of
what?” As Nove put it, “again, the gradual loss of the sense of legitimacy
worked its way through, in Russia itself and on the periphery,”61 and with
the loss of legitimacy came an associated loss of imperial will.
Reflections on a Doomed Empire

In the manner of its ending, both the tsarist and the Soviet empires
resemble the Roman Empire rather more than they do the empires of
either Spain or Britain, in that the empire and the state collapsed in
each case precipitately and together. For that reason among others, it is
more conventional in the literature focusing on Russia alone to extend
the comparison to other empires that met a similar fate—the German, the
Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman. It is not, however, that other par-
allels are not drawn. They are. Brian Landers, for example, has recently
compared the trajectories of Russian and American imperialism, seeing in
both the working out of a collective faith in manifold destiny.62 Dominic
Lieven, for his part, has productively compared the Soviet and the Brit-
ish empires, seeing both “as part of a global process of modernization
whose origins lie in the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, in the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment and in the nineteenth-century Indus-
trial Revolution.” It is a comparison that enables Lieven to emphasize
the superiority of the Soviet over the British Empire, with the former so
“much more thoroughgoing in its commitment to modernization than
the British ever were in their non-white colonies.”63 Lieven even goes so
far as to compare the Soviet Empire to the Ottoman: both empires built
on a faith, and both empires that eroded internally as that faith weakened.
The comparisons in each case are illuminating.
This is not to say, however, that the fit between the Soviet Empire and
other nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial empires of the British
type is a perfect one. Unlike the British, the Soviets did conceive “of the
USSR as a single country and sought to create a Soviet people united
by common customs, loyalties and ideals.” Not for them the “dominant
British conception of empire in which constitutional law and geography
sharply divided the metropolitan nation from its dependent overseas col-
onies.”64 Moreover, the Soviets saw themselves as anything but imperial.
Imperialism for them was a stage of capitalist development over which
they had supposedly leapt, such that they felt a natural affinity with the

forces of resistance in other people’s empires: a natural affinity, of course,

which they did not then extend to resistance within their own. But unlike
the British—with whom they shared a tendency for indirect rule over their
subordinate federations—the Soviets were genuinely open to the assimila-
tion of non-Russians into the ruling classes of the empire. National iden-
tities separated people in both empires, but communist loyalty trumped
everything in the Soviet case: one reason why, for Lieven at least, it is the
Soviet parallels with Rome that ultimately are so striking. “In a sense their
empire was closer to Rome than to Britain. Their ruling elite was more
willing to assimilate non-whites than Britain was any time in its impe-
rial history. The role of the Russian language and Russian high culture
had Latin and Roman parallels; moreover, the Soviet imperial identity
was above all a question of political loyalty, at least external ideological
conformity and acceptance of the Party’s behavioral norms. Natives could
become Soviet (or Roman) in a way they could never become British, at
least so long as the British empire existed.”65
But even an analyst as versed in Russian and Soviet history as Dominic
Lieven remained insistent that “the parallels with Rome should not be
pushed too far” because Rome, unlike Soviet Russia, had a higher Greek
culture on which to draw and because Rome lacked an opponent—as
with the Soviets, the United States—that was visibly more successful
than it was. As Lieven put it, in order to survive, “an empire’s prestige
requires more than Pushkin, an excellent metro system and a few Stalinist
skyscrapers dotting its capital’s skyline.”66 That “more” was, in the end,
simply not there in the Soviet case, and in its fall the discredited Soviet
Empire released its own version of Rome’s legacy of the Dark Ages. In
the Soviet case, this was a legacy in Eastern Europe of intense national-
ism that sustained episodes of ethnic cleansing, and in Asian Russia it
was a legacy of religious fundamentalism that sustained jihad. The man-
ner and the timing of the Soviet collapse have general lessons for us all.
The chaotic manner in which the Soviet Empire fell, and the dislocations
that fall left in its wake, serve to remind us that imperial power, if it
is to be deconstructed, is best taken down in a measured and a man-
aged manner. The unexpected nature of the Soviet disintegration reminds
us too that imperial deconstruction is better done early than late. It was
far too late in the Soviet case. As Chalmers Johnson put it, “as time ran
out on the Soviet empire, Gorbachev’s military restraint in dealing with
Eastern Europe was admirable, but the endgame of the Soviet Union
remains a cautionary tale for any overextended empire that waits too long
to try to halt the drift to crisis.”67

CHAPTER 7
The Lessons of Empire
It is time now for us to take stock; and as we do so, we would do well

to remember that for one thing to be any sort of guide to another, the
two have to share some powerful similarities. We would also do well to
remember that just because two things share the same label—in this case,
the label of empire—that labeling does not by its mere application neces-
sarily imply sufficient levels of similarity for meaningful comparison. So
we have to be very careful here. Each empire is very much its own crea-
ture, existing in its own space and time. Differences between empires have
to figure in the explanatory mix as much as similarities do. Moreover, and
as we saw in Chapter 2, there is much analytical mileage to be gained
by seeing the category of “empire” as occupying one end of a contin-
uum on which global powers can properly be placed, a continuum with
the category of “hegemon” at the other. Generalizations gleaned from
an examination of empires, therefore, cannot automatically be applied
to nation-states more properly catalogued as hegemonic. Nor is it safe to
leap casually from one time period to another, without recognizing the
degree to which, over time, economic developments associated with the
rise of capitalism have qualitatively altered key relationships within and
between nations, such that the direct control of territory (so vital to early
empires) is unlikely to figure large in processes of domination and subor-
dination in today’s global economy.
Yet even so, the systematic comparison of empires, for the purpose of
locating common trends and characteristics, has a long and productive
pedigree as we have just seen in the Russian case; and in consequence,
we are now the beneficiaries of an extraordinarily rich literature treat-
ing empires as subject to common logic and trajectories. That literature
stretches back to at least the writings of Edward Gibbon, and has modern
equivalents in the work of, among many others, Michael Doyle, John
Darwin, Charles Maier, Hermann Münkler, Jane Burbank, and Frederick
Cooper.1 Scholars make comparisons between empires, and so do politi-
cians and journalists—many of them motivated by the same desire as

that underpinning this volume—namely, that of exploring the past in

order to better shape the future. There is nothing particularly new in any
of this. As the imperial historians Cain and Hopkins noted two decades
ago, “as commentators in the United States try to read the lessons of
the British empire, so the British, in their time, looked to Greece and
Rome for guidance, with a sideways glance at the fate of the Dutch.”2
Legitimately so, for as Carlo Cipolla put it when bringing together in
1970 a series of essays on the economic decline of empires: “the economic
difficulties of empires show striking resemblances. It is not unreasonable
[therefore] to try to identify these similarities, provided that we keep in
mind that individual histories are characterized by important elements
of originality.”3 Not unreasonable, particularly in the case of empires
like the British—ones that last a long time and decline only slowly—
because their experience is so useful a source of insight for those of us now
studying an America that is unlikely to rapidly implode like the Soviet
Union or to one day succumb to barbarians at its gates in the manner of
classical Rome.
So we are not the first to look at the British past, the better to under-
stand the American future. Indeed, we have a major recent example of
just that comparison in Julian Go’s outstanding exploration Patterns of
Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. Julian Go
treats empires as others have, as moving on a trajectory of ascent, hege-
monic maturity, competition, and decline; and he uses that standard and
common trajectory to then explain the differential use of hard and soft
power first by the British state and then by the American. For Go—and
the point is an important one for us—empires of the British and Ameri-
can kind tend to use hard power both when they are ascending and when
they are declining, but privilege the use of soft power throughout their
major hegemonic moments because it is at those moments that their sense
of self-confidence and dominance is at its height.4 Julian Go uses that
comparative insight to argue that the claim for American “exceptionalism
obscures more than it enlightens.” As he says, “it masks complex histo-
ries of imperial power exercised by both the U.S. and British empires.
It overlooks important similarities between the two empires, and blinds
us to localized and sometimes global logics that shape imperial policies,
practices and processes.”5
He is surely right; and in being so, he gives us yet another example of
how a general understanding of empires can throw light on the specifics
of particular imperial moments. To maximize that light for those of us
contemplating US public policy in the first half of the twenty-first cen-
tury, we need a full specification of what the logics and legacies of empire

The Lessons of Empire 161
might be: logics and legacies that will necessarily apply to any country
and governing class choosing to operate imperially on the global stage.
Other empires not studied here might have other lessons for us, but if
the four case studies we have examined are a reliable guide, among those
lessons may very well be the following.
The Limits of Hard Power
Ultimately, there always seems to be a serious military problem with
empires. Empires cost a lot to build and maintain: a lot in terms of
money, in terms of manpower, and in terms of political capital. Empires
also invariably meet both resistance and pushback from within the empire
and competition from other imperial entities beyond their borders, both
of which ultimately inflate those costs substantially. This pattern of costs
and resistance was very clear in the Russian case, where ultimately the
burden of Cold War competition and internal repression overwhelmed an
economy stagnant for other reasons, and left the Soviet Union immersed
in an Afghan war that it could not win and from which it eventually
had ignominiously to withdraw. A similar pattern of imperial overstretch
brought Spanish power to an equally ignominious end in the Treaties of
Westphalia and the Pyrenees between 1648 and 1659 and swept the Brit-
ish out of Southeast Asia in 1942 and India by 1947. Empires regularly
discover the truth of Talleyrand’s often-quoted remark to Napoléon “that
you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.”6 Armies are so much
better at winning power than at retaining it; as Machiavelli put it even
before Spain was an empire, “to undertake the governing of Cities by
violence, especially those which were accustomed to living in freedom, is
a difficult and wearisome thing.”7
Then there is the linked and persistent issue of resistance and pushback
from within the empire itself. Large territorial empires like the Soviet,
or geographically scattered empires of the British kind, invariably retain
control of peripheral societies by a process of indirect rule: with the impe-
rial center in effect freezing in place, and then sustaining, local power
elites in return for their loyalty and submission. In the process, however,
empires invariably lay the ground for their own eventual demise: and do
so in at least three ways. First, by their administrative activity, they create
what eventually become new nations, in the Soviet case by “defining bor-
ders, creating territorial institutions, and providing republics with many
of the trappings of statehood.”8 The Spanish and British empires were
similarly active. Empires also seem inevitably to release what Dominic
Lieven called the law of colonial ingratitude: that process through which
groups that the colonial power itself creates—normally a local middle

class and a local set of army officers and subordinate ranks—become,

in the end, the cause/agency of colonial overthrow. Native aristocracies
might baulk at full identification with these new, colonially created state
boundaries, but the new colonial middle classes have no such problems.
(Nor do white settlers in British dominions.) Empires create servants,
and the servants ultimately rebel. And finally, modern empires succumb
to what Ronald Grigor Suny has called “the dialectic of empire, linking
success to failure.” They inevitably fall prey to “the delegitimizing power
of nationalism and democracy that severely undermine imperial justifica-
tions; and the subversive effect of other legitimizing formulas, like devel-
opmentalism, that produce precisely the conditions under which imperial
hierarchies and discriminations are no longer required.”9
Difficulties of Governance
Pushback against imperial rule is simply one important facet of a more
general feature of empires: the fact that they become more difficult to rule
the larger they are and the longer they last. Partly, this is simply because
geographical size and communication capacity have historically been in
tension. Until the age of the Internet, the farther away you were from
the metropolitan center, the longer it took for information and instruc-
tions to pass between you and those who ruled you. The big empires
were always based on indirect rule, and that indirect rule always—and
of necessity—provided a space for resistance: resistance either by the tra-
ditional elites doing the local ruling or by those they ruled venting their
frustration with the colonial set up at both the local and the metropolitan
level. Settler colonies were historically supremely difficult to effectively
discipline from the metropolitan center. The British failed abysmally at
this in the American case and successfully avoided it by not trying in
the case of the white dominions. Only the north of Ireland tested UK
governments systematically on this in the years preceding the 1998 Good
Friday Agreement.
However, the governance problems of empire invariably run deeper
than simply matters of distance. Any difficulty of the center control-
ling the periphery is invariably matched by problems of control at (and
over) the center itself. Control of the army invariably proved problem-
atic in empire after empire as the army grew in size: problematic in the
Roman case because of the power base it provided for generals with
political ambitions; problematic in the Spanish case whenever paying the
army proved difficult, which it often did; and problematic in the Rus-
sian case whenever the army’s defeat by someone else’s military forces
discredited the regime as a whole. Even democratic governments have had

problems containing the ambitions of their generals—though invariably,

civilian power does ultimately prevail in democratic states. What demo-
cratic governments find it difficult to do is to reconcile the political and
social inequalities of empire with the egalitarian values they espouse at
home. Invariably, the force of the latter makes the maintenance of the
former impossible over the long term. As Michael Blundell put it for
the Kenyan imperial state, “it boiled down to whether the British Gov-
ernment could or would shoot Africans to maintain the status quo for
Europeans.”10 Eventually, British governments said “No,” just as Mikhail
Gorbachev did, and with similar results for the long-term stability of the
empire. What democratic governments with global pretensions also find
difficult to avoid is the emergence of an imperial presidency—that is, of an
executive that, though democratically elected, slips inexorably into non-
or even antidemocratic practices in the defense of imperial power far away
from its own shores. At the height of the Roman Empire, faced with
issues of this kind, the republic rapidly gave way to what was effectively
a monarchy. Modern empires don’t inevitably do that, but they do face
similar problems of excessive executive autonomy.
Problems of the State

Something else that empires do, with damaging long-term consequences
for their own ability to survive, is distort the distribution of skills and pri-
orities within their governing classes over time. The pursuit of imperial
glory invariably pulls the brightest and the best away from domestic
concerns to imperial ones. It sends them into the army. It draws them
to imperial service. It makes working in the financial sector more lucra-
tive than being entrepreneurial at home. And as talents shift, so too
do the preoccupations of the state. The immediate protection of impe-
rial interests comes to take precedence over the identification and pur-
suit of long-term domestic needs, and does so more quickly the more
those imperial interests are challenged by resistance movements or other
empires in countries far removed from the domestic center. And around
the institutions of the metropolitan state, powerful imperial interests
cohere: interests protecting the global reach of the financial sector,
interests protecting the needs of the industrial complex that generates
military products, and the interests of the military forces themselves.
When an empire has been consolidated for several generations, political
formations keen to deconstruct it have their work made more difficult
by the potency of this accumulated political leverage exercised against
imperial critics by powerfully positioned, closely linked and immensely
privileged imperial elites.

Empires also over time seem inevitably to run into problems of fund-
ing. There is always eventually some imperial fiscal crisis of the state. Even
an empire as early as the Roman relied heavily on taxation for its daily
operation and for the maintenance of its military forces, its public works,
and even its primitive welfare initiatives to maintain social order. Indeed,
the Roman Empire was particularly pressed on this because ultimately
it had to tax land more than it could tax trade—trade flows being only
modestly developed in ancient antiquity—and land (as soon as the empire
ceased to expand) proved to be relatively fixed in supply. The Spaniards,
by contrast, building their empire a millennium and a half later, were able
to draw more easily on what was by then an embryonic but established
European banking system, in the process creating what Sir John Elliott
called “a regular system of default financing” that periodically broke
down as the state defaulted on its loans. Rising taxes, growing public
debt, debasements of the currency, and resistance to taxation hikes are all
features of the other empires we have examined. Rome, Spain, Britain,
and Soviet Russia all experienced each of these dimensions of fiscal crisis
in different ways; and as their fiscal crises deepened, their grip on empire
invariably weakened.
Erosion of Economic Strength

It’s not all bad news for empires, of course. Empires in their prime also
attract a lot of subsidy. They take things from peoples less powerful than
themselves and do so with relative ease because of the imbalance of mili-
tary capacity; and they find borrowing resources from others outside the
empire easier than it might otherwise have been because the collateral
asked of them on such borrowing is invariably low, relative to the bor-
rowing capacity of nonempires. In financial as well as in military terms,
power and privilege go together. This financial arbitrage comes, however,
at a serious long-term price. Empires at times enjoy a credit rating that
is too good for their own long-term viability. At the very least, empires
tend to end up (as in the British case) with a serious division of interests
between their financial and manufacturing sectors. At the very worst (as
with Spain) for all their wealth, empires still end up dependent on credit
provided by bankers based in circuits of capital that lie outside the territo-
rial reach of the empire itself, credit that, if withheld (as in 1576), leaves
the imperial army unpaid and the imperial military capacity momentarily
out of central control. Armies win imperial control, but it is bankers who
eventually determine if it can be sustained.
Moreover, obtaining things easily because of imperial preference invari-
ably weakens the ability of empires to generate those things themselves. It

frees them from any immediate confrontation with the reality of market
forces, and it alters the relative weight within their underlying economy
of the sectors that manufacture things and those that merely play with
money. Empires, that is, as they succeed invariably undermine the eco-
nomic superiority in which that rise had initially been anchored. We saw
this in the Roman case, with the imperial city progressively outsourc-
ing the bulk of its manufacturing capacity to cheaper sources of produc-
tion in the periphery of the empire, effectively deindustrializing itself in
the process. We saw it with Spain, depleting the Castilian economy by a
mixture of heavy taxation and ruinous inflation. We saw it in the Brit-
ish case, with the 1890s retreat by British manufacturing into the safer
markets of empire, and with the growth around the Edwardian state of
a powerful network of financial interests whose voice came to dominate
policy making. That retreat into empire was a response to competition
from economies that had developed during (and under) the brief period
of British economic dominance, and seems to reflect a general truth of
those brief periods—namely, that the economic institutions generating
the original dominance then change the world they dominate, in the pro-
cess becoming less appropriate to the new world that they have helped
create. Retreating into imperial markets is never economically sensible,
because the peripheries of modern empires are invariably economically
backward. The British retreat reflected an institutional rigidity in the core
of the British economy: a refusal/inability to see that practices that had
worked so splendidly in the past were unlikely ever to do so again in the
future. Empires get becalmed by too great a faith in their own past glory.
Social Tensions and Cultural Trajectory

The division between financial and manufacturing interests in the British
case points to a more general feature of imperial rule: the importance of
relations between and within social classes in understanding the trajec-
tories of empires. Imperial expansion favors some sections of the ruling
order but definitely not others, and the struggle between both is a feature
of each empire in turn. Internal elite tensions were particularly acute in
the Roman case, both at the end of the republic and at the end of the
western empire that succeeded it. In both periods, sharp inequalities of
income and intense greed among ruling groups were key barriers to sys-
tem stability: barriers transcended in the first case by the abandonment
of the republic but in the second only by the fall of the empire itself. A
similar resistance to a sharing of the taxation costs of empire was visible
in upper-class and clerical circles in the Spanish case, and the petty cor-
ruption of the Soviet nomenklatura was a major force eroding the internal

legitimacy of the Soviet state. As Adrian Goldsworthy noted for Rome,

empires invariably rot from the top down rather than from the bottom
up, as imperial privilege comes to be understood by the powerful as a
matter of elite entitlement.11
Pride and self-confidence also inevitably generate institutional and
cultural sclerosis in empires over time. As Carlo Cipolla noted, “the more
a mature empire is proud of its cultural heritage, the more emotionally
difficult it is for its people to change to new modes of being and to new
ways of doing things, under the pressure of external competition and
growing difficulties.”12 Institutional sclerosis was definitely a feature of
the British response to late nineteenth-century challenges to its economic
and hence imperial dominance, setting up a process of path-dependent
economic and imperial decline rooted firmly in the original conditions
of dominance. Cipolla also noted that “institutional rigidities reflect cul-
tural rigidities. Conservative people and vested interests cluster around
obsolete institutions, and each element supports the other powerfully.”13
If change is then blocked by this coalition of interests, and economic
difficulties are allowed to grow, “a cumulative process is set in motion
that makes things progressively worse. Decline enters then in its final,
dramatic stage.”14 That was certainly how decline played out in the Brit-
ish case, and may yet—unless guarded against—play out in processes of
imperial decline to come.
Finally, consider this: even privileged elites within dominant empires
tend to wake up to the dangers of the erosion of the competitive strength of
their domestic economy, if they wake up to it at all, only too late. Empires
rise but they also decline—sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly—partly
because their governing classes (and their central populations) come over
time to believe more and more in the naturalness and permanence of that
superiority. They come to take their global position of power for granted,
and lose sight of the very special conditions necessary for its retention and
growth. They also come to swallow much of their own imperial rheto-
ric and so progressively lose the capacity to understand their own grow-
ing unpopularity in far-flung parts of the empire. As Chalmers Johnson
wrote, “it is typical of an imperial people to have a short memory for its
less pleasant imperial acts but for those on the receiving end, memory can
be long indeed.”15 A heightened tolerance of war, a double standard on
the legitimacy of violence (it is all right if we inflict it on others but not if
they inflict it on us), and even a blindness to both the violence of poverty
at home and the violence of empire abroad: all these seem to be inevitable
features of the culture of empire. For although the specific content of
ideas and claims differs from empire to empire, the general character of

the imperial mind-set does not. It is always a mixture of excessive hubris

and growing ignorance: hubris about the intellectual or racial superior-
ity of the imperial culture and growing ignorance about the depth and
complexity of cultures on the imperial periphery (Henry Kamen’s “The
silence of Pizarro”). As the global reach of an empire increases, so too does
its cultural parochialism. Some empires, as we saw most clearly in the
British case, fall in total self-delusion. Others, like the Russian, fall when
that self-delusion is no longer possible.
Overall
Some imperial scholarship clings resolutely to the view that empires are
a good thing, and that the possession of one is a sign of both present and
future strength.16 But the bulk of the evidence available to us on the char-
acter and trajectory of global power would suggest otherwise. It would
suggest that empires grow strong only because powers around them grow
weak, and that imperial stability is more a function of that continuing
weakness than it is of factors exceptional and special to the global power
itself. It would suggest that empires fool themselves if they think that
their superiority is endemic rather than contingent, and a reflection
of their inner strengths rather than of others’ external weaknesses. Take
those external weaknesses away, and imperial decline seems to follow as
surely as night follows day.17 The bulk of the evidence would also sug-
gest that empires begin militarily strong, politically focused, economically
advanced, socially cohesive, and culturally dynamic; but that invariably
they end militarily exhausted, politically gridlocked, economically weak-
ened, socially divided, and culturally depleted. Colin Read called this
trajectory “the winner’s curse.”18 As we saw in detail in Chapter 1, there
is plenty of military exhaustion, political stalemate, economic erosion,
social division, and cultural deprivation in contemporary America. It is
now time to return, therefore, to the question first raised as this book
began: whether any of that exhaustion, stalemate, erosion, division, and
depletion is the product of the presence in the modern world of some-
thing that we might properly recognize as an American Empire.


PART III
The Reckoning


CHAPTER 8
A New Rome on
the Potomac?
As we saw in Chapter 2, there is great value to be had from think-

ing of empires and hegemons as occupying two ends of a continuum
designed to differentiate types of global dominance. At the classical impe-
rial end of the continuum stand empires (like Rome or tsarist Russia) that
directly control huge landmasses in ways that privilege the metropolitan
center over the rest of the imperial holdings, that exercise direct and effec-
tive sovereignty over other political societies far removed in space from
their own, and that do so for their own immediate benefit and not for
that of the societies they dominate. At the hegemonic end of the con-
tinuum stand polities whose global reach can be equally extensive, but
whose degree of direct control over other political societies is negligible.
Hegemonic dominance rests in the capacity to indirectly influence those
societies in ways that benefit the hegemonic center and on the capacity to
exercise that influence on a regular and a substantial basis. And between
the two polar positions on the imperial continuum stand empires that
exercise both direct and indirect control: direct control over colonies or
settler communities abroad and indirect control through a system of alli-
ances, economic relationships, and cultural networks. The questions for
us now, as they were at the end of Chapter 2, are where the United States
stands on that continuum, and the degree to which that position leaves
the United States vulnerable to what we have just enumerated as struc-
tural tendencies endemic to empires.
Any balanced assessment of US history must conclude that the United
States sits at neither end of the imperial continuum. It certainly does not
sit exactly where Rome and tsarist Russia did. It is true that the United
States created itself by capturing a large landmass—there are tsarist paral-
lels there as the US government thereby became “one of the great land-
lords of world history”1—but its unique form of government extended

equal rights to the settlers that moved out into the territories it conquered,
so that there is no visible territorial hierarchy of dominance and subordi-
nation. If there is a comparative dimension to the US story of manifest
destiny—one that might place the United States at the classically imperial
end of the continuum—those parallels might more properly be with the
Spanish and Soviet ways of dealing with resistance to its rule: namely,
the widespread destruction of native peoples. Official American history
still tends to sugarcoat that key dimension of American expansion, but
destruction there certainly was. And for that reason, and for others to
which we will return, the United States cannot properly be positioned
fully at the benign hegemonic end of the imperial spectrum either. Hege-
monic leadership through alliances, economic relationships, and cultural
networks is definitely the most prominent face of post-1945 America’s
way of shaping its surrounding global order, but it is not the only face.
Soft power and hard power go together in the American Empire as ear-
lier they did in the British. Troops as well as dollars are America’s chosen
currency of empire, and because they are, many of the logics associated
with direct imperial rule must factor in to any evaluation of this society’s
contemporary position and likely future trajectory.
The need for that “factoring-in” is reinforced by two features of US
military history on which contemporary commentary often tends not
to dwell but to which we made brief reference at the end of Chapter 2:
namely, America’s own early twentieth-century experience as a colonial
power, and the series of more recent wars that the United States has
waged, on other people’s territory, in order to defend/extend the area of
its global hegemony.
“Simply put, by seizing Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and
Samoa” in 1898, “the United States had become a formal overseas empire
just like its European counterparts”;2 and as a colonial power in the Phil-
ippines between 1898 and 1946, the United States waged an absolutely
standard imperial war against a movement of national independence: a
15-year pacification struggle (1898–1913) replete with the usual horrors
of mass killings, forced deportations, and the cultural subordination of
the natives to their superior American masters.3 To its credit, the United
States backed off the European carve up of Africa in the last decades of
the nineteenth century, though American troops were heavily involved
in putting down rebellions across the globe in China in broadly the same
time period (from the Taiping rebellion of the 1860s to the Boxer rebel-
lion of 1900). And as we discussed more fully in Chapter 1, post–World
War II US troops have been regularly deployed in a string of regional
wars: in large numbers in Korea before 1954 and in Vietnam after 1964,

A New Rome on the Potomac? 173
and in lesser numbers in places such as Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon

in 1958, and Somalia in 1991. Michael Hunt and Steven Levine have
properly labeled America’s Asian wars (from the Philippines and Japan to
Korea and Vietnam) as “an arc of empire” under which America followed
“a familiar imperial path,” and have pointed to the large presence of the
US military in the Middle East as a similar arc that is ultimately likely
to be similarly unsuccessful.4 And as part of that second arc, to this day,
we have people sitting in military bunkers directing drones to kill people
thousands of miles away. We may not invade Arab lands with ease any
more (not after Iraq and Afghanistan) but we still definitely invade their
airspace. And because we do—because of the way we still treat certain
overseas states and peoples—colonial as well as hegemonic empires have
real and important lessons for us as we contemplate our current condition
and its future potential.
That is particularly true, given the extent to which after 1945 the United
States stepped into a global role previously occupied by the British, and
did so consciously and deliberately as British power waned.5 The military
and economic leadership that Britain had exercised before 1914 (and to a
lesser degree before 1938) because of its global holdings, the United States
now came to exercise instead. And like the British before them, central
to that exercise of metropolitan global power was the construction of a
network of subordinate elites controlling key allied states in a dependent
and subordinate relationship to the metropolitan center: in this case to
Washington, DC. As Dwight Eisenhower put it even before taking office
as president in 1953, “we cannot be a modern Rome, guarding the far
frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than because these are
not, politically, our frontiers.”6 Where once there had been Pax Romana
and more recently Pax Britannica, those who governed the United States
after 1945 consciously set out to create and supervise an equivalent Pax
Americana. This was a pax like its predecessors, a global settlement under
one hegemonic power that created stability for allies within it, challenges
(and threats) to and from groups beyond its reach, and frontiers that
had to be policed and, where necessary, actively defended. The details of
each settlement differed in important ways—which among other things,
prevent one hegemonic period from being used in any simplistic way as a
guide to the next7—but the general structure and logic of each settlement
is, broadly speaking, the same.8
So in contemplating the present condition and future global trajectory
of the United States, we are definitely dealing with a variant of “empire,”
just a novel and unprecedented kind of variant. As Julian Go put it, “the
fact that the United States did not initiate a new round of colonization

after acquiring the Japanese territories does not mean a lack of empire.
It simply meant a different type of empire. In this empire, clients took
the place of colonies, and financial aid took the place of administrators.”9
Nor is Julian Go alone in arguing this. As we briefly noted in Chapter 2,
the British imperial historian Bernard Porter made a similar argument in
a slightly different way:
Modern American “imperialism” is not like old British imperialism. It is
much, much bigger. Britain once had an empire. America now has a super
empire. The prefix “super” is apt because of the slight ambivalence that
attaches to it. Superman is either a terrific man, or is more than a man.
Likewise with present-day America. If she isn’t a terrific empire . . . she
is more than one. She exceeds any previous empires the world has ever
seen: for example in the spread of her cultural and economic influence;
in her military dominance; in the extent of her ambition . . . to remodel
the world in her own image. If that still does not qualify her as an empire,
then it is because she has no desire to do this “formally.” But then neither
did Britain, for much of the time she is generally acknowledged to have
been most “imperialistic,” in the 19th century. Leaving that aside, how-
ever: America’s reluctance to take on all the traditional trappings of empire
doesn’t necessarily make her less of one. She is transcending the category.
Nothing quite like this has ever been seen before.10
Of course, because the United States did not in the end establish a large
and semipermanent colonial empire, some of the patterns of resistance
experienced by countries that did (not least Spain, Britain, and France) do
not apply in the American case; and because the United States is quintes-
sentially a capitalist rather than a communist country, part of the Soviet
experience has no equivalence here. Whatever things the government and
military of the United States may or may not do that periodically offend
liberal sensibilities, running large-scale gulags is not one of them. But
the seriousness and totality of the commitment by successive postwar US
administrations to the maintenance and extension of American global
hegemony means that at least two things follow as surely as night follows
day. One is that those governments (and to a significant degree also their
electorates) have incrementally succumbed to what Jack Snyder labeled
the “imperial temptations”11 and Sheldon Pollock “the lethal embrace of
empire.”12 Those temptations include a propensity for imperial overreach
and a vulnerability to the standard myths of empire,13 and both need to
be explored in detail here. The other is that American power, like the
power of earlier empires, has begun to fall into a particular pattern—
the standard imperial path of ascendancy, consolidation, and decline14—
that has arguably now reached at least its consolidation plateau in the

American case. Whether decline is to follow will therefore be our prime

concern when the domestic impact of the imperial temptation has been
explored in full.
The Weight of Military Spending

The most obvious parallel between previous imperial experience and the
postwar American equivalent lies in the realm of the military. As we saw
in Chapter 1, the scale of US military operations is truly global, and the
cost—financial and otherwise—is truly enormous. That enormity has
consequences, three of which are particularly telling in the context of
a conversation about possible imperial overreach and subsequent global
decline. One consequence turns on the political and economic impact of
a large military budget. A second concerns the impact of military practices
on core American values and institutions. The third touches on the para-
dox of the interplay between military strength and national insecurity.
The most immediate impact of a large military budget is the space it
diminishes for public spending of a nonmilitary kind: an impact that is
always there in some form but that is particularly acute at moments such
as the present, when military spending has dramatically increased and
the size of the federal deficit is a matter of intense political controversy.
Military spending did not trigger the financial crisis of 2008. That was
entirely the product of the misbehavior of civilian institutions; but mili-
tary spending was a significant cause of the modest rise in federal debt
that preceded the crisis and subsequent recession. Federal spending to
offset that recession, and the collapse in tax revenues associated with it,
did then create a larger federal deficit than is normal in peacetime and
gave rise to fierce political struggles in Washington, DC on how best to
reduce it. The fiercest of the deficit hawks tended to be also the fiercest
defenders of military spending, so that the combination of the two put
particular pressure on the discretionary parts of the federal nonmilitary
budget. A smaller defense budget would have lessened those pressures,
but the defense budget is currently anything but small. Consequently, it
too fell victim to the sequestration deal forced on a reluctant adminis-
tration as the price of allowing the debt ceiling to rise in August 2011,
ironically creating the impression that somehow both military and non-
military spending are equally burdensome on the rest of the US economy.
That impression is false, however, because they are not equivalent and
because the “cuts” in military spending—if the Congressional Budget
Office is correct—will, in real terms, merely take the Pentagon’s “base
budget [to] about what it was in 2007, and . . . still 7 percent above the
average funding since 1980.”15 “Even after the sequester, the Pentagon’s

base budget is set to remain well above pre-9/11 levels for the next
decade, and the military is taking a far smaller haircut than it did after
Vietnam and the Cold war wound down.”16 As we noted earlier, an
enormous academic literature now exists on the interplay between mili-
tary spending and rates of economic growth elsewhere in the domestic
economy, and like all such literatures it sustains more than one con-
clusion. My own work17 suggests (and did long before 9/11) that after
1945, military spending within the US economy was initially a positive
element in the creation and stabilization of an entire social structure of
accumulation that brought rising living standards to key sections (the
white, male, unionized sections) of the American working class, helping
to turn them into the suburbanized middle class now under such pressure
today. For a period, the “spin-in” to the domestic economy of advan-
tages created by technological innovations researched and developed in
the military-industrial sector more than offset the burden of taxation
and misallocation of resources that a large military budget also brought
to the table—but only for a period, and that period is now long gone.
Now the size of the military budget squeezes out vital social programs and
acts as a barrier to the flexible redeployment of federal dollars that are in
short supply. The weight of the military-industrial complex within the
US manufacturing sector pulls a disproportionate percentage of America’s
limited research budgets and skilled labor away from vital civilian uses,
and leaves too large a part of the manufacturing base protected from full
market competition by preferential Pentagon purchasing; and the lim-
ited multiplier effect of military expenditure as against federal spending
focused on civilian needs means that dollars directed toward military pur-
poses do not have the general expansionary consequences that would flow
from federal spending directed in other ways.
As we saw in Chapter 5, the liberal militarism that informed Brit-
ish policy during its imperial period now informs American policy in
its imperial moment. Liberal militarism relies on technology and profes-
sionals for its effectiveness, rather than on mass conscript armies, while
deploying its sophisticated technology under the banner of a univer-
salistic ideology.18 In consequence and even before the events of 9/11
triggered a renewed US military buildup, government procurement for
America’s technologically sophisticated military accounted for the sales
of “more than a half of all aircraft, radio and TC communications equip-
ment; a fourth of all engineering and scientific instruments; and a third of
all tubes and non-ferrous forgings manufactured in the United States.”19
This might have been fine, had it not also involved the neglect by the
federal government of the purchasing requirements of the civilian goods

sector, had it not also cushioned key parts of US manufacturing from

foreign competition, and had it not also concentrated public spending
in areas in which the resulting more general “bang for the buck” was
remarkably low. The recent work by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-
Peltier would suggest that “investments in the green economy, health care
and education will produce between about 50–140 percent more jobs
than if the same amount of money were spent by the Pentagon.”20 So the
choices here—effectively between guns and butter—are very real ones,
and ones that have been publicly recognized for a very long time. As
General Eisenhower put it at the start of his presidency, “every gun that
is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final
sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.”21 Right now, if Pollin and Garrett-Peltier are correct,
$1 spent on the military will generate about 11,200 jobs in the United
States, if given directly to consumers to spend will generate 15,100 jobs,
and if given to education 26,700 jobs.22 Spending $1 on the military
when civilian unemployment is so high makes less economic sense than
the Pentagon likes to claim.
Corrosive Effects
That would be bad enough if this was the only element on the debit
side of the military account; but it is not. The scale and character of
the modern American military help erode, in subtle but important ways,
key American institutions and values. President Eisenhower warned as he
left office of the corrosive impact on American democracy of the emer-
gence in the 1950s of a powerfully embedded military-industrial com-
plex. His warning was apposite then, and even more so now; because the
numbers of dollars involved here are truly enormous, and the impact of
their spending on local economies within the United States is currently
so great. So great in fact that, as with David Edgerton’s characterization
of the United Kingdom as “a warfare state,” it is possible to find seri-
ous American academic scholarship now making the same case for the
United States.23 And why not, for “the Pentagon has dispersed around
$385 billion to private companies for work done outside the U.S. since
late 2001,” mainly on the construction of military bases and heavily for-
tified American embassies: with almost a third of that money going to
just ten companies (including the most famous recipient, Haliburton).24
And at the same time, individual members of Congress have received
(and continue to receive) substantial campaign contributions from major
defense contractors: $4.4 million in the 2012 election cycle for mem-
bers of the House Armed Services Committee alone.25 Funding of this

scale necessarily inserts corporate interests between the representative

and those he or she represents and so helps undermine at home the very
democracy that the military expenditure is being used to promote abroad.
It certainly helps explain Chalmers Johnson’s great fear that since, in his
view, “our political system may no longer be capable of saving the United
States as we know it,”26 the ultimate price of American Empire might yet
be American democracy itself.
It is hardly surprising therefore—and certainly noteworthy—that in the
early drafts of the now-famous Eisenhower speech, the retiring president
referred to something he called “the ‘military-industrial-Congressional’
complex,” ultimately leaving out the reference to Congress only because
of his wish not to alienate “the legislature in his last days in office.”27
Yet however named, the set of institutional relationships to which Eisen-
hower drew attention remains a powerful and potentially undemocratic
complex that supplies arms not simply to the US military but also to fed-
erally approved buyers abroad. In 1990, the United States had captured
“an impressive 37 percent of the global arms trade. By 2011 . . . that
percentage had reached a near-monopolistic 78 percent.”28 It is the scale
and character of America’s military-industrial complex that has helped
turn us, in the lifetime of a single generation, from the isolationist state of
the 1930s to our current global status as producer and distributor of the
world’s most lethal arms. If we fear backlash now, it is a backlash in part
that we have helped arm.
There is, of course, still much to admire in the American military (if
not always in the companies who supply it), not least the patriotism and
personal bravery demonstrated daily by the men and women in uniform,
the role the military plays in training soldiers with vital modern skills,29
and the role it plays in providing routes to leadership for minority popu-
lations within the United States itself. But not all the practices prevalent
in the contemporary American army are to be honored in that way. The
scale of sexual violence against serving women is now at last being recog-
nized, as well as the volume of mental illness for veterans of both sexes
created by the strains of war itself. And sadly, to that litany we now have
to add a string of military atrocities in both Middle Eastern theaters of
war: a string that includes the random and sustained abuse of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib and the desecration of the Koran by drunken American
soldiers. It is a string that seriously undermined the effectiveness of the
very mission with which the American military was charged.
Moreover, what the military does in public is one thing, but what
branches of the US armed forces and intelligence services do out of
the public eye in something else entirely. As was noted in Chapter 1,

the United States has a long track record of assistance and support for
military coups and repressive regimes. It is a record that stretches back to
at least the CIA-organized antidemocratic coup in Iran in 1954, includes
American connivance at the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende in
Chile in 1973, and to this day involves direct US assistance to repressive
regimes in the Middle East (to Egypt during the Mubarak years and to
Saudi Arabia under the House of Sa‘ud). Indeed, “throughout the Cold
War, the United States favored, with some variation, military autocrats
in South America, monarchs across the Middle East, and a mix of demo-
crats and dictators in Asia,” regularly “setting aside democratic principles
for a realpolitik policy of backing almost any reliable leader.”30 To that
long and murky record we have now added—since 9/11—waterboarding
and other forms of torture, rendition, and the planned assassination of
Islamic militants. Robert Scheer has written of “America’s global tor-
ture network” consisting of 54 countries linked in a network of torture
chambers that the United States has authorized.31 The inner workings of
those torture chambers have been extensively documented by the Open
Society Justice Initiative.32 We are not Rome: we don’t crucify, but we
have waterboarded. We definitely have waterboarded; and waterboard-
ing is definitely torture. Indeed, American jurists defined it as such when
waterboarding was inflicted on US POWs by the Japanese military before
1945 and by the North Koreans later. Some Japanese officers were even
executed for their role in this particularly heinous crime.33 But double
standards as well as violations of human rights have long been associated
with the excesses of empire. As Bernard Porter put it, “nothing coming
from Abu Ghraib . . . exceeded in horror certain crimes that were perpe-
trated under the British in post-Mutiny India, or in 1950s Kenya. This
sort of thing is a likely—if not inevitable—side-effect of colonialism.”34
This is why the more effective way of getting rid of the excesses of empire
is not to stop at the punishment of the excessive but rather to run down
the empire that makes those excesses possible.
Fortunately, under the present administration, the Bush-era toleration
of this kind of torture has officially gone. Unfortunately, it been replaced
in centrality in the fight against al Qaeda by White House–cleared assassi-
nations, not just of bin Laden, but also of American citizens sympathetic
to his cause. We even have an official 16-page “white paper” from the
Obama administration making the legal case for this covert assassination
program.35 American citizens abroad (though not yet within the United
States itself ) can apparently now be legally assassinated if they are thought
by an unnamed “high-level official” to constitute “an imminent threat”
to this country but cannot realistically be captured: with the decision

on “imminence” and “inability to capture” being left ultimately to the

president to make alone. With the CIA acting effectively as the presi-
dent’s secret army, America’s long sequence of wars and covert operations
since 1945 has left the executive branch with war-making powers never
anticipated by the constitution’s creators. As Rachel Maddow put it, “war
making has become almost an autonomous function of the American
state. It never stops.”36 It is a matter, therefore, of considerable concern
that the “war on terror” released by George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11
not only involved the invasion of countries unconnected with that terror;
it also gathered to the presidency new powers of surveillance over Ameri-
can citizens both at home and abroad, eroded civil liberties, and lethally
enhanced the powers of an imperial presidency. Ancient Rome had its
Principate. We got by simply with the Authorization to Use Military Force
Act and the Patriot Act: but in both cases, liberties were lost that will now
be extraordinarily difficult to recapture.
Pushback
The third consequence of all this military expenditure and activity is
so large as to require separate treatment here. It is not simply a matter
of the US state exercising hard power as well as soft power abroad. It is
also that the exercise of that hard power, and the ubiquitous deployment
of military forces to do the exercising, cumulatively erodes the credibility
and legitimacy of a soft power message that presents the United States as
quintessentially democratic at home and altruistic abroad. What large-
scale American military endeavors on foreign soil, designed to rearrange
other people’s political furniture, invariably do is ultimately fail: the fur-
niture may change but the new furniture is normally less favorably dis-
posed to the United States than was the furniture there before. And what
small-scale, covert, and targeted American military endeavors on foreign
soil invariably do is kill their terrorist targets, but only in ways that gener-
ate yet more terrorists to target.
The track record of the American military since 1945 has not been a
particularly impressive one, and certainly the record since 9/11 has been
one more of failure than of success. There have been clear successes: not
least the ousting of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001 and
the killing of Osama bin Laden a decade later. But in general, the big
post-1945 invasions by US military forces have produced stalemates and
defeats rather than clear and welcome victories: stalemate in Korea, defeat
in Vietnam, and stalemate again after the First Gulf War. The American
military toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003—on the face of it, a clear US
military victory—but the resulting explosion of sectarian tension, and the

steady drumbeat of returning body bags very quickly made that victory a
hollow one. George W. Bush’s announcement of “mission accomplished”
was, by common consent these days, at best wildly premature and at
worst entirely misleading. Far from achieving outright victory and far
from being welcomed as liberators as Donald Rumsfeld had anticipated,
the US military presence first in Iraq and now Afghanistan has simply
stoked the fires of anti-Americanism and over time has strengthened pop-
ular support for the very groups, politics, and ideologies against which the
invasions were originally made. If the United States and its allies invaded
Iraq simply to topple Saddam Hussein, they succeeded beyond measure.
If, however, they invaded to find weapons of mass destruction, there
were none; and if their purpose in going in—as they quickly claimed it
was—was to establish a stable democracy there, the eight-year occupation
that followed the invasion must be counted as a total failure. Freedom
House, the great measurer of democratic stability and rights, currently
grades Iraq as “not free”—scoring badly on both civil liberties and politi-
cal rights37—as well it might, given the civil war now in full play and the
ongoing deadly tit-for-tat sectarian violence that remains the dominant
feature of life in the Baghdad that US-led troops supposedly “liberated”
more than a decade ago.38 The situation in Afghanistan as America “with-
draws” is, if anything, actually even worse: the Taliban is resurgent, the
Kabul government is shrouded in corruption, and poppy production is
up as never before. Like the British and the Russians before them, as
Gideon Rachman has it, “the west has lost in Afghanistan.”39
American troops may be technologically more advanced than the foes
they fight. They have a technological edge that the Romans, for example,
long ago did not. But as we have seen from Vietnam right through to
Afghanistan today, sophisticated military technology can be more than
outplayed by low-intensity, guerrilla-style resistance. Roadside bombs can
be more potent a weapon than the latest laser-guided nuclear missile.
This should not come as a complete surprise, as the ubiquity of the US
military presence abroad invariably generates—as indeed previous impe-
rial experiences would suggest that it was bound to generate—a powerful
pushback by groups directly threatened by that presence. In the specifics
of the moment, the current “war on terror” is a war largely pitting pro-
fessional troops against non-state-led religious zealots. In that war, “vic-
tory,” if such a thing is possible at all, will be measured ultimately in the
numbers of hearts and minds won, rather than in the number of zealots
killed. Dead zealots are a powerful recruiting tool for the movement that
spawned them. What is being fought over here are degrees of popular
homegrown local support, and in that fight, the United States is at a

disadvantage when fighting abroad precisely because it is not local and

it is not homegrown. It is external, and its presence is imposed, which
is why the latest technological face of US liberal-militarism—the use of
drones to assassinate militants, keeping the lives of American soldiers safe
by not putting boots on the ground—is a particularly poor choice of
weapon for the objectives to which it is being deployed. You do not win
hearts and minds by flying a modern equivalent of Hitler’s V2 over vil-
lages and peoples who coexist with political formations like the Taliban or
with religious beliefs that are Islamic rather than Christian. What you do
when you fly drones around is terrify innocent civilians, kill some of them
by mistake, and drive the rest into (at the very least) an anti-American
posture. Pushback is inevitable when trying to exercise global power, but
that is no reason for adopting a military tactic that can only amplify that
pushback—and amplify it at speed.
As the Obama administration seemed belatedly to recognize, drones do
terrible things.40 They violate the very basic right of a fair trial before sen-
tencing, and do so in a way, as Jimmy Carter said, that “abets our enemies
and alienates our friends.”41 It makes the US claim to be championing
human rights look very bare indeed, and it weakens the capacity of human
rights advocates in the countries that the drones hit from challenging inter-
nally the jihadists against whom the drones are deployed. Politicians and
social movement activists in Pakistan, for example, find it almost impos-
sible to advocate meaningful antiterrorism policies while the drones violate
Pakistani sovereignty by invading its air space. While the drones fly, civil
rights activists run the risk of being branded as American lackeys, their
own lives put at risk by the very policy designed to strengthen them by
weakening support for religious radicalism. As the Yemeni student told the
Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2013, drones cause hatred of America:
“What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone
strike accomplished in any instant: there is now intense anger and growing
hatred of America.”42 The drone strategy is thus both immoral and inef-
fective. “In return for killing a handful of ‘al Qaeda leaders’ it dramatically
increases the ranks of potential anti-U.S. suicide bombers, weakens friendly
governments, strengthens U.S. foes, and increases the risk of nuclear mate-
rials falling into unfriendly hands.” And it does all that, as Fred Branfman
correctly put it, because “its basic premise—that there is a fixed quantity of
al Qaeda leaders, adherents and affiliates whose death reduces the threat to
the U.S.—is simply wrong.”43
This is hardly rocket science (drone science, maybe), and it is certainly
not new. Chalmers Johnson, for example, was clear immediately after
9/11 that a powerful military response to the destruction of the twin

towers was exactly what al Qaeda wanted the United States to orchestrate.
“A second strategic objective of revolutionary terrorism,” he wrote, “is to
provoke ruling elites into a disastrous overreaction, thereby creating wide-
spread resentment against them”: hence the title of his book, Blowback.44
Having learned that lesson the hard way, the tide of war may be receding
as the president regularly likes to assert—the troops are at last coming
home—but still that tide is only receding in a conventional sense. As we
saw in Chapter 1, the covert war is still in full gear.45 The use of private
mercenaries is still in full flow.46 It was even so when the main US theater
of war was Iraq: “It has been estimated that a fifth of U.S. forces deployed
in Iraq [were] in fact ‘Greencard soldiers,’ who hope[d] to acquire U.S.
citizenship through several years of military service, and that PMCs [pri-
vate military companies] supplied an additional 20,000 soldiers.”47 As US
troops now withdraw from Afghanistan, the same pattern seems likely to
hold, with special ops and private companies moving in to fill the space
that the troops leave behind. And so long as they do, pushback will con-
tinue. So long as we bomb them, they will seek to bomb us. Of course!
There are certain things that empires seem never to learn, and this is one
of them; but we might have expected more of this empire, given the anger
produced here long ago (and now regularly retold) at the use of Hes-
sian mercenaries by the British in the American War of Independence.
Why, after all, on Christmas Day 1776 did George Washington cross the
Delaware?
The result of all this recent American global military deployment
has been the creation of a world in which American power is as much
resented as admired. As Robert Cox put it at the start of the Iraq War, “US
influence had a benign quality, often welcomed abroad, in the decades
following the Second World War. It is now regarded abroad with great
suspicion. American values do not now, if they ever did, inspire universal
endorsement as a basis for social and political life. Once widely admired,
if not emulated, they have become more contested and more ambiguous.”
Why? Because “the aggressive application of ‘hard power’ in the last few
years has dissipated the gains US ‘soft power’ made in the post-Second
World War era.” The result is that “the American Empire may appear as
the predominant military and economic force in the world. But it is less
stable and less durable than first appears.”48 That is quite a price to pay for
the unbridled use of military force.
The Preoccupied State

As we saw in each of the case studies examined earlier, the task of run-
ning an empire grows exponentially as the empire expands, burdening

the imperial state with tasks, agendas, mind-sets, and power relationships
from which lesser states are invariably free. The simple scale and scope of
the empire means that the daily agenda of imperial concerns is necessar-
ily large, allowing key players at the top of the imperial state less and less
time to deal with any one of them with the care and deliberation each
deserves. Being the American president these days means carrying, daily,
an overwhelming workload of background briefings, policy decisions,
and speech making that all too often leaves domestic public policy, when
it is eventually formulated, coming together too little and too late. Being
the American president these days means that the entire world is your
agenda, with every problem it generates potentially being one to which
you and your administration will have to react. Little wonder then that,
when measured against both the immediate and long-term needs of the
president’s own domestic base, so much of what comes out of the White
House seems determined by other interests, and what is said by presidents
often seems out of touch with immediate local American realities. This
gap between immediate American local needs and governing presidential
concerns tends to narrow as presidential elections loom—that narrowing
is one of the things that often makes such elections seem so artificial and
so forced—but the disconnect invariably opens up again as soon as the
election is over.
This gap between local needs and governing concerns has been par-
ticularly evident, and ultimately particularly costly, in the post-1945
American case. America emerged from World War II as one of two great
superpowers, each locked in competition with the other for spheres of
global influence. As the “leader of the free world”—as American pres-
idents liked to put it—and with the Cold War framing everything, the
overwhelming geopolitical need (as seen in Washington, DC) was the pre-
vention of the expansion of the communist bloc. As we saw in Chapter 1,
that need did more than tie American arms down in bitter (and ultimately
unsuccessful) Asian wars. It also encouraged successive American admin-
istrations in Washington, DC to prioritize the reconstruction of success-
ful capitalist economies on the front lines of the Cold War itself. That
meant rapidly reconstructing the very economies and societies against
which the allies had previously just waged total war: West Germany
in Europe immediately after 1945 and Japan (and later South Korea) in
Asia, once China had gone communist in 1949. Remarkably, the geo-
political concerns of global dominance required metropolitan encour-
agement of competitor economies at each end of the informal empire.
These were economies whose states lacked these wider imperial responsi-
bilities and who could, in consequence (and who indeed did), prioritize

the reconstruction of their own competitive strength—strength measured

against that of an American economy whose very size and capacity had
fuelled their military defeat between 1941 and 1945. No liberal milita-
rism for them—only for their occupiers. For example, for Cold War rea-
sons alone, the British state (with American support) reconstructed the
German car industry in the years immediately after World War II.49 There
was no equivalent state-orchestrated reconstruction of the car industry at
home during that same period. Likewise, American military proconsuls
encouraged the development of strong trade unionism in Germany and
insisted on agrarian reform as a prerequisite for democracy in Japan. They
effected an economic and social transformation in the border economies
they militarily controlled while singularly failing to effect a similar trans-
formation back in the United States.
This dual role for the US state was initially mutually reinforcing, since
the uniqueness of the emerging American Empire lay “in the extent to
which particular U.S. interests and capacities merged with the making of
a global capitalism.”50 As Doug Stokes put it,
because of the structural position of the US state as both the core hege-
monic capitalist state within global capitalism and the state to which other
capitalist powers have looked to ensure world order, it has long occupied a
dual role that has been subject to both a “national” logic seeking to maxi-
mize US national interests and a ‘transnational’ logic whereby it has played
a coordinating role that has sought to reproduce a global political economy
conducive to other core capitalist states. Importantly, these two logics have
long complimented each other insofar as, by reproducing and defending
world capitalism, the USA has also reinforced its own position as the core
hegemonic state within the international system.51
But take the Cold War away, and put in its place the successful strength-
ening of other modern capitalisms, and then we see that “the tension
between the American empire’s role of positive-sum transnational coordi-
nation and its pursuit of more peculiarly American interests is becoming
more fraught.”52
Moreover, in the years immediately following World War II, the preoc-
cupations of imperial rule led both Democratic and Republican admin-
istrations to actively support the reconstruction of the British, French,
and Dutch colonial empires in the east as a bulwark against communism:
support that was only withdrawn when those colonial reconstructions
proved inadequate to the task. Imperial preoccupations also encour-
aged successive US administrations to see a total congruence between
American economic interests and the reduction of trade barriers within

the capitalist bloc over which American hegemony ruled. It is true that
initially US foreign economic policy tolerated hidden levels of protec-
tion in Asian economies too weak to withstand direct US competition.
The need to save Japan and South Korea from communism outweighed,
for a while, Washington’s concerns with the export markets of US-based
companies, as the creation and toleration of a trade deficit at the core
of the empire (the United States as the consumer of last resort) became
central both to American foreign economic policy and to rising Ameri-
can living standards. It was only when the import of Asian goods began
to destroy US manufacturing jobs in significant numbers that Washing-
ton became sufficiently concerned about Asian protectionism as to press
(through GATT and later the WTO) for a global insistence on genuine
free trade. But Asia apart (and American agriculture to one side), succes-
sive US administrations from 1945 defined free trade as a central tenet
of American foreign policy needs and used round after round of trade
negotiations to bring global tariffs down.
That preoccupation with free trade made perfect sense immediately
after World War II because of the economic superiority of US-based man-
ufacturing capacity. Not unlike the British at the height of their moment
of global hegemony, though to a lesser degree in the American case, full
employment at home required healthy export markets abroad, and suc-
cessive US governments actively promoted both the export of American
goods and the outflow of American capital to finance their purchase.
What else, after all, in all its essentials was the Marshall Plan but this?
But then—again like the British—the American political class came quite
quickly to treat free trade as an unassailable truth rather than as a policy
choice, and persisted in its extension long after the economic superiority
of US-based manufacturing that had warranted it had begun to slip away.
What had started as the successful export of American goods morphed
inexorably into the export of American jobs, as the logic of free trade in a
post–Cold War world made “the hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing”
a credible response (and ultimately an unavoidable one) for competitively
pressed American firms. What had begun as the functionally reinforcing
export of American capital slipped inexorably into the emergence of a vast
concentration of financial power in core American banking institutions,
and into the emerging gap between global financial and local manufac-
turing interests (between Wall Street and Main Street as it is now gener-
ally characterized) so evident in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis.
Disproportionately focused on the maintenance of the informal
empire, successive postwar administrations inadvertently presided over
the separation of American capital from American industry, the breaking

away of multinational US companies from their home manufacturing

base, and the associated steady erosion of American wages—wages vital
to the sustenance of America’s role as the capitalist bloc’s consumer of
last resort. The very success of the American imperial adventure, that is,
consolidated at the core of the global system a political class whose preoc-
cupations with global leadership left it strangely indifferent to the ero-
sion of the very economic base on which that adventure had first been
predicated.
Finance as Empire
Being a hegemonic power has brought the United States the same kind
of financial arbitrage that once was enjoyed in London. America runs a
trade deficit on a scale that no minor power could get away with; and
because it does, American living standards are underwritten and increased
by the labor power of workers elsewhere in the global system who pro-
duce more efficiently than American workers but lack the market capacity
to earn American wages. American public policy is equally underwrit-
ten by the inflow of foreign capital. US Treasury bonds are treated by
foreign states and overseas private investors alike as a safe haven in a
world of uncertainty. As Robert Cox put it, “the USA, the nation with
the world’s largest debt, finances its massive trade and budget deficits,
which includes the cost of its military adventures, by an equally massive
inflow of foreign capital. This is what enables government and people
in the USA to command the resources of the rest of the world and to
pay for the building and use of its own military power.”53 The inward
flow of predominantly Japanese capital in the 1990s helped create what
Colin Crouch called “privatized Keynesianism,”54 fueling a Wall Street
bull market that dramatically raised the paper wealth of US asset hold-
ers and thus financed the Clinton boom years. Similar flows, more from
China this time, financed the property bubble during the Bush years
that came crashing down in 2008. As Herman Schwartz put it, “during
the long 1990s, the U.S. economy avoided the normal trade-offs across
domestic consumption, domestic investment, and overseas investment,”
because “massive foreign lending relieved the normal constraints” and
“enabled the United States to enjoy differential domestic growth.”55 Even
now, with the US manufacturing and service sectors growing only slowly
and with wages still stagnant and unemployment high, the influx of for-
eign capital has restored profitability to Wall Street, and with it the return
of those remarkable bonuses for senior financiers that briefly so outraged
American public opinion in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial
crash. And of course, “the status of the dollar as world currency gives

the USA, as a debtor country, the unique privilege of being able to bor-
row from foreigners in its own currency, which means that any deprecia-
tion of that currency will both reduce the value of US debt and increase
the competitiveness of US exports.”56 Given the scale of debt the United
States has now racked up with China in particular, the world’s remain-
ing superpower may well have maneuvered itself from a position of eco-
nomic strength in 1945 to one of such financial indebtedness by 2013 as
to be now literally “too big to fail.” Lawrence Summers, for one, thinks
so, writing of a balance of financial terror in which the United States relies
on the cost to others of not financing its current account deficit as assur-
ance that financing will continue.57
American finance is therefore perversely both strong and weak at the
same time, and if the core of the American Empire is its global finan-
cial capacity so too is the empire. Quite how to read those strengths and
weaknesses is currently a matter of intense academic debate. Certainly,
the American debt problems are not the same as those that ultimately
crippled the Spanish imperial mission. America fights far fewer wars
than the Spaniards did and has access to far more (and more generous)
sources of credit.58 But American foreign and domestic policy, like that
of Spain centuries before, does have to be paid for: and with debt come
creditors, and with creditors come terms. America’s freedom of political
and economic action in relation to China, its largest creditor, is far more
restricted than is say its policy toward Mexico, its largest trading partner,
or even toward Germany and Japan—its erstwhile allies and now major
creditor nations. But credit-flows on the scale that now enter the United
States can also be seen as a source of strength. Leo Panitch and Sam Gin-
din certainly see them that way: as a capture and employment of “so
much of the world’s savings, some of which is also recycled as American
investment abroad,” and as such, a “structural strength of the empire, not
its weakness.”59 They insist that “it is wrong to see the financialization
of the American empire as a symptom of its decline: the globalization of
finance has included the Americanization of finance, and the deepening
and extension of financial markets has become ever more fundamental to
the reproduction and universalization of American power.” For them, “it
is an American empire strengthened rather than weakened by financial-
ization that we need to confront”:
The deepening of financial markets played a directly imperial role. It made

it possible for the American economy to attract global savings that other-
wise would not have been available to it. Those capital inflows are often
identified by critics as an imperial tithe the US imposes on other countries,
but this ignores how much of this capital came to the US for reasons of

prudent investment and profitability. In any case, they sustained the dollar
at exchange rates that otherwise would have been lower, making imports
cheaper for American consumers and reducing the reproduction cost of
labor for American industry, while keeping the cost of capital low in the
US. And it was not only the relative strength of the US economy that
these financial markets maintained. They also contributed to making the
empire easier to manage: the inflows of capital and imports of commodi-
ties to the US allowed global savings to be channeled and global exports
to be expanded, while mobile financial markets promoted the neoliberal
restructuring and integration of other economies.60
Broadly speaking, this is a view of the “strength” of US financial insti-

tutions that Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin share with Herman Schwartz.61
Others, by contrast, take a more sanguine view of America’s current finan-
cial stability and strength;62 but either way, if American power is so heavily
predicated on the global presence and role of US-based financial institu-
tions, it is a power anchored on what is ultimately a precarious base.
For financial empires rest on the confidence of those who control large
investment flows (now not simply central banks and multinational cor-
porations but also increasingly the managers of sovereign wealth funds),
and that confidence is necessarily extremely fragile. That fragility partly
derives from the separation of financial circuits from those of industrial
and mercantile ones. The more financial institutions make money by
trading with each other, the more they become vulnerable to Minsky-
type cycles of speculative fever, and the more the transactions they finance
become of less and less value to the rest of the economy beyond. The
fragility is partly a product of the inadequate external governance of
the financial sector itself and of the excessive speculation which that inad-
equate governance allows. The fragility is also partly a product of the
centrality of Wall Street institutions to a domestic economy that sustained
itself from the 1980s only by substituting rising private debt for stagnant
private wages; and partly, it can be a product of the disproportionate
exposure of even large American financial institutions to the weaker sec-
tions of a global economy that is necessarily characterized at its core by
processes of combined but uneven development. The American financial
system is currently vulnerable to at least three, and possibly four, of those
sources of fragility. It is fragile by function. It is fragile by governance. It is
fragile by the scale of private debt. And it may well be fragile by exposure.
American financial institutions are certainly vulnerable to their own
growing propensity for the incestuous. John Cassidy, for example, is now
fairly convinced that maybe 85 percent of what Wall Street institutions
do is functionally irrelevant to the rest of the economic system, noting

that “many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses
whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients
into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to
exploit day-to-day movements in the market.”63 With that turn has come
a greater capture of total profits by financial institutions (running as high
as a third of all the profits produced by US business at the peak of the pre-
2008 boom) and wages 60 percent higher on average in the financial sec-
tor than elsewhere in the American economy. For years, as Cassidy put it,
“the most profitable industry in America has been one that doesn’t design,
build or sell a single tangible thing.”64 Then add to that rake’s progress
Wall Street’s proven record of feckless speculation—with each institution
obliged to pursue the capture of market share at the price of growing
instability across the financial system as a whole—with each resulting
financial crisis more destructive of Main Street jobs and prosperity than
the one before. The growth rate and employment levels of the overall
US economy experienced modest damage from the Savings and Loans
debacle of the late 1980s, more damage from the busting of the dot-com
bubble in 2001, and damage of 1930s proportions from the mother of all
financial crises in 2008.65
The US government and economy is currently mired in a deep fiscal
crisis because of the recession triggered by the 2008 financial meltdown.
It is a serious fiscal crisis because of the scale of the injection of public
money made necessary by the depth of the crisis; and it is an ongoing
financial crisis because that depth made any economic recovery more
difficult to achieve, and less rapid in arrival, than would have been the
case had the recession been less severe. But it was very severe, and its
consequences remain very serious. The immediate and short-term unem-
ployment fallout from the financial crisis of 2008 was on the order of
11 million lost jobs. The longer-term consequences are harder to isolate,
but at their most extreme could be the loss of the American Dream for
an entire generation. Certainly, as this is drafted in the middle of 2014,
unemployment prospects for the class of students just graduated from
college are bleak and for those from high school worse still;66and the aver-
age household has still only recovered 45 percent of the wealth lost in the
great recession.67 That destruction of wealth was particularly marked in
black and Latino households.68 Corporate profits have rebounded but
bank lending has not (especially to small and medium size enterprises).69
Corporate cash holdings are high, but reinvestment is sluggish. Hiring
by the private sector is insufficient, month on month, to bring even the
official unemployment figure down to much less than 6 percent; and
hiring by the public sector is currently constrained by the politics of the

debt crisis that the recession triggered. The US economy has lost two mil-
lion clerical jobs since 2007. The construction industry shed more than
one job in four. Manufacturing employment between 2007 and 2011
fell 15.5 percent.70 As financial crises go, 2008 certainly was a major one!
Overall, in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street meltdown,
maybe fifty million jobs were destroyed worldwide, and you might be
forgiven for thinking, therefore, that in the wake of the global recession
triggered by their speculation, Wall Street institutions would welcome
tighter federal regulation and a retreat to safe and boring banking. But
of course, you would be wrong. The Dodd-Frank reforms were defective
when they were passed—too full of limits and loopholes lobbied for by
Wall Street—and even now remain too limited in implementation to be
doing more than set up the American financial system for a crisis to come.
Senior bankers, like major empires, suffer from hubris; and because they
do, those of us dependent on the viability of the institutions they head
are currently experiencing levels of job insecurity and wage pressure not
seen in the US economy since the darkest days of the 1930s. If all this is a
measure of American power, there is no evidence of that power enriching
the lives of most Americans. On the contrary, it is an imperial power that
now comes at a heavy internal price.
Manufacturing Offshore
The ultimate source of fragility of American financial institutions lies not
in their internal practices or inadequate governance but in their relation-
ship to the rest of the American economy. Leo Panitch and Sam Gin-
din find that economy strong and so see resilience in American finance.
Herman Schwartz likewise points to the continuing strength and profit-
ability of major American corporations, having them substitute “offshore
production for exports while upgrading production processes.”71 They
all see the glass as half-full. Many of the rest of us, by contrast, see it
as half-empty. American businesses are going offshore in the pursuit of
profitability and corporate control, in the process opening up a poten-
tially damaging divide between large multinational corporations that are
able to exploit labor forces elsewhere in the informal empire and smaller
businesses that remain heavily dependent on American consumers and
American labor markets. On this latter view, large-scale American capital
may be truly global and therefore profit-healthy, but American labor and
American-based business most definitely are not. Your view of the glass
depends heavily, therefore, on where you are standing to view it.
In truth, the two views cannot both be right, and for my part I see
in the Pollyannaish accounts of current US economic strength a strange

disregard of the importance of where manufacturing production is

anchored and of the associated importance of the scale of its continu-
ing presence inside the United States itself. It is true that large US-based
corporations have benefited from the role of the dollar as the sole reserve
currency and from the attractiveness to foreign investors of US Treasury
bonds. As Herman Schwartz has documented so well, they have benefited
by being able to move production offshore, to take greater control of
the global production chains on which ultimately they rely, and even to
reconfigure manufacturing processes within the United States in order to
increase levels of productivity at home. The result has been their enhanced
profitability, but it is a profitability now disproportionately based on the
outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and on a fall in the number of Ameri-
can workers employed in high-productivity economic sectors. American
capital may still be doing well within the informal American Empire,
but American-based industry and American workers are not so fortunate.
Theirs is a differential and more impoverished set of experiences fixed by
their diminished capacity to go global in the pursuit of wealth. The Pol-
lyannaish view of the strength of the American Empire suffers, it would
seem, from a strangely “top down” view of how best to measure economic
and political success in the modern age. In the informal American Empire
that appears to be so strong, the top 1 percent is doing fine. The rest of
America is not.
Critics often react to this argument, of course, by commenting nega-
tively on what they see as an unnecessary fetishization of manufacturing.
All that is really happening, they tell us, is that low-productivity manu-
facturing jobs are being shipped abroad, leaving high-value and high-skill
production systems safely anchored in the United States. But that critique
cuts no ice here because, as we saw in Chapter 1, the scale, character, and
future distribution of manufacturing employment still matters. It matters
partly because over time, overseas economies that were initially happy
simply to receive low-productivity employment opportunities do start to
work their way up the value chain; and as they do so, more and more
highly skilled American employment slots are also outsourced. It matters
partly because American consumers do still want manufactured goods in
large volume and need the wages to buy them; so where those goods are
made, and by whom, directly impacts incomes and employment across
the domestic economy as a whole. And it matters partly because if those
goods are not made here in the United States, if instead American employ-
ment moves disproportionately into low-productivity service sectors, the
long-term result has to be a lower rate of overall productivity growth in
the United States, lower levels of employment and wages here, as well

as lower standards of living and available resources for welfare purposes.

Of course, the strength of the dollar and the outsourcing of production
do bring back to the United States goods that are cheaper to buy; that
indeed is the usual justification given for the outsourcing now so preva-
lent. But it cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the limited gain
to American consumers brought by cheap imports has been more than
offset by the adverse impact of those imports on general American wage
levels—pulling those wage levels down, if the Economic Policy Institute
calculations are right, by $2,500 annually for a typical two-income fam-
ily in 2006, and by 4 percent overall for American workers without a
college degree.
Previous empires have normally enriched their core populations by
drawing into the imperial center the surplus product of their far-flung
possessions. But not this empire: this empire currently enriches just the
fortunate few and embattles/impoverishes the rest. Previous empires
created income inequality between core and periphery; this one creates
income inequality within the core itself. The result has been a scale of
job polarization that was both unexpected and never before seen in the
US economy: high-skill and low-skill jobs proliferating, middle-skill jobs
disappearing, and income inequality widening in line with the new skill
distribution.72 As high quality manufacturing jobs have begun to follow
American capital abroad, the class of men (and occasionally women) who
oversee that process have given themselves huge bonuses for the privilege,
in the process leaving less and less in the wage and salary pool for those
lower down the corporate hierarchy or for those employed in sectors of
the economy held back by those capital flows. Income inequality is as
high now in the United States as it was in the “Age of the Robber Bar-
ons”; and that inequality is showing no sign of coming down. On the
contrary—and just like ruling groups in empires past—those who benefit
most from the informal empire of American capital are proving to be
extremely reluctant to see any of their private wealth drawn away in taxa-
tion that might service the common good.
Behind the basic economic divide that the full orchestration of the
American Empire has called into existence—between multinational and
finance capital on the one side and small businesses and American labor
on the other—lies a deeper social divide of class overlaid by divisions of
race, gender, and ethnicity. Those divisions run so deep in contemporary
America, indeed, that their potentially radical political consequences can
be held in check only by the constant repetition of key imperial claims
about American exceptionalism and unique levels of social mobility
and about the benign consequences of American global leadership. Those

claims are vital for conservative political stability because the costs of
empire are not only economic. They are also social and cultural; and it is
to those that we now need to turn.
Imperial Hubris
In the US case, the cultural consequences of American global hegemony
are several and serious. They are cultural consequences that are still heav-
ily in play in contemporary American politics and society, and they are
cultural consequences that are currently so ubiquitous as to be largely
invisible to the conventional American eye.
The most potent of those cultural consequences is that of hubris. The
mass and generality of Americans have a huge pride in the promise of their
country. This is a pride that manifests itself in the ease and regularity with
which so many public and private gatherings in the United States begin
with the Pledge of Allegiance and with which so many political speeches
end with the injunction on God to “bless the United States.” That stands
in sharp contrast, for example, to the lack of public enthusiasm in the
United Kingdom these days for a shared singing of the national anthem
and to the resistance Tony Blair met from his own civil servants when
proposing to end his 2003 Iraq Invasion speech with a similar injunction
“God save the United Kingdom.” The UK national anthem used to be
played at the end of the showing of each film in UK cinemas—a prac-
tice entirely acceptable to the British public that had fought the Second
World War. A generation later, however, the practice was dropped because
so many younger cinemagoers simply rushed out as the anthem was play-
ing. The United Kingdom today is postimperial in its public culture in
ways that the United States most definitely is not.
Accordingly, and as we noted in Chapter 1, it remains absolutely axi-
omatic in normal American conversation to believe in American excep-
tionalism, to hold America superior to all other societies on a vast range of
desirable dimensions, and to see in that superiority some divine mission
or plan. America remains the most religious of modern industrial societ-
ies. It remains the most committed of any to its founding institutions
and claims, and it remains highly self-referential in its understandings of
both past history and modern freedoms. American popular (and politi-
cal) culture combine these three threads in a particular understanding
of American history (manifest destiny), American potential (the Ameri-
can Dream), and America’s proximity to God (as the city on the hill).
The result is the presence, at the core of the dominant American self-
definition, of what Peter Beinart called “the beautiful lie . . . the pro-
found conviction that nothing in the world is beyond [America’s] power

to accomplish.”73 American popular culture is activist and self-assertive in

a way that is reminiscent of British culture in the Victorian era. As Ronald
Reagan had it, “when the going gets tough, the tough get coming.” At the
heart of the American imperial mission lies a quite remarkable degree of
collective self-confidence and faith in the capacity of individual Ameri-
cans to succeed.
These regularly repeated and generally held understandings of the
American condition have various impacts on the way US institutions
comport themselves in the world and on the way the American electorate
understands the country’s current global role and global challenges. With
very few exceptions, the American political class buys into the argument
that the country’s global role is both necessary and benign. It is benign—
concerned to spread freedom—and it is necessary because without it the
rest of the world would slip back either into communism (before 1989),
Islamic radicalism (post 9/11), or chaos (as witnessed in the 1930s). Both
those who currently govern America and the bulk of the electorate that
voted them in see America abroad as the harbinger of democracy and
human rights. They understand those rights as inherently universal
and desirable, and they therefore expect strong local popular support for
the American pursuit of those rights in areas of the globe that currently
lack them. To a significant degree, there is little that is actually new here.
As Edward Said observed long ago, “every single empire in its official
discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances
are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and
democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”74 The new bit in
this old litany is the uniquely American conviction that, as it exercises
global hegemony, it is not acting like an empire. As Dick Cheney said,
“if we were a true empire we would currently preside over a much greater
piece of the earth’s surface than we do. That’s not the way we operate.”75
He said that while presiding over an American military invasion of a sov-
ereign nation-state.
This imperial hubris gives the American electorate a particular way
of understanding the interaction between America and its allies as well
as between America and its foes. It makes overseas resistance to Ameri-
can power appear both ungrateful and ultimately irrational, and it makes
American leadership of coalitions of the willing seem both necessary and
natural. In those coalitions, the leadership is invariably American: the
American state stopped playing second fiddle to anyone else as they eased
out the British from overall leadership of the allied war effort in 1943
and 1944. As George Herbert Bush put it in 1988, “I never apologize
for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are.”76 The widely held

view within the United States of the veracity of George W. Bush’s claim
as American troops invaded Iraq—namely, that “we have no desire to
dominate, no ambitions of empire”77—also establishes a distinct double
standard in American popular attitudes to political violence both at home
and abroad. As was noted earlier, it makes that violence seem entirely
legitimate if exercised by American military forces but entirely illegiti-
mate if waged against the American military presence by foreign fighters.
The scale and character of the response to the Boston bombing in 2013 is
a case in point. Not surprisingly, therefore, Chalmers Johnson’s notion of
blowback is not one that is widely recognized or shared in contemporary
American political discourse or media commentary.
The intensity and form of this shared hubris has varied slightly over
time and between administrations and political parties. American hubris
received a huge boost from the collapse of the Soviet Union, so much
so that the boost left neoconservative Republicans angry at the Clinton
administration’s clear preference for multilateral global action and the
exploitation of a peace dividend. It was this same boosted neoconserva-
tive hubris, of course, which then sent American forces into the quagmire
of Iraq. And the Iraq debacle reminds us that—as with the British Empire
before it—support for military adventurism can often be more extensive
and long lasting among political elites than among the electorates whose
sons and daughters actually implement the military adventure. In rela-
tion to both the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of
Iraq in 2003, popular support within the United States was initially high
for both missions: in 2001 because of Taliban support for al Qaeda and
in 2003 because of the Bush administration’s assertion of Saddam Hus-
sein’s links to the events of 9/11. That support then rapidly dissipated as
the number of body bags returning to the United States grew and as the
insurgency continued. The popular support dissipated, but the military
missions continued.
There is value here, therefore, in differentiating between popular sup-
port in the United States for specific imperial missions and general
support for the role of the US military overseas. Support for the latter,
though currently slipping,78 is far more permanent than support for the
former, in part because “citizens in a society devoted to the pleasures
of personal consumption have proven averse to the personal sacrifices
required by distant, dirty wars”;79 and in part because much popular
opinion in the United States remains largely ignorant of (or indifferent
to) the long postwar history of American support for foreign dictators
and of the remarkable series of covert wars waged by both the CIA and
the Pentagon. Such “tragic choices,” as Peter Beinart had it, “have been

largely airbrushed from public memory”80 and obscured in the American

popular mind by a series of governing myths about US foreign policy.
These are myths that academics critical of America’s imperial posture
insist are best labeled as fairy tales that leave Americans “culturally blind”
and “in denial of the imperial nature of their project.”81 Indeed, in their
own way, American proconsuls in the Bush years were as guilty of practic-
ing the double lie as were the Soviets before them: lying about the motives
leading them to impose military solutions on Iraq and, by their actions,
discrediting the very values of freedom and democracy they claimed to
be using their military might to spread. The Iraq case may be an extreme
example of this dishonesty, but it is not the first. American policy makers,
and their electorates, invariably wrap up the realpolitik of US foreign pol-
icy in the mythology of manifest destiny, divine providence, and benign
indifference so that when, intellectually underequipped in that fashion,
American policy ends up colliding
dangerously with the nationalism of peoples whose historical memory

has left them with a chip on their shoulders about Western governments
telling them what to do, often our ignorance leaves us unable to even
understand why the chip is there. Listening to the foreign policy debate in
Washington, one would not know that the United States was once a quasi-
imperial power in China, or that we helped overthrow an elected prime
minister of Iran. As a result, Americans are often genuinely confused when
Iranians and Chinese—including Iranians and Chinese deeply committed
to human rights—bristle at our lectures.
“For such a lustily nationalistic people,” as Peter Beinart noted, “we

remain curiously blind to the nationalism of others.”82
The Cultural Consequences of Empire

That degree of misinformation and misunderstanding of the true charac-
ter of American foreign policy that prevails in significant sections of the
US electorate is bad enough, but in truth the cultural damage of empire
runs deeper still. Imperial hubris also helps block widespread recognition
of, and debate about, the state of America’s social capital: particularly
sufficient debate about its education system and the economy’s physical
infrastructure, but also any debate at all about the content and long-term
significance of its wider cultural mix of sport and entertainment.
Like globally hegemonic powers before it, the United States possesses
an electorate whose understanding of the world around them is, for many
Americans at least, seriously impaired by an all-pervasive parochialism.

America is so big that many of its citizens literally never leave it; they
never see societies that flourish without fast food chains, large-scale shop-
ping malls, and huge football stadiums; or if they do, they see them only
on travel documentaries as somewhere to visit that remains unmodern-
ized and cute/quaint. America is so big that the governing assumption
remains, in many communities across the country as a whole, that the
United States possesses the best health care system, the best education sys-
tem, the greatest sporting capacity, and so on. When contradictory data
sets do occasionally break through—as it has recently, for example, on the
comparative costs of health care here and abroad—the general tendency
(in both the electorate and the political class) is to turn inward rather
than outward, seeking a uniquely American solution that remains largely
uninfluenced by (and unaware of ) the best practices abroad. With the
consolidation of empire—as informal and hegemonic as that empire is in
the American case—has come the standard imperial closure of the mind,
a closure that makes it ever more difficult for policy makers and opinion
formers to point to impending weaknesses and to win effective support
for early preventive corrective action.
Before problems can be addressed, they have to be recognized, and that
recognition requires the facing and understanding of a complex reality.
But much in contemporary American life stands in the way of both that
recognition and that understanding. Modern American mass culture pro-
vides ample opportunities—far more than in previous generations—to
escape entirely from reality into the imaginary world of instant music,
soap operas, and game shows (the last of which at least keeps alive the
hope of escaping from financial hardship to endless wealth in the manner
of modern celebrities). In truth, as all the social mobility data show, such a
hope is largely misplaced, but it helps keep serious social questions at bay;
and because it does, it also enables the superrich and privileged to sleep
easier in their beds at night.83 The rich might sleep less easily if a high-
powered mass education system was currently balancing out any dumbing
down of popular culture by creating a well-informed and socially critical
electorate in the manner envisaged at the start of the republic by Thomas
Jefferson; but it is not. Public education in the United States continues
to struggle, structurally trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard
place. The rock in this case is a student body whose capacity to learn is
seriously depleted by their immersion in systems of poverty and income
inequality tied to wider social processes of class, race, and gender. The
hard place is a flow of resources restricted by rebellions against taxation
and public spending rooted in libertarian conservatism and bankrolled by
superrich entrepreneurs determined to hold on to everything they own.

America has a mass culture that bombards television audiences hour by

hour with what Chris Hedges labeled “cant and spectacle,” creating in his
view a “culture of illusion” that “thrives by robbing us of the intellectual
and linguistic tools” with which “to separate illusion from truth.”84 It is
a mass culture offset only at the margin by an education system that too
often reproduces rather than ameliorates deepening social inequalities.
In consequence, there is a genuine “bread and circuses” feel to much of
cultural life in modern America. The society is so large that high culture
remains readily available, but commercial pressures and imperial closure
have combined to drain popular culture of significant educational and
developmental content. Even in the higher education system to which
American apologists still point with such pride, the highest salaries these
days do not go to academics or even to administrators. They go to foot-
ball and basketball coaches. The work ethic that was so central to Ameri-
can capital accumulation and social mobility in the years before 1945 has
increasingly given way to cultures of entitlement and of ease. The sense
of entitlement—to riches beyond measure—is particularly entrenched at
the top of American society, as indeed it was at the top of Roman society
at the end of the Western Empire. The parallel expectation of the general
Roman population for basic food and entertainment to be shipped in,
free of charge, from the edges of the empire has its modern parallels in
the widespread American expectation of rising living standards, cheap
gas, and access to high-quality, 24–7 popular entertainment and sport.85
The emergence of Christian orthodoxy in the late stages of the Western
Roman Empire has its parallel in the revival of evangelical Christianity
of a highly conservative kind in contemporary America. Where else but
there would 48 percent of all Christians polled believe that Jesus Christ
will be back among us sometime in the next forty years?86 The American
imperial project is not the sole cause of any of this, but without that impe-
rial role little of this lethal cocktail of escapism, inertia, and millenarian-
ism would be so readily available.
In this regard, it is worth noting with what regularity and speed
commentators who are particularly sensitive to questions of imperially
induced cultural decay in contemporary America take us back to their
vision of classical empires—and to Rome in particular—for contrast and
for parallel. Chris Hedges, for example, convinced that the United States
is now becoming an “empire of illusion,” ties the growing immersion of
modern Americans into worlds of illusion by pointing to the power here
of corporate elites, and sees important Roman parallels:
The earth is strewed with the ruins of powerful civilizations that

decayed . . . not all died for the same reasons. Rome, for example, never

faced a depletion of natural resources or environmental catastrophe. But

they all, at a certain point, were taken over by a bankrupt and corrupt elite.
This elite, squandering resources and pillaging the state, was no longer
able to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness. These empires died
morally. The leaders, in the final period, increasingly had to rely on armed
mercenaries, as we do in Iraq and Afghanistan, because citizens would no
longer serve in the military. They descended into orgies of self-indulgence,
surrendered their civic and emotional lives to the glitter, excitement, and
spectacle of the arena, became politically apathetic, and collapsed.87
Likewise, Morris Berman, bewailing “the collapse of American intelli-

gence,” offers this:
It would seem that four factors are present when a civilization collapses:
(a) accelerating social and economic inequality; (b) declining marginal
returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socio-
economic problems; (c) rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical under-
standing, and general intellectual awareness; (d) spiritual death . . . the
emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it
in formulas—kitsch, in short . . . Economic and technological appear-
ances to the contrary, American civilization is in its twilight phase, rapidly
approaching a point of social and cultural bankruptcy. The gap between
rich and poor has never been greater; our long-term ability to pay for basic
social programs is increasingly in question; the level of ignorance and func-
tional illiteracy in this country is so low as to render us something of an
international joke; and the takeover of our spiritual life by McWorld—
corporate/consumer values—is nearly complete.
As he said, “an economic superstar, the United States is in reality a cul-

tural shambles, an ‘empire wilderness.’”88 “For what we are now seeing,”
Berman wrote, “are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of
Rome: the triumph of religion over reason, the atrophy of education and
critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus
of torture.”89 That may be to overstate it a tad, but he has a point. For it
may just well be, as he says, that “the decline of Rome . . . and not the self-
corrective cycles of American history may be a more reliable guide to our
future.”90 How else can we seriously respond to the emergence within the
contemporary United States of a dangerous conundrum of institutions
and processes that have locked this country onto a trajectory of global and
domestic inequality from which we now need so desperately to escape?

CHAPTER 9
Toward a Better America
If the argument that has been built up in this volume has any merit,
it suggests that, for the long-term economic and social health of us all,
those who govern us in the United States need to do three extremely diffi-
cult things and to do them with as much speed and determination as they
can muster. They need to rebalance the economy, enhancing the weight
of manufacturing and diminishing that of finance in the overall economic
mix. They need to address and reduce the enormous inequalities that now
divide one American from another; and they need—more than anything
else—to begin to phase America out of the empire business. If the argu-
ment here is correct, the question before us now is not whether these vital
changes are necessary. The question rather is how, over a series of genera-
tions, these vital and necessary changes can be brought about. Changes
of this scale are never easy, which is why debate about them now is so
necessary. In truth, each will be phenomenally difficult to effect, but all
are essential. Their achievement, therefore, must now become America’s
overriding concern.1
Getting Out of the Empire Business

This is not as crazy and impractical an idea as it may first sound. It is not
crazy when we remember that the huge global role played by the United
States is only, at most, seven-and-a-half decades old. That global role is
something that has been put together and sustained within the lifetime
of many senior citizens, and something that is so recent quite simply can-
not be as set in stone as the advocates of an expanding American global
role are likely to claim. It is also not crazy when someone who recognizes
himself as “a card-carrying member of the foreign policy establishment
for nearly four decades,” Richard Haass, can write this:
The biggest threat to America’s security and prosperity comes not from
abroad but from within. The United States has jeopardized its ability to

act effectively in the world because of runaway domestic spending, under-

investment in human and physical capital, an avoidable financial crisis, an
unnecessarily slow recovery, a war in Iraq flawed from the outset and a war
in Afghanistan that became flawed as its purposes evolved, recurring fiscal
deficits, and deep political divisions. For the United States to continue
to act successfully abroad, it must restore the domestic foundations of its
power. Foreign policy needs to begin at home, now and for the foresee-
able future.2
Getting out of the empire business is also not impractical when you
recognize the war-weariness of this generation of American voters. We
are now more than a decade away from the horrors of 9/11. We have
tried two Middle Eastern wars in our attempt to defeat “terrorism,” and
it is widely recognized (within the United States as well as abroad) that
those attempts have broadly failed. Instead of quick military solutions,
we have seen our men and women in uniform bogged down in mili-
tary and cultural quagmires made more intractable by their presence. We
have seen the alarming growth of a national security state at home and
of covert military operations abroad. None of this is now generally popu-
lar. Sending American troops abroad was extremely popular immediately
after 9/11, but it is not anymore.3 It is not popular among liberals or
libertarians, and more significantly, it is no longer universally popular
even among conservatives. You only have to remember the verbal maul-
ing that Senator John McCain received from his own Republican base
in Arizona in 2013, when he tried to force greater military involvement
by the United States in the Syrian civil war,4 to recognize the depth of
current popular alienation from any extension of America’s military com-
mitments overseas. It was an alienation clear in the result of the 2012
presidential election, when “for the first time since 1972 we had a debate
between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in which
the Democrat was for less spending on the military and the Republican
for significantly more—and the Democrat won.” America now has, as
Barney Frank put it, a “new mandate for defense . . . not to spend more
but to spend less.”5 As the Financial Times recently observed, “a gap has
opened up in the U.S. between a foreign policy establishment that still
takes it for granted that their nation should police the world, and a more
skeptical public.”6 Given the existence and width of that important gap,
if there ever were an opportune time to begin to roll back America’s global
presence, that time is surely now.
Of course, such a rollback will need to be measured, moderate in pace,
and deliberate in execution; and it will need to be those things for at least

Toward a Better America 203
two broad sets of reasons—one set that are political in character and the
other economic.
Politically, the rollback will need to be measured and moderate so that
allies abroad, long used to large-scale American aid, are not immediately
abandoned and exposed to any rapidly escalating danger. It will also need
to be moderate and managed because in our years of global dominance
we made many enemies, and they will not vanish overnight if we decide
to pull our troops home. Indeed initially, that rollback may very well
embolden them, so that our liberty will initially require extra vigilance.
And the rollback will need to be moderate for domestic electoral reasons,
because as we have recently seen in a spate of examples from Benghazi to
the Crimea, any serious attempt by a cerebral president to reflect publicly
on the necessary limits to American global power will quickly be deni-
grated by his political opponents as both a sign of American weakness and
a cause of the very limits on which he is quite properly reflecting.7
Economically, the rollback will also need to be measured and moderate
because, without the careful orchestration of a move from the production
of arms to the production of much-needed civilian consumer goods and
social infrastructure, large-scale American unemployment will inevitably
follow. But we know that money spent on civilian output has a larger
multiplier effect than money spent on defense procurement. We know
that large-scale demilitarization was successfully effected after World War II,
and that the American experience then is still available as a model for
similar military demobilization now. We know of small examples already
under way successfully converting parts of the US war economy to a civil-
ian one.8 We know of vast veterans’ needs better served by health-care
spending than by armament procurement;9 and we know that American
soft power is always more effective when deployed in place of hard power
rather than as its corollary. We know that military intervention abroad
invariably creates more terrorists than it destroys, and ultimately that the
only way of breaking that cycle is to replace military intervention by a
different and more culturally sensitive type of American presence over-
seas. And we know that far more Americans die each year in car wrecks
and gun-related suicides than died on 9/11, and yet we fund a vast war
on terror but none at all against either the car industry or the gun lobby.
Observations of this kind can always, of course, be dismissed as “the
retreat doctrine” by commentators still convinced that the lessons of his-
tory are otherwise; as Bret Stephens recently put it, “what history really
advises is that America does best when it fights its wars to a successful
conclusion. The alternative is to confirm what our enemies suspected all
along: we don’t have stomach for the long haul; all they have to do is wait

us out.”10 Eliot Cohen from the strategic studies program at Johns Hop-
kins has been more adamant still: “A world in which the U.S. abnegates
its leadership will be a world of unrestricted self-help in which China sets
the rules of politics and trade in Asia, mayhem and chaos is the order
of the day in the Middle East, and timidity and appeasement paralyze the
free European states. A world, in short, where the strong do what they
will, the weak suffer what they must, and those with an option hurry up
and get nuclear weapons.”11 This is to make the argument of America as
the indispensable nation with a vengeance. It is a view we often hear: as
Joseph Lieberman and Jon Kyl put it, in arguing against “the danger of
repeating the cycle of American isolationism . . . history has shown that,
once the United States chooses to lead, we and the world benefit.”12
Oh, that it were always so, but it is not. The list of American allies
in the world has long included (and still includes) many authoritarian
and dictatorial regimes. We are not so unambiguously a force for global
freedom and democracy as apologists for American power like to claim.
And it remains true that an America armed with more nuclear-powered
carrier fleets than the rest of the world combined still finds itself at the
mercy of Chinese trade policy in Asia and is still unable to block Chinese
trade even though the Chinese record on human rights is an appalling
one. Moreover, though you would never know it from the Lieberman-Kyl
position, American arms have not been fully successful in any major the-
ater of war since 1945, and their arrivals in those theaters have often been
as destabilizing as their departures. Ask both the Iraqis and the Afghans
about that. America may have picked up the British imperial role, but its
military has been less successful in consolidating an empire than the Brit-
ish ever were;13 and postwar American attempts at nation-building abroad
succeeded in Japan and West Germany after World War II, and in South
Korea in the 1950s, but nowhere else since.14
Moreover, Eliot Cohen notwithstanding, there is currently no military
solution even to the most intractable of America’s overseas commitments;
namely, the defense of the security of the state of Israel. That security
will only come when a two-state solution recognizing Palestinian rights
is established in spite of veto attempts from the Israeli right, as presidents
from both political parties have regularly conceded. Much of the push-
back against the United States in the Middle East “is fueled by a percep-
tion of the United States as Israel’s uncritical protector,” a view that can
only be changed by “ending American support for non-essential and pro-
vocative Israeli policies—such as its new settlement policy or its refusal
to dismantle illegal outposts.”15 So now is not the time to ratchet up US
military spending and presence even in the Middle East. Now is the time

instead to reset the American military global posture as a defensive one

and to begin that vital process of disabusing ourselves (and the world) of
the currently all-pervasive assumption that American arms will operate
for the rest of human time as the main global policeman.
This is not an argument for American isolationism. It is an argument
against American imperialism. The distinction is a vital one. Richard
Haass wrote,
Even if it wanted to, the United States could not wall itself off from global
threats such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, trade and investment pro-
tectionism, pandemic disease, climate change, or loss of access to finan-
cial, energy or mineral resources . . . At the same time, the United States
must become significantly more discriminating in choosing what it does
in the world and how it does it. Hard choices have to be made. It is not
simply that it needs to recognize that the limits to its resources require it
to be exacting in setting priorities; it must also recognize the limits to its
influence.16
There are very modest signs in some aspects of the Obama foreign policy
rhetoric that give cause for optimism here, though there are many other
signs that do not. The May 2013 presidential speech on counterterrorism
delivered at the National Defense University at least recognized that while
“our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,”
the overall war on terror, “like all wars, must end”; and the “Authorization
for Use of Military Force” must be replaced in order “to avoid keeping
America on a perpetual wartime footing.”17 “Beyond Afghanistan,” the
president said, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war
on terror’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle
specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”18 And a
year later, the president was clearer still, telling the 2014 graduating class
at West Point that “to say we have an interest in pursuing peace and free-
dom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military
solution” and that “U.S. military action cannot be the only—or even the
primary—component of our leadership in every instance.” Indeed, he
suggested that “a strategy that involves invading every country that har-
bors terrorist networks is naive and unsustainable” and that “our actions
should meet a simple test: we must not create more enemies than we take
off the battlefield.”
The president still told those same graduating soldiers, however, that
“America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else
will,” and that the question each of them would face “is not whether
America will lead but how we will lead.” Like recent presidents before

him, Barack Obama remains convinced that “the United States is the one
indispensible nation” and that it has been “for the century passed and
will likely be . . . for the century to come.”19 Beliefs like that help explain
why left-leaning Democratic administrations no less than right-leaning
Republican ones maintain vast US naval supremacy across every ocean,
finance huge covert operations on every continent (including now exten-
sively in Africa), and provide massive military aid to a string of repressive
regimes that claim kinship with American interests. What the presidential
address at West Point in May 2014 made abundantly clear was that the
kind of mind-change necessary for getting out of the empire business
clearly has not yet percolated to the top echelons of the Obama admin-
istration. If you still doubt that—and many Republicans do appear to
doubt it, if their condemnation of Obama’s “weak” foreign policy can be
taken at face value—consider the example of Benjamin Rhodes, the dep-
uty national security adviser, who in 2013 defended the idea of a surgical
military strike in Syria by saying, “One thing for Congress to consider
is the message that this debate sends about U.S. leadership around the
world—that the U.S. for decades has played the role of undergirding
the global security apparatus and enforcing international norms. And we
do not want to send a message that the United States is getting out of that
business in any way.”20 He may not want to send that message, and the
Obama administration as a whole may not want to send that message,
but thank goodness that many Americans now do want to send it. It is
certainly a message that needs to be sent, and it needs to be a message
that genuinely reflects a changed set of policy priorities and global under-
standings in Washington, DC.
So if US foreign policy is to be reset, a series of specific things need
to be done now, and done consistently, to begin to degrade what Benja-
min Rhodes euphemistically called “the global security apparatus” but
that should more properly be understood as US overt and covert military
operations and alliances. Among those things must be at least bringing
back to the United States the vast majority of our military personnel; a
significant reduction in the number of our bases overseas; the incremental
rundown of all covert operations; new limits on our ability to interfere,
covertly or otherwise, in the internal affairs of other sovereign states; and
resetting our defensive walls closer to home, first on the far shore
and eventually on the near shore of the two oceans that divide us from the
Eurasian landmass. All that is entirely possible for “a continental power
bounded by oceans to the east and west, and unthreatening neighbors
to the north and south.”21 All, indeed, are changes that others have can-
vassed before. There is currently a myriad of plans already in existence

for defense cuts of considerable size, achievable without undermining

national security—plans, that vary from the very modest to the superam-
bitious. The Center for American Progress produced one in 2012, Rebal-
ancing Our National Security, taking the US defense budget back to 2006
levels. Chalmers Johnson produced another in 2010 with a more radical
intent. He called it 10 Steps towards Liquidating the Empire22 and enumer-
ated ten steps that were not dissimilar in kind from those proposed by
Rachel Maddow in her widely acclaimed study of Drift. As she wrote,
“none of this is impossible . . . We just need to revive the old idea of
America as a deliberately peaceable nation. That’s not simply our inheri-
tance, it’s our responsibility.”23
We would all do well to remember that prior to 1992 we were well
used to operating in a bipolar world, one in which significant parts of the
global order lay outside our direct sphere of influence. We should have
no wish to return to the tensions of the Cold War; but even so, there
is value in the recognition that only since the Soviet Union collapsed
have we been the one global superpower, under pressure to act directly in
one theater of war after another. It is time for us to welcome the emer-
gence of a new multipolar world, to recognize our limits within that
emerging multipolar world, and to begin to live within those limits.
It is also time for us to recognize that “most of the jihadist groups” that
defenders of the “war on terror” regularly demonize “have local agendas,
and very few aspire to strike directly at the United States as Osama bin
Laden’s core network did.”24 So we need, at the very least, to stop wasting
money on an unlimited and endless war against something called “ter-
rorism,” and we need to stop deploying rhetorical double standards that
enable us to condemn the possession by others of the kinds of weapons
that we hold ourselves. If cluster bombs are bad when Syrians use them,
they are also bad when we use them. We need to stop spying on American
allies and American citizens. We certainly need to stop killing Ameri-
can citizens by executive order, and we certainly need to shut down the
School of the Americas and the other centers training ourselves and oth-
ers in the use of extreme forms of interrogation. Torture is torture, and we
should not countenance it. Arms exports are too often exports of death
and tyranny, and we should scale ours back—hugely. We should give up,
as Chalmers Johnson said, “our inappropriate reliance on military force
as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives”;25
and we should break free from (by emptying our minds of ) the notion
that American soldiers and politicians need to keep on doing globally for
the next seventy years what they just happen to have been doing globally
for the last seventy. Foreign policy needs to be reset against a much larger

canvas than that—one that takes in the whole of American history and
the grandest of sweeps of our history to come—a canvas that makes clear
to all of us just how unusual the last seventy years have been, and how
poor a guide they therefore are to how America should position itself
globally in the seventy years to come.
Rebalancing the Economy
One of the more powerful rebuttals of the argument that the United States
should scale back its military expenditure and activity has come recently
from Mark Helprin, putting the conservative case for what others have
called military Keynesianism: the argument that, as in 1941, a strong
burst of additional military spending will trigger a breakthrough into sus-
tained economic growth and full employment of a kind currently beyond
the capacity of the civilian economy to generate alone.26 It is a somewhat
novel argument in conservative hands, but it is also sadly a false one. It is
false partly because we already know that military spending has a lower
multiplier effect than any equivalent civilian-focused spending. And we
know too that America’s global situation is not as it was in 1941. America
does not face a global economy divided by autarky and stalked by expan-
sionist authoritarian regimes as it did then. Instead, the United States
faces an open global economy in which the collapse of communism, new
technologies of competition, and extensive outsourcing have combined
to generate a new and potentially threatening international division of
labor. It is an international division of labor that, if left to the free flow
of market forces, will inevitably farther deindustrialize the US economy
and compound the already powerful Walmart effect that is currently split-
ting American society into an elite of rich bankers, a struggling middle
class, and an embattled poor. Our job, if we wish to avoid that fate, is to
find ways of strengthening our presence within this global economy—ways
that will bring wages and employment back to the United States on a scale
and at a level capable of creating a new upward dynamic of prosperity and
enhanced equality here in America itself.
To rebalance our economy in that way, we need both to lessen the role
of finance within the domestic economy and to increase the weight of
the manufacturing sector and its employees in our overall GDP. There
is much controversy these days about whether manufacturing can be
so sharply differentiated from finance, whether bringing manufactur-
ing employment back to its former scale is even possible, and whether
that return of employment (if attainable) can be effected without reduc-
ing American wages and working conditions still farther. The vital task
now facing center-left politicians and intellectuals is to counter all three

of those immobilizing arguments by emphasizing, on the contrary, that

manufacturing and finance can be split, that manufacturing can be resus-
citated, and that such a resuscitation will be more effective the stronger
the role of organized labor within it is allowed to be. And that center-left
task is currently particularly important because of one thing on which
there is no disagreement: namely, the remarkable growth of the financial
services sector in the US economy in the last thirty years. “This growth is
apparent whether one measures the financial sector by its share of GDP,
by the quantity of financial assets, by employment, or by average wages.”
We will use the share of GDP and average wages. The share of GDP pro-
vided by financial services was 2.8 percent in 1950, 4.9 percent in 1980,
but 8.3 percent by 2006. Wages in the financial services sector matched
those in other industrial sectors in 1980. By 2006, they were 70 percent
higher.27
At the very least, therefore, the contemporary US financial sector has
grown far too large for its own good or for ours: “forty years ago, our real
economy grew better with a financial sector that received one-twentieth
as large a percentage of profits (2 percent) than does the current financial
sector (40 percent).”28 This is an unprecedented scale of financial-sector
bloat now sucking high-quality mathematicians and engineers toward it
and away from productive industries while also, via its short-term focus
on accounting profits, pressuring “U.S. manufacturing firms to export
jobs abroad, to deny capital to firms that are unionized, and to encourage
firms to use foreign tax havens to evade paying U.S. taxes.”29 In truth,
the biggest problem with the financial sector these days is not so much
its size as its impact: the manner in which its internal practices inten-
sify income inequality in the wider society and—on Lawrence Mitch-
ell’s evidence—currently oblige nearly 80 percent of CEOs in productive
companies to “at least moderately mutilate their business in order to meet
[financial] analysts’ quarterly profit estimates.”30 That mutilation would
matter less if what financial institutions now do mattered more, but sadly
much of what they do does not. Instead, and as we saw in Chapter 8,
there is clear evidence that a disturbingly high percentage of what passes
for essential financial activity these days is in fact nothing of the kind; and
that accordingly one of the curses of our modern condition is the degree
to which current patterns of reward between different forms of manage-
rial activity now serve to pull the brightest and the best of each generation
away from productive work that is potentially beneficial to us all, and
toward forms of money making that are ultimately merely speculative in
kind. The data on this pull toward the unproductive are both striking and
a matter of concern. As Robert Schiller recently reported, “in a survey of

elite universities . . . in 2006, just before the financial crisis, 25 percent

of graduating seniors at Harvard University, 24 percent at Yale, and a
whopping 46 percent at Princeton were starting their careers in financial
services. Those percentages have fallen somewhat since, but this might
only be a temporary effect of the crisis.”31
It may well be, therefore, that as Robert Creamer has recently argued,
“the dominance of the financial sector has become a mortal danger to our
economic security.”32 It is certainly why getting back to boring banking
is such an essential element in the industrial policy of any economy keen
to see manufacturing activity prioritized. It is also why it is so vital to
recognize (and to challenge) the rise of the private equity business model
within the manufacturing sector itself, with that model’s defining discon-
nect between employees’ needs (for job security, career ladders, secure
pensions, and the like) and the preoccupation of senior management with
shareholder interests, short-term dividend returns, and long-term stock
prices. But we will not get back to boring banking without a struggle. We
will not get back without stronger regulations on the financial sector than
those negotiated into place under Dodd-Frank, and without caps on the
earning capacity of senior hedge-fund managers and of investment bank-
ing CEOs. We will also not get back without a tax and regulatory struc-
ture that penalizes speculative trading and the excessive distribution of
short-term profits. We will also not get back without a tax and regulatory
structure that encourages the domestic reinvestment of corporate prof-
its and the long-term entrepreneurial activity of those prepared to invest
in and employ American workers. Such tax and regulatory structures are in
use elsewhere, directing investment into our manufacturing competitors,
and we would do well to quickly examine the best of them, the better to
apply them to ourselves.
It is not, after all, as though the US federal government does not
already reward and subsidize heavily the profit-making activities of key
private-sector firms and leaders. It does both—to the tune of at least
$100 billion per year if the research of either the Cato Institute or the
Heritage Foundation is accurate.33 It is rather that such subsidization
is designed and implemented in a piecemeal and pork-barrel fashion,
released by a myriad of federal agencies for a similarly long and uncoor-
dinated list of agency goals. We need, as a high priority, a public discus-
sion on industrial priorities and the creation of policy and institutions
capable of servicing those priorities. We have a Pentagon. We need a
civilian equivalent. We have a set of policies already in place prioritizing
farming, energy, pharmaceuticals, and military production. We need a
new set prioritizing basic consumer goods, energy conservation, and the

improvement of social capital. We need, as a high priority, to bring our

trade deficit back toward surplus, both by replacing an unquestioned com-
mitment to free trade with one geared to the protection and enhancement
of labor rights on a global scale (including here in the United States) and
by strategic public investment in key areas of technological development
and labor reskilling.
Fortunately, it is not as though we have to start from scratch. We do
not. The residual strength of US-based manufacturing is already strik-
ing, and we have some preliminary evidence of a slowing emerging trend
bringing more manufacturing capacity out of China and back to the
United States.34 But powerful countertendencies are at work too. Coun-
tries compete with each other to attract foreign direct investment. Job
polarization splits modern labor forces into high-skill and low-skill group-
ings, squeezing middle-class occupations in the process. The rising level
of skills required even for routine manufacturing tasks pulls investment
away from societies where education and skill levels fail to rise commen-
surately. The consolidation of global supply chains and the preference of
multinational corporations for anchoring production close to their main
markets takes production abroad; and across the global system as a whole,
the current absence of a new technology capable of generating rapid pro-
ductivity growth makes a new long wave of capital accumulation harder
to stimulate. On that last and ultimately most important barrier, Robert J.
Gordon has recently written of the six headwinds currently blocking any
easy return to high rates of US domestic economic growth: headwinds of
“demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment,
and the overhang of consumer and government debt.”35 So of one thing
we can be fairly certain: that amid this mixture of force and counterforce,
manufacturing capacity on the scale now required within the territorial
United States will not return to America automatically without powerful
public policy to speed the process. It will come back on the scale required
for renewed competitiveness and full employment only if outsourcing is
made unattractive in tax terms. It will come back only if demand levels
in America begin once more to rise faster than in the global system as a
whole. It will come back only if returning companies find waiting for
them both an adequate supply of available skilled labor and a set of coor-
dinated federal agencies able and willing to deploy comprehensive start-
up finance (not simply on factory buildings and land but also on fully
modernized transport systems and communication networks).
But it will not be worth bringing manufacturing back if it returns with
wage rates set by the lowest available rate in Asian and South American
labor markets. Manufacturing has to be brought back on labor’s terms,

and those terms have to be generous for a whole set of reasons. The first is
that, without decent wages and secure working conditions, the private sec-
tor will find itself without adequate markets for its quality products, and
the United States will, in consequence, sink even farther than it already
has into the Walmart-style morass of low wages and shoddy goods. The
second is that, in a world of increasingly sophisticated technologies, there
will not be enough low-skill, low-paid jobs to absorb each new generation
of Americans, even if the filling of jobs on those terms were desirable. The
years of economic growth based on low wages and high levels of personal
debt are now over. The crisis of 2008 brought the Reagan growth model
to a staggering halt, and neither banks nor borrowers will gladly go down
that path again. The only growth model that is viable over the long period
is one that bases high levels of personal consumption on high levels of
wages already earned, which means that the political task now before pol-
icy makers in Washington, DC is to find ways to replace a bankrupt and
self-defeating race to the bottom with a vibrant and prolonged race to the
top. Trade policy will have to change to make that race to the top pos-
sible. The evidence is quite clear that “those industries that faced the big-
gest rises in their import exposure have tended to experience the largest
declines in their payroll share.”36 Policy on labor rights and on working
conditions will have to change too. America cannot go on—without huge
damage to itself—ignoring the best of foreign practices on gender rights
at work, on rights of collective bargaining and trade union membership,
and on rights to flexible working conditions and limited overtime. The
best of those practices are in parts of Europe, and one measure of how
much the American mind-set has retreated from empire will be the will-
ingness of policy makers and opinion formers to openly look overseas for
models that we might productively emulate.
We need a new economic growth model in America today, one based
on weaker finance and stronger manufacturing as well as on strong labor
organizations and rising wages. We have such a model in our past—the
New Deal—and we have such a model in the best of our competitors
(certainly in Germany). This is no time to wrap the flag around a discred-
ited Reaganism and to denounce thinking outside the box as somehow
un-American. It is certainly no time to tie national pride to an economic
model in which job insecurity is rife, real wages are falling, work pressure
is intensifying, and income inequality is growing. Rather, it is time, as
President Obama said, to begin growing this economy from the middle
out, prioritizing a return to full employment and greater social equality.
It is time to break decisively with the free-market illusions of neoclassi-
cal economics and time to begin shaping the market again through the

deployment of a conscious and ambitious industrial policy. After all, to

quote the president again, “the countries that are passive in the face of a
global economy will lose the competition for good jobs and high living
standards. That’s why America has to make the investments necessary to
promote long-term growth and shared prosperity. Rebuilding our manu-
facturing base. Educating our workforce. Upgrading our transportation
and information systems . . . What we need isn’t a three-month plan,
or even a three-year plan, but a long-term American strategy, based on
steady, persistent effort, to reverse the forces that have conspired against
the middle class for decades.”37 So at the very least, it seems worth-
while to increase the public funding of high-quality career and technical
education—including improved access to apprenticeships, community
college programs, and IT training—and of college-level education in sci-
ence, technology, and engineering. It seems worthwhile to increase the
public funding of basic science and to refocus federal support for research
and development away from overdependence on military and health care
products toward targeted support for private-sector research and develop-
ment in new technologies directed at climate-protecting energy savings
and transport infrastructure. It is worth closing corporate tax loopholes,
especially for US firms with large overseas labor forces, and giving tax
credits to US-based companies bringing employment back home. And
it is essential that we restrict new trade agreements only to countries
meeting high and agreed-upon labor and environmental standards, and
replace right-to-work legislation here at home with a strengthening of the
rights of trade union membership and of collective bargaining. An active
industrial policy must target federal help to small and medium-size busi-
nesses, particularly those located in areas of high unemployment, and it
must build a base under US manufacturing by extensive public spending
on basic infrastructure renewal.
We know that manufacturing matters.38 It matters as a productivity
powerhouse, as a source of demand for other services, as a location for
strong wages and working conditions (particularly for non-college-trained
American workers), and as a critical contributor to a much-needed reduc-
tion in the US trade deficit. We would be foolish to turn our back on
the development of policies that could simultaneously raise living stan-
dards, ease trade dependency, and erode income and wealth inequality.
We would be foolish not to focus all our energies on nation building at
home, by creating and sustaining over the next decades a twenty-first-
century version of what in the twentieth century was America’s finest
moment: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s confident New Deal answer to the

despair of the Great Depression. The time for a more active and progres-
sive industrial policy is now.
The Pursuit of a More Equal America

All societies contain degrees of inequality, and imperial societies—as we
have seen—have a propensity for greater inequality than most. Life at the
bottom of social and economic hierarchies is never pleasant, but it can
be made bearable if the social order is so constructed as to allow those at
the bottom to rise by their own efforts, ideally rising in certain cases com-
pletely to the top. That capacity for social mobility within and between
generations was always the promise of the American Dream; but it was a
promise that was only ever realizable when the degree of inequality faced
by the American poor was slight enough as to make their circumstances
easy to escape. The question before us, therefore, is whether American
inequality has crossed some particular line that now makes the changing
of people’s circumstances far less easy—indeed overwhelmingly difficult
for them in most cases. Have we, as a country, locked ourselves in the years
since the Reagan Revolution into self-sustaining patterns of privilege and
deprivation that collectively put the American Dream beyond the reach of
more and more of our fellow citizens? President Obama clearly fears that
as a society we may indeed be approaching that particular line, with the
current income gap being in danger of fraying the US social fabric. As he
told The New York Times in July 2013, “the central problem we face . . .
is how do we build a broad-based prosperity” without which “growth will
be slower than it should be, unemployment will not go down as fast as it
should, income inequality will continue to rise.” If the president is correct
to argue that “that’s not a future that we should accept,”39 then he is also
right to say that now is the time for corrective action.
And he is right, because when inequality hits levels currently operating
in the United States, self-sustaining dynamics of poverty set in across the
entire society. In such circumstances, individual self-help is not enough
to break those dynamics, nor do unregulated market forces correct them
on their own. On the contrary, without corrective public policy, each
dynamic deepens over time: dynamics of ill health, urban deprivation,
ghettoization, and inadequate demand that lock children into the pov-
erty of their parents. With income and wealth inequality running at cur-
rent levels, a dynamic of poverty and ill health blights the lives of more
and more Americans and fuels the escalating health-care costs that sit
at the heart of the fiscal deficit. Why? Because low-income Americans
lack access to sufficient quantities of nutritious food, and the fast food
to which they turn then adds to the illnesses already associated with the

stress of poverty, setting into motion that uniquely American phenom-

enon: the combination of poverty with obesity. Historically, even here in
the United States, the poor were thin; but that is not so in America today.
Today, Mississippi, the state with the highest poverty rate (22.8 percent in
September 2013), is also the state with the highest rate of food insecurity
(20.9 percent) and of obesity (34.6 percent).40 In all this, however, Missis-
sippi is not alone. The linkage between poverty and obesity is ubiquitous
in modern America, and it is one reason the United States currently ranks
112 out of 122 countries on the Human Capital Index sponsored by the
World Economic Forum.41 We are an obese as well as an unequal society.
We need to stop being each and both.
A related dynamic of poverty and urban deprivation additionally locks
the children of the poor into geographical spaces that are denuded of
adequate social capital. The key loss here is educational capital. Run-
down neighborhoods with limited tax bases lack the resources to attract
the educational facilities they need, and the resulting underskilling of the
children working through underresourced American schools locks the vast
majority of those children into deprived neighborhoods for generations
to come. This dynamic of poverty and urban deprivation matters more
for the United States than for other leading industrial economies because
the US rate of child poverty is five times higher than in the OECD as a
whole. It is striking in this regard that the 2013 SAT scores continued
to show, as previous reports had done, that as many as 60 percent of
the high-school students taking the test were so lacking in their reading,
writing, and math skills as to be unprepared for college-level work.42 Too
often, blame for educational underperformance in the United States is
directed at America’s low-paid teachers, but the reality is otherwise: there
is only so much a teacher can do, trapped between a culture of depriva-
tion on the one side and dwindling public resources for education on
the other.43
The resulting interplay of poverty and underskilling then shuts more
and more Americans out of an already diminished flow of well-paid,
middle-class jobs. It also pushes many of them into a shadow economy
now organized around drugs, often builds patterns of behavior and
dependency that are themselves criminalized, and leaves the American
poor disproportionately exposed to incarceration and the perpetuation
of poverty associated with jail time. Moreover, income-based poverty and
the associated lack of wealth produce underresourced communities in the
United States whose poor credit scores leave them unable to raise local
capital to generate new businesses and sources of local employment. Lack
of access to income and credit also helps stifle the general and rapid rise

in consumer demand that the entire economy requires and reinforces a

downgrading in the quality of consumer goods and living standards that
we have earlier referred to as the Walmart effect. It is not an effect, of
course, that directly impacts the CEO of Walmart himself. If Lee Saun-
ders’s reporting is accurate, William Simon’s “total compensation in 2011
was a staggering $14,054,824,”44 just part of a 273:1 ratio between CEO-
to-worker compensation in 2011–12.45
Saunders’s data points to something else too: the way in which the cre-
ation and reproduction of cycles of deprivation, cycles that become more
deeply embedded over time, also exist alongside parallel cycles of privilege
and advantage. The children of more affluent parents eat better, go to
better schools, gather more marketable skills, and even enjoy a degree
of class privilege should they ever face the US justice system. The result
is a dynamic of inequality and blocked social mobility that now renders
the American Dream largely unattainable for at least the bottom third
of white Americans and the bottom two-thirds of African American and
Hispanic American populations. We still talk about America as the land
of opportunity, but the reality is that for more and more of its less favored
citizens that opportunity is now slipping from their grasp. Social mobil-
ity is normally measured in one of two ways: by comparing the social
position of children to their parents and by watching individual social
mobility over time. In 2008, the Brookings Institution found 40 percent
of American children with a poor father remain poor and just 8 percent
make it to the highest income bracket. The equivalent Swedish figures
were 26 percent and 11 percent.46 There is “stickiness at both ends” of the
American income distribution—the children of the poor stay poor, those
of the rich stay rich—which is one reason rates of economic mobility in
Canada and Australia, where that stickiness is less, are currently twice that
in the United States.
Such levels of inequality are not simply personally demeaning to those
caught up in them and morally challenging to a society that prides itself
on the basic equality and freedom of all its citizens—though they are cer-
tainly both those things. Our current levels of income and wealth inequal-
ity are also economically damaging in a world of ever more sophisticated
technologies and of intensely competitive and ever-more globally inte-
grated markets. The waste of human potential represented by the scale of
contemporary poverty in the United States is not simply socially divisive
and morally disturbing; it also denies to the wider American economy an
adequate flow of domestic consumers and an adequate input of skilled
labor. Future living standards for all of us depend on the enhanced and
sustained productivity of that labor. As an economy and society, we

cannot go on (and ultimately will not be allowed to go on) sustaining

our living standards by running trade deficits with developing economies
abroad, in effect exercising a degree of imperial arbitrage as we transfer
the wealth generated by low-paid workers overseas into our inflated levels
of consumption. Instead, we all will increasingly come to depend on the
skills and productivity of our fellow citizens for our continued personal
well-being, as we learn to survive in a global economy that is no longer
divided between capitalist and communist blocs or between imperial cen-
ters and colonial dependencies: a world that is genuinely flat. The barren
wastelands of deserted American cities, the rundown industrial parks now
denuded of manufacturing industries, and the vast underclass of those
excluded from work by distance, education, or illness will come back to
haunt us all if we do not now turn our best efforts to the design and
implementation of a new growth model for the American economy: one
based on higher levels of income equality and on higher levels of wages at
that economy’s core.47
The Task Ahead

If any of this was easy, it would have been done already. But realigning
the movement of a great ship of state, just like realigning the trajectory
of the huge oil tankers on whose safe arrival in port our daily lives con-
tinue to depend, is a task of huge skill and immense effort. Enormous
waves of resistance will inevitably push us in the opposite direction, waves
made even deeper than normal by the attempt at realignment. We can
expect heavily funded resistance from the institutions and social groups
whose immediate interests are challenged by any retreat from empire and
finance.48 We can expect intense and vocal resistance from the naysay-
ers who claim such change to be either unnecessary or undesirable. We
will certainly see resistance from sections of a political class now so grid-
locked that it cannot easily and consistently agree on amendments to
small things, let alone to big ones. And we will have to address resistance
from firmly embedded economic and social processes that will play them-
selves out automatically to our disadvantage unless they are effectively
challenged: at the very least, the economic processes of globalization and
job polarization and the social processes of class differentiation and racial
hatred. Time and again we will be told, by those committed to the main-
tenance of the status quo, that any change of the nature and scale pro-
posed here is quite literally beyond the capacity of a functioning global
power to deliver.
To which the answer has to be that, contrary to surface appearances,
American global power is both very new and very brittle, while the

American domestic crisis is both very deep and very painful. That domes-
tic crisis—our current unique fusion of federal political gridlock, loss of
global economic leadership, and deepening internal social division—will
erode American power in any case if it goes unaddressed and unreformed.
So reform is vital, and the only issue is its direction. The argument here is
that any reform should be fundamental rather than superficial, and that
it should prioritize the replacement abroad of hard power by soft power
and the replacement at home of economic inequality with renewed social
justice. Of course, perhaps we have already passed the tipping point.49
Perhaps, as the cynics say, more than three decades of unalloyed Reagan-
ism have left American culture too scarred with rampant individualism
ever to sustain a collective and egalitarian political project again. But I
don’t think so. I don’t think America is lost. I think America is currently
on the cusp. The forces of conservatism, both traditional and libertarian,
are as present in our political life as they have ever been, angrier and more
mobilized than at any time since the 1950s. But they remain nonetheless
a minority presence in a political culture that is still divided rather than
moribund.
There are many progressive Americans, politically engaged and active
right now, who are well aware of the need for at least part of this reform
agenda and who are willing to pursue detailed and focused change. Progres-
sive campaigns pop up everywhere on issues as disparate as voting rights,
equal pay, the minimum wage, gay marriage, and immigration reform.
The pursuit of those reforms needs both to intensify and to attract to
itself more support. But it also needs to be part of a bigger thing—linked
together in a broader political project committed to putting the substance
back into the eroding promise of the American Dream. That bigger thing
will not happen without a fundamental change in the way American
politics at the federal level is framed by those who practice it. It will not
happen without the creation of mass support for a political program
that will bring American troops home and put America’s house in order.
It will not happen without the revitalization of a broad progressive move-
ment committed to the generalized revival of American society and econ-
omy. If there was ever a time when America needed a second “New Deal,”
that time is now. My hope is that a volume like this one can both help
explain why such a new deal is necessary and be a partial trigger to its
emergence.

Notes
Introduction
1. If you doubt that, take a look at pages 382–83 of The Global Competitiveness
Report 2013–14, published by the World Economic Forum and available at
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2013
-14.pdf.
2. The details are in Chapter 1.
3. Benjamin Franklin’s tongue-in-cheek advice to the British, Rules by Which a
Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One, ought still to be obligatory read-
ing in the corridors of power. Not surprisingly, his advice to those wanting to
lose their empire focused on mistreating the “remotest provinces” since—in his
view—“a great Empire, like great Cake, is most easily diminished at the Edges.”
First published in The Public Advertiser on September 11, 1773—that 9/11
date again—the advice is readily available at http://nationalhumanitiescenter
.org/pds/makingrev/crisis/text9/franklingreatempire.pdf.
4. Initially, Sean Doyle, Benjamin Gionet, Alexandra Gray, Bradley Harper, Tom
Hotchkiss, Justin Hutton, Christian Mattia, William McClure, Edgar Mer-
cado, Nirali Parikh, Hardin Patrick, Luke Perry, Justen Robinett, Peter Shames,
Donald Song, Curtis Vann, and Victoria White. Later, Kyle Adams, Emily
Anderson, Doug Baker, Bryce Delgrande, Meghan Fallon, Caroline Fisher,
Jeremy Hefter, Mickey Herman, John Ho, Lin Ingabire, Travis McCall, Alex
Mole, Colton Morrish, Catherine Mudd, Joey Polychronis, Alexis Shklar, Ken-
dall Stempel, Caroline Stoupnitzky, and Harrison Waddill.
Chapter 1
1. For a fuller account, see David Coates, Making the Progressive Case: Towards a
Stronger U.S. Economy. New York: Continuum, 2011, pp. 114–19.
2. This is the title of his 1963 book published in New York by Basic.
3. S. M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1996, p. 26.
4. Thomas Madden, Empires of Trust. New York: Dutton, 2008.
5. Olaf Gersemann, Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Realities.
Washington DC: Cato Institute, 2004.
6. Newt Gingrich, A Nation like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters.
Washington DC: Regnery, 2011, pp. 13 and 230.

220 Notes
7. Editors, “After the Attack . . . The War on Terrorism,” Monthly Review, Novem-
ber 2001, p. 1.
8. Quoted in Jack A. Smith, “Look Out, Obama Seems to Be Planning for a Lot
More War,” posted on AlterNet, May 8, 2010: available at http://www.alternet
.org/story/146787.
9. This is from Robert Reich, America’s Biggest Jobs Program—the U.S. Military,
posted August 12, 2012: available at http://robertreich.org/post/938938180.
10. Peter Van Buren, “Imperial Reconstruction and Its Discontents,” posted on
TomDispatch, August 16, 2012: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/
blog/175583.
11. On this, see Chalmers Johnson, “10 Needed Steps for Obama to Start Disman-
tling America’s Gigantic, Destructive Military Empire,” posted on AlterNet,
August 25, 2010: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/147964.
For the counterargument that base construction is limited and without sig-
nificance, see Vaclav Smil, Why America Is Not a New Rome. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2010, p. 49.
12. Van Buren, Imperial Reconstruction.
13. Dan Froomkin, “U.S. to Hand over Iraq Bases, Equipment Worth Billions,”
posted on The Huffington Post, September 26, 2011: available at http://www
.huffingtonpost .com /2011 /09 /26 /iraq -withdrawal -us -bases -equipment _n
_975463.html.
14. Ibid.
15. Nick Turse, “The Secret War in 120 Countries,” The Nation, August 4, 2011:
available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175426/nick_turse_a_secret
_war_in_120_countries.
16. Juan Cole, “The Age of American Shadow Power,” The Nation, April 30, 2012:
available at http://www.thenation.com/article/167353/age-american-shadow
-power.
17. Seamas Milne, “America’s Murderous Drone Campaign Is Fuelling Ter-
ror,” The Guardian, May 30, 2012: available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/
commentisfree/2012/may/29/americas-drone-campaign-terror. For the data
on civilian and noncombatant deaths, see the reports by Amnesty Interna-
tional and the UN, reported in Craig Whitlock, “Drone Strikes Killing More
Civilians than U.S. Admits, Human Rights Group Says,” The Washington
Post, October 22, 2013: available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/
national-security/drone-strikes-killing-more-civilians-than-us-admits-human
-rights -groups -say /2013 /10 /21 /a99cbe78 -3a81 -11e3 -b7ba -503fb5822c3e
_story.html.
18. See Scott Shane, “Debate Aside, Number of Drone Strikes Drops Sharply,” The
New York Times, May 21, 2013: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/
22/us/debate-aside-drone-strikes-drop-sharply.html?pagewanted=all.
19. Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. New York:
Broadway, 2013, p. 206.
20. Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, “Our Taxes Pay Spies to Work for Rich
Shareholders—and Pay for the Privatization of War Itself,” Lowdown, 14(4),

Notes 221
April 2012, drawing on work by Dana Priest and William Arkin, available at
http://www.projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-projects.
21. Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, At What Risk?
Washington, DC, February 2011: available at http://www.wartimecontracting
.gov.
22. Robert J. Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 124.
23. Julian Barnes and Nathan Hodge, “Military Faces Historic Shift,” The Wall
Street Journal, January 6, 2012 (the data are for 2009).
24. According to figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, “World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 . . .
The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.” Law-
rence Wittner, “The Shame of Nations: A New Record Is Set on Spending on
War,” posted on The Huffington Post, April 24, 2012: available at https://www
.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/23-2.
25. Barney Frank, “The New Mandate on Defense,” Democracy Journal, Winter
2013, p. 51.
26. Data are from War Resisters League, Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes.
New York: War Resisters League, 2011.
27. If you factor in the $3–4 trillion also spent on veterans, the total bill for the
decade since 2001 might run to as high as $11 trillion. All this is in Chris
Hellman, “The Pentagon’s Spending Spree,” posted on TomDispatch, August
16, 2011: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175431. For the
Stiglitz calculation, increasing his original cost estimate in his jointly written
(with Linda Bilmes) The Three Trillion Dollar War (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008), see Joseph Stiglitz, “The U.S. Response to 9/11 Cost Us Far More than
the Attacks Themselves,” posted on AlterNet, September 6, 2011: available at
http://www.alternet.org/story/152309.
28. Dylan Matthews, “America’s Secret Intelligence Budget, in 11 (Nay, 13) Charts,”
The Washington Post, August 29, 2013: available at http://www.washingtonpost
.com /blogs /wonkblog /wp /2013 /08 /29 /your -cheat -sheet -to -americas -secret
-intelligence-budget/?wpisrc=nl_wonk_b.
29. Joshua Holland, “Five Eye-Opening Facts about Our Bloated Post-9/11
‘Defense’ Spending,” posted on AlterNet, May 28, 2011: available at http://
www.alternet.org/story/151119/five_eye-opening_facts_about_our_bloated
_post-9_11_%27defense%27_spending.
30. See, for details, Coates, Making the Progressive Case, p. 154.
31. See Dean Baker, “Does Paul Ryan Know What’s in His Budget?,” posted on
NationofChange, August 20, 2012: available at http://www.nationofchange
.org/does-paul-ryan-know-what-s-his-budget-1345475290.
32. From 2007 to March 2014, there was not a month without fatalities among US
troops engaged in combat. Data are at iCasualties: http://icasualties.org/OEF.
33. Dan Froomkin, “How Many U.S. Soldiers Were Wounded in Iraq? Guess
Again,” posted on The Huffington Post, December 30, 2012: available at

222 Notes
http:// www.huffingtonpost .com /dan -froomkin /iraq -soldiers -wounded _b

_1176276.html.
34. See Mac McClelland, “Hearts and Minds,” Mother Jones, January/February
2013, pp. 17–27, 64.
35. Ernesto Londono, “Military Suicides Rise to a Record 349, Topping Number
of Troops Killed in Combat,” The Washington Post, January 14, 2013: available
at http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/military-suicides
-rise-to-a-record-349-topping-number-of-troops-killed-in-combat/2013/01/
14/e604e6b4-5e8c-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_story.html.
36. Data are reported in Ashley Curtin, “Comprehensive Study Shows Need for
Better Veterans Suicide Prevention,” posted on NationofChange, February 7,
2013: available at http://www.nationofchange.org/comprehensive-study-shows
-need-better-veterans-suicide-prevention-1360248744.
37. On these widely varying estimates, see Nora Eisenberg, “10 Hard Truths about
War for Veterans Day (and Every Other Day),” posted on AlterNet, November
11 2010: available at http://www/alternet.org/story/148818.
38. Matthew Duss and Peter Juul, “$806 Billion Spent for Hundreds of Thousands
to Be Killed and Wounded: The Staggering True Costs of the Iraq War,” posted
on AlterNet, December 15, 2011: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/
153429. Michael Mann has slightly lower figures for deaths (500,000) but
slightly higher figures for refugees—internal 2.5 million, external 2.5 million—
from a total population of 30 million. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social
Power, vol. 4. New York: Penguin, 2013, p. 298.
39. Congressional Budget Office, Federal Support for Research and Development,
June 2007: available at http://www.cbo.gov/publication/18750.
40. See Tom Engelhardt, “A Record of Unparalleled Failure,” posted on TomDis-
patch, June 10, 2014: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/
tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_a_record_of_unparalleled_failure.
41. Alfred W. McCoy, “Fatal Florescence: Europe’s Decolonization and America’s
Decline,” in Alfred W. McCoy, Joseph M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson
(eds.), Endless Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, p. 22.
42. “United States GDP Growth Rate,” Trading Economics, available at http://
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43. See Coates, Making the Progressive Case, appendix 1; and David Coates, Answer-
ing Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments. New York: Continuum,
2010, chapter 10.
44. Sebastian Mallaby, “The US Labor Market Doesn’t Work,” The Financial
Times, August 21, 2012: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/08d1eeae
-ead3-11e1-984b-00144feab49a.html#axzz2GvFW2wkX.
45. “Income for working-age households fell over the 2000–2007 business cycle
(the first time in any cycle in the post-war period) and then were battered by the
great recession we’re still effectively in.” Lawrence Mishel, “What Does Health
Care Have to Do with the Wage Slowdown? Not Much,” posted on the EPI
blog, August 26, 2012: available at http://www.epi.org/blog/health-care-wage
-slowdown.

Notes 223
46. The data are from McKinsey. The report is Edward Luce’s, “Can America
Regain Most Dynamic Labor Market Mantle?,” The Financial Times, Decem-
ber 11, 2011: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6327a7f4-21bb
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47. “North Carolina and the Global Economy,” Duke University, available at
http://www.duke.edu/web/mms190/furniture/dimensions.html.
48. “Made in the USA Group 6,” US Bureau of Industry and Security,
available at http://www.bis.doc.gov/defenseindustrialbaseprograms/osies/
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49. Robert E. Scott, “The China Toll,” EPI Briefing Paper #345. Washington, DC:
Economic Policy Institute, August 23, 2012: available at https://groups.google
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50. Robert E. Scott, “Growing U.S. Trade Deficit with China Cost 2.8 Million
Jobs between 2001 and 2010,” EPI Briefing Paper #323. Washington, DC:
Economic Policy Institute, September 20, 2011: available at http://www.epi
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51. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Syndrome: Local
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52. “World University Rankings 2012-2013,” available at http://www.timeshigher
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53. For the general case, see David Mason, The End of the American Century. Lan-
ham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010, pp. 65–71.
54. Donna Cooper, Adam Hersh, and Ann O’Leary, The Competition That Really
Matters. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress and The Center for
the Next Generation, August 2012: available at http://www.americanprogress
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55. OECD, Programme for International Student Assessment: Results from PISA
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56. See Diane Ravitch, “Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?,”
The New York Review of Books, June 7, 2012: available at http://www.nybooks
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57. Chris Hedges, “Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System,”
posted on truthgig, May 1, 2012: available at http://www.truthdig.com/
report /item /why _the _united _states _is _destroying _her _education _system
_20110410.
58. OECD, Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around
the World, available at http://www.oecd.org/fr/edu/prescolaireetscolaire/
programmeinternationalpourlesuividesacquisdeselevespisa /buildingahigh
-qualityteachingprofessionlessonsfromaroundtheworld.htm.

224 Notes
59. See page 129 of “Chapter 5: Finland: Slow and Steady Reform for Consistently
High Results,” in OECD, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Educa-
tion: Lessons from PISA for the United States: available at http://www.oecd.org/
pisa/46623978.pdf.
60. Thomas B Moorhead, Deputy Undersecretary for International Labor Affairs,
US Department of Labor, speaking at Labor Markets in the 21st Century, Wash-
ington, DC, February 22, 2002: available at http://www.dol.gov/ilab/media/
reports/otla/labormarkskills/labormarkskills.htm#.UOx2pawQgpA.
61. Andreas Schleicher, The Economics of Knowledge: Why Education Is Key to
Europe’s Success, Brussels, the Lisbon Council policy brief, 2006, p. 2; available
at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/11/36278531.pdf.
62. Fareed Zakaria, “The Hard Truth about Going Soft,” October 6, 2011: avail-
able at http://fareedzakaria.com/tag/united-states/page/2.
63. Ylan Q. Mui and Suzy Khimm, “College Dropouts Have Debts but No Degree,”
The Washington Post, May 28, 2012: available at http://articles.washingtonpost
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64. On the controversy, read Daniel Costa, “STEM Labor Shortages?,” EPI
Policy Memorandum #195, November 19, 2012: available at http://www.epi
.org /publication /pm195 -stem -labor -shortages -microsoft -report -distorts /;
and Brad Smith, “How to Reduce America’s Talent Deficit,” The Wall
Street Journal, October 18, 2012: available at http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10000872396390443675404578058163640361032.html.
65. Data are from a report by the Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeast-
ern University Boston, “High School Dropout Crisis Continues in US, Study
Finds,” CNN, May 5, 2009, available at http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/05/
dropout.rate.study/index.html?eref=ib_us.
66. Joe Klein, “Learning That Works,” Time, May 14, 2012: available at http://
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2113794,00.html.
67. See David Ashton and Francis Green, Education, Training and the Global Econ-
omy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997.
68. Data are from the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State
University, cited in Catherine Rampell, “Where the Jobs Are, the Training May
Not Be,” The New York Times, March 1, 2012: available at http://www.nytimes
.com /2012 /03 /02 /business /dealbook /state -cutbacks -curb -training -in -jobs
-critical-to-economy.html?_r=0.
69. Thomas A. Hemphill and Mark J. Perry, “U.S. Manufacturing and the Skills
Crisis,” The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2012: available at http://online
.wsj .com /article /SB10001424052970204880404577230870671588412
.html.
70. Ayşegül Şahin, Joseph Song, Giorgio Topa, and Giovanni L. Violante, “Mis-
match Unemployment,” NBER Working Paper No. 18265, August 2012: avail-
able at http://www.nber.org/papers/w18265.

Notes 225
71. The National Academies, Rising above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly
Approaching Category 5, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010, pp.
65–66.
72. Published in 2013, and available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204904
-en.
73. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation. New York: Dutton, 2011.
74. Gary Pisano and Willy C. Shih, “Restoring American Competitiveness,” Har-
vard Business Review, July 2009: available at http://hbr.org/2009/07/restoring
-american-competitiveness/ar/1.
75. “Science and Engineering Indicators 2014,” National Science Foundation,
available at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/overview/c0i.htm.
76. Byron Wien, “America’s Decline Will Not Be Easily Reversed,” The Financial
Times, August 11, 2008: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a1cfa9e8
-66e8-11dd-808f-0000779fd18c.html#axzz2HQ9RvZXS.
77. Thomas Friedman, “Facts and Folly,” The New York Times, March 29, 2006:
available at http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=20060402&
id=5nspAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Z9gEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1575,105620.
78. CRS Report for Congress, America COMPETES Act: Programs, Funding and
Selected Issues, January 22, 2008, p. 7.
79. National Academies, Office of News and Publications, U.S. Competitive
Position Has Further Declined in Past Five Years, released September 23, 2010:
available at http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx
?RecordID=12999.
80. These data are in the 2011 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic
and Security Review Commission: available at http://www.uscc.gov/content/
2011-annual-report-congress.
81. For the data on labor costs as the prime driver of outsourcing, see Alex Lach, “5
Facts about Overseas Outsourcing,” Center for American Progress, July 9, 2012:
available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/news/2012/07/09/
11898/5-facts-about-overseas-outsourcing.
82. Data are from the Commerce Department, cited in David Wessel, “Big U.S. Firms
Shift Hiring Abroad,” The Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2011: available at http://
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704821704576270783611823972
.html.
83. Sudeep Reddy, “Domestic-Based Multinationals Hiring Overseas,” The Wall
Street Journal, April 18, 2013: available at http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424127887324763404578430960988848252.html.
84. Robert Reich, “The Problem Isn’t Outsourcing. It’s That the Prosperity of Big
Business Has Become Disconnected from the Well-Being of Most Americans,”
posted on NationofChange, July 24, 2012: available at http://robertreich.org/
post/27527895909.
85. Harold Meyerson, “Business Is Booming,” The American Prospect, March 2011,
p. 12: available at http://prospect.org/article/business-booming-0.
86. Robert E. Scott, “NAFTA’s Legacy,” EPI Briefing Paper #173. Washing-
ton, DC: Economic Policy Institute, September 28, 2006: available at

226 Notes
http:// www.beaconschool .org / ~lmoscow /12th %20grade /readings %2012 /

UNITED%20STATES%20NAFTA.htm.
87. Clyde Prestowitz, The Betrayal of American Prosperity. New York: Free Press,
2010, p. 277.
88. “Top Five U.S. Exports to China in 2009,” USITC DataWeb: available at
http://dataweb.usitc.gov.
89. “Textile industry contributions peaked in 1948, reaching approximately 1.95%
of GDP. The apparel industry’s peak contribution occurred in 1947 and 1948,
when it contributed 1.36% to GDP each year. By contrast, in 2001 the textile
and apparel industries contributed 0.22% and 0.23% respectively.” US Depart-
ment of Commerce, The U.S. Textile and Apparel Industries: An Industrial Base
Assessment: accessed August 28, 2012.
90. The output and productivity figures are for 1997–2007. The source is John
Gapper, “America’s Turbulent Job Flight,” The Financial Times, July 28, 2011:
available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1d467a7c-b883-11e0-8206
-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2HQ9RvZXS.
91. Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott, Concording U.S. Harmonized System Cat-
egories Over Time, NBER Working Paper No. 14837: available at ipl.econ.duke
.edu/seminars/system/files/seminars/215.pdf.
92. Lach, “5 Facts about Overseas Outsourcing.”
93. See Barry Lynn and Phillip Longman, “Who Broke America’s Job
Machine?,” Washington Monthly, March 4, 2010: available at http://www
.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.lynn-longman.html.
94. In 2012, total health spending made up 17.9 percent of US GDP.
95. Michael Ettlinger and Kate Gordon, The Importance and Promise of American
Manufacturing. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, April 2011:
available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2011/04/07/
9427/the-importance-and-promise-of-american-manufacturing.
96. Ibid.
97. Coates, Making the Progressive Case, p. 71.
98. Josh Bivens, “Squandering the Blue-Collar Advantage,” EPI Briefing Paper
#229. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, February 12, 2009: avail-
able at http://www.epi.org/publication/bp229.
99. Bureau of Labor Statistics, International Comparison of Hourly Compensation
Costs in Manufacturing, 2010. US Department of Labor, December 21, 2011.
100. Steven Rattner, “Let’s Admit It: Globalization Has Losers,” The New York
Times, October 15, 2011: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/
opinion/sunday/lets-admit-it-globalization-has-losers.html. Steven Rattner
was Obama’s “auto czar,” overseeing the restructuring that accompanied the
bailout in 2009. See also Michael Fletcher, “In Rust Belt, Manufacturers Add
Jobs, but Factory Pay Isn’t What It Used to Be,” The Washington Post, May 17,
2011: available at http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-05-17/business/
35264283_1_new-jobs-american-products-prospective-workers.
101. David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, “The American Middle Class Is No
Longer the World’s Richest,” posted on NYTimes, April 22, 2014: available

Notes 227
at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is
-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?_r=0.
102. “Average Annual Hours Actually Worked per Worker,” OECD.StatExtracts,
September 15, 2014: available at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode
=ANHRS.
103. American men ranked last in life expectancy in the 17 countries, and women
next to last. The report is US Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives,
Poorer Health, available at http://pnhp.org/blog/2013/01/11/u-s-health-in
-international-perspective-shorter-lives-poorer-health.
104. In 2013, the ratio was 295.9:1. See Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis, “CEO
Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less,” EPI Briefing Paper
#380. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014: available at
http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise.
105. Trends in the Distribution of Household Income between 1979 and 2011, Wash-
ington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, October 2011.
106. Paul Buchheit, “Five Facts about Inequality for Anyone Thinking of Voting
Republican,” posted on The Huffington Post, October 29, 2012: available at
http://www.nationofchange.org/five-facts-about-inequality-anyone-thinking
-voting-republican-1351518477.
107. Data are in the Pew Economic Mobility Project, Pursuing the American Dream,
August 2012: available at http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_report_detail
.aspx?id=85899403846.
108. Emily Beller and Michael Hout, “Intergenerational Social Mobility: The
United States in Comparative Perspective,” The Future of Children, 16(2),
2006, 19–36.
109. Lawrence Mishel, Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of
Working America, 12th ed. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2012,
p. 152.
110. Peter Edelman, “The State of Poverty in America,” The American Prospect, June
22, 2012: available at http://prospect.org/article/state-poverty-america.
111. Brandon Roberts, Deborah Povich, and Mark Mather, “Low Income Work-
ing Families: The Growing Economic Gap,” Working Poor Families Project,
Policy Brief Winter 2012–13, p. 1: available at http://inequality.org/topreads/
lowincome-working-families-growing-economic-gap.
112. Five years after the 2008 crisis, one in five American workers was still working
part-time, most of them for lack of a better full-time job. On this, see Lynn Stu-
art Parramore, “Half Lives: Why the Part-Time Economy Is Bad for Everyone,”
posted on AlterNet, June 9, 2013: available at http://www.alternet.org/labor/
part-time-jobs-and-economy.
113. The poverty rate among white Americans in 2011 was 9.9 percent. Among
African Americans, the poverty rate was 27.4 percent, and among Hispanic
Americans it was 26.6 percent. See David Coates, Pursuing the Progressive Case?
Observing Obama in Real Time. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2013, p. 142.

228 Notes
114. The Pew Center on the States, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, avail-
able at http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2008/02/28/
one-in-100-behind-bars-in-america-2008.
115. Rebecca Ruiz, “Eyes on the Prize,” The American Prospect, January/February
2011: available at http://prospect.org/article/eyes-prize.
116. Steven Raphael, “Explaining the Rise in U.S. Incarceration Rates,” Criminology
& Public Policy, 8(1), 2009, p. 87.
117. See David Lapido, “The Rise of America’s Prison-Industrial Complex,” New
Left Review, January/February 2001, pp. 109–23; and Hannah Holleman,
Robert W. McChesney, John Bellamy Foster, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Penal
State in an Age of Crisis,” Monthly Review, 61(2), June 2009, pp. 1–17.
118. Ethan Nadelmann, “It’s Time to End American Exceptionalism When It
Comes to Putting Citizens Behind Bars,” AlterNet, May 1, 2014: available at
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/its-time-end-american-exceptionalism-when-it
-comes-putting-citizens-behind-bars.
Also, The National Research Council, The Growth of Incarceration in the
United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. Washington, DC: National
Academies, 2014.
119. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-
blindness. New York: New Press, 2011.
120. This is the thesis of the Boston Consulting Group in their report Made in
America Again: Why Manufacturing Will Return to the U.S. Boston, August
2011: available at http://www.bcg.com/documents/file84471.pdf.
121. This is from Ettlinger and Gordon, The Importance and Promise of American
Manufacturing, p. 2.
122. Eric M. Fattor, American Empire and the Arsenal of Entertainment. New York.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
123. Ezra Klein, “American Decline Is a Mirage in a World That’s Rising,” posted on
Bloomberg, May 16, 2012: available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012
-05-16/american-decline-a-mirage-in-a-world-that-s-rising.html.
124. Robert Kagan, “Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline,”
Brookings, January 30, 2012: available at http://www.brookings.edu/research/
opinions/2012/01/17-us-power-kagan.
125. Howard Friedman, The Measure of a Nation. New York: Prometheus, 2012, pp.
208–9.
126. Geoffrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 128–90.
127. This is the title of the volume by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum,
published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011.
Chapter 2
1. Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the
Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 1.

Notes 229
2. Cited in Niall Ferguson, “Hegemony or Empire?,” Foreign Affairs, 82(5), 2003,

pp. 154–61.
3. Ibid.
4. Earl C. Ravenal, “What’s an Empire Got to Do with It? The Derivation of
America’s Foreign Policy,” Critical Review, 21(1), 2009, pp. 21–75.
5. This is in Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2013, p. 17.
6. Andrew Hurrell, “Pax Americana or the Empire of Insecurity?,” International
Review of the Asia-Pacific, 5, 2005, pp. 153–76.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Bradley A. Thayer, “The Case for the American Empire,” in Christopher Layne
and Bradley A. Thayer (eds.), American Empire: A Debate. London: Routledge,
2007, pp. 3, 5, and 7.
10. Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” The Weekly Standard, October
15, 2001: available at http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/boot
.htm.
11. Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline. New York: Liveright, 2014, pp. 219,
246, 252, and 267.
12. Thomas F. Madden, Empires of Trust. New York: Dutton, 2008.
13. Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy, 111, 1998, pp. 24–35.
14. Cited in James Chase, “Imperial America and the Common Interest,” World
Policy Journal, 19(1), 2002, p. 1.
15. Dimitri Simes, “America’s Imperial Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs, 82(6), 2003, p.
93. For why the United States is not popular abroad, see Andrew Kohut and
Bruce Stokes, America against the World: How We Are Different and Why We
Are Disliked. New York: Henry Holt, 2006; and Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth
Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007.
16. Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2012, p. 251.
17. Reported in Michael Cox, “The Empire’s Back in Town: Or America’s Imperial
Temptation—Again,” Millennium, 32(1), 2003, p. 11.
18. Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-building Lite,” The New York Times, July 28, 2002:
available at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/nation-building
-lite.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.
19. Cox, “The Empire’s Back.”
20. Michael Cox, “Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine,” Review of Interna-
tional Studies, 30(4), 2004, p. 592.
21. Michael Cox, “Empire by Denial? Debating US Power,” Security Dialogue,
35(2), 2004, p. 230.
22. Elliot A. Cohen, “History and the Hyperpower,” Foreign Affairs, 83(4), July/
August 2004, p. 56.
23. Ferguson, “Hegemony or Empire?”
24. Cox, “The Empire’s Back,” p. 7.

230 Notes
25. Cited in ibid., p. 9.

26. Bryan Mabee, “Discourses of Empire; the US ‘Empire,’ Globalization and
International Relations,” Third World Quarterly, 25(8), 2004, p. 1373.
27. Noam Chomsky, “U.S.—A Leading Terrorist State,” Monthly Review, 53(6),
2001, 14–15.
28. Harry Magdoff, Imperialism without Colonies. New York: Monthly Review,
2003.
29. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire. London: Verso, 2003.
30. Paul Attwood, War and Empire: The American Way of Life. New York: Pluto,
2010.
31. Perry Anderson, “Imperium,” New Left Review, 83, September–October 2013,
pp 1–71.
32. Walden Bello, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire.
New York: Metropolitan, 2005.
33. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold Story of the United States. New
York: Gallery, 2012.
34. David Edwards, “Noam Chomsky: America’s Decline Is Real—and Increasingly
Self-Inflicted,” posted on AlterNet, February 14, 2012: available at http://www
.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/14/chomsky-the-american-decline-is-increasingly
-self-inflicted.
35. Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Hope. New York:
Metropolitan, 2010, p. 109.
36. Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.
New York: Metropolitan, 2008, pp. 2–4.
37. Tom Engelhardt, “Are We Going Down Like the Soviets?,” posted on AlterNet,
June 21, 2010: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/147261.
38. Bacevich, The Limits of Power, p. 6.
39. See note 37.
40. Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky on the Dangers of American Empire and
Why the US Continues to Be Bin Laden’s Best Ally,” posted on AlterNet, Sep-
tember 6, 2011: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/152308.
41. Andrew Bacevich, “Why We Can’t Win the ‘War on Terror,’” posted on Alter-
Net, October 10, 2010: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/148456.
42. Andrew Bacevich, “Uncle Sam, Global Gangster,” posted on TomDispatch,
February 19, 2012: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175505.
43. Terrence McNally and Andrew Bacevich, “America’s Empire and Endless Wars
Are Destroying the World, and Ruining Our Great Country,” AlterNet, Sep-
tember 6, 2010: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/148094.
44. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2000, pp. xiii–xiv. For critiques, see Gopal Balakrishnan, Debating
Empire. London: Verso, 2003.
45. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Global Capitalism and American Empire,” in
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds.), The New Imperial Challenge: The Socialist
Register 2004. London: Merlin, 2003, p. 4.
46. Ibid., p. 13.

Notes 231
47. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Theorizing American Empire,” in Amy Bar-
tholomew (ed.), Empire’s Law. London: Pluto, 2006, p. 21.
48. Leo Panitch, Martijn Konings, Sam Gindin, and Scott Aquanno, “The Political
Economy of the Subprime Crisis,” in Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings (eds.),
American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance, 2nd ed. Hound-
mills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. x.
49. Sam Gindin, “Empire’s Contradictions, Our Weaknesses: The Empire Stum-
bles On,” posted on A Socialist Project e-bulletin, 57, September 17, 2007.
50. Eliot A. Cohen, “History and the Hyperpower,” p. 50.
51. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006, pp. 24 and 31.
52. Michael Doyle, Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 19.
53. Maier, Among Empires, p. 7.
54. Ronald Gregor Suny, “Learning from Empire: Russia and the Soviet Union,”
in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore (eds.), Lessons of
Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power. New York: New Press, 2006,
p. 73.
55. Ibid., p. 74.
56. Alexander Motyl, Revolutions, Nations, Empires. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1999, p. 124.
57. Maier, Among Empires, p. 5.
58. Calhoun et al., Lessons of Empire, p. 2.
59. All this is in George Steinmetz, “Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperial-
ism in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Sociological Theory, 23(4), 2005,
339–67.
60. George Steinmetz, “Imperialism or Colonialism? From Windhoek to Wash-
ington, by Way of Basra,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W.
Moore (eds.), Lessons of Empire. New York: New Press, 2006, pp. 135–56.
61. George Steinmetz, “Return to Empire,” p. 340.
62. Doyle, Empires, p. 45.
63. Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome
to the United States. Cambridge: Polity, 2007, p. 5.
64. Ibid., p. 6.
65. See, for example, Deepak Lal’s In Defense of Empires. Washington, DC: AEI,
2004. Also Niall Ferguson, Colossus. New York: Penguin, 2004, pp. 169–99.
66. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 3.
67. Motyl, Revolutions, p. 128.
68. Go, Patterns of Empire, p. 207.
69. Münkler, Empires, pp. 68 and 72.
70. Ferguson, “Empires with Expiration Dates,” Foreign Policy, 156, September–
October, 2006, p. 48.
71. On the longevity of the Ottoman Empire, see Karen Barkey, Empire of Differ-
ence: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2008.

232 Notes
72. We will later learn to call this “The Silence of Pizarro” (see Chapters 4 and 7).
73. Colin Read, The Rise and Fall of an Economic Empire. New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2010, p. 200.
74. Ibid., p. 340.
75. Steinmitz, “Return to Empire,” p. 349.
76. Michael Cox, “The Bush Doctrine and the Lessons of History,” in David Held
and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi (eds.), American Power in the 21st Century.
Cambridge: Polity, 2004, pp. 33–34.
77. P. Eric Louw, Roots of the Pax Americana. Manchester, England: Manchester
University Press, 2010, p. 2.
78. On this, see Cox, “Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine,” p. 34, culmi-
nating in the statement, “If this was not imperialism by any other name, then
it is difficult to think what might be.”
80. Robert Gilpin calls this “The American System,” and describes its key char-
acteristics in his essay, “The Rise of American Hegemony,” in Patrick Karl
O’Brien and Armand Cleese (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and
the United States 1941–2000. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp. 165–82. See also
David Coates, Running the Country. Milton Keynes, England: Open University
Press, 1995, pp. 16–20. The case for treating this hegemony as imperial has
recently been put best by P. Eric Louw, Pax Americana, pp. 1–27.
81. This is what G. John Ikenberry called an “American hegemonic order with
‘liberal’ characteristics . . . built around multilateralism, alliance partnership,
strategic restraint, collective security, and institutional and ruled-based relation-
ships,” in his essay, “Liberal Hegemony or Empire? American Power in the Age
of Unipolarity,” in Held and Koenig-Archibugi (eds.), American Power in the
21st Century, p. 85. Ikenberry is here using the term “liberal” in its European
(i.e., free market) not American (i.e., progressive) sense.
82. Maier, Among Empires, p. 8. Maier has this hegemony going through three
stages, p. 274.
83. There is a large and important literature on the similarities and differences
between the British and the American periods of global dominance, and on
whether therefore there are lessons to be gleaned from one for the other. We
will come back to this question in Chapter 6. In the meantime, see David Lake,
“British and American Hegemony Compared: Lessons for the Current Era of
Decline,” in Jeffry A. Frieden and David Lake (eds.), International Political
Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth. London: Routledge, 2000;
and the essays gathered by O’Brien and Clesse, Two Hegemonies.
84. Cox, “Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine,” p. 586.
85. Chalmers Jonson, “737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire,” posted on Alter-
Net, February 18, 2007: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/47998/737
_u.s._military_bases_%3D_global_empire.
86. David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, “Introduction: Wither American
Power?,” in Held and Koenig-Archibugi (eds.), American Power in the 21st Cen-
tury, p. 3.

Notes 233
87. Doug Stokes, “The Heart of Empire? Theorising US Empire in an Era of Trans-
national Capitalism,” New Political Economy, 26(2), 2005, p. 224.
88. See, for example, Michael Cox, “The Empire’s Back”; Philip S Golub, “Imperial
Politics, Imperial Will and the Crisis of U.S. Hegemony,” Review of Interna-
tional Political Economy, 11(4), 2004, pp. 763–86; and Louw, Pax Americana,
pp. 239–64.
89. Bacevich, The Limits of Power, pp. 3–8.
90. Steinmitz, “Return to Empire,” p. 348. He immediately qualified his observa-
tion in this way: “But the United States has long perceived greater advantages
in informal and indirect imperialism as opposed to direct colonialism; Iraq was
released into ostensible self-sovereignty in mid-2004.”
91. There is now a vast literature on the foreign policy of George W. Bush, much
of it written in the midst of the policy fights that broke out on both sides of the
Atlantic and designed to shape the outcome of those fights. For my contribu-
tion, see David Coates and Joel Krieger (with Rhiannon Vickers), Blair’s War.
Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
92. Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the
Betrayal of the American Promise. New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 195–236.
93. On this, see Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, Terminator Planet: The First His-
tory of Drone Warfare, 2001–2050. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Plat-
form (May 24, 2012). On the cyberspace dimensions of this new American
military technology, see David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret
Wars and Surprising Use of American Power. New York: Crown, 2012.
94. Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. New
York: Metropolitan, 2010.
95. In evidence to the House Foreign Relations Committee, January 20, 2013:
available at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2013/01/203192.htm.
96. The case is also made in a book much favored by the president, Robert Kagan,
The World America Made. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Chapter 3
1. See Jean-Michel David, The Roman Conquest of Italy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
2. Harry Sidebottom, “Roman Imperialism: The Changed Outward Trajectory
of the Roman Empire,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 54(3), 2005, p.
315.
3. Ibid.
4. Timothy Parsons, The Rule of Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010,
p. 29.
5. Simon James, Rome and the Sword. London: Thames and Hudson, 2011, p.
282.
6. Sidebottom, “Roman Imperialism,” p. 329.
7. Ibid., p. 320.
8. On this, see Michael Doyle, Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1986, pp. 93–97; Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination

234 Notes
from Ancient Rome to the United States. Cambridge: Polity, 2007, pp. 47–48 and
70–73.
9. On this, see Sidebottom, “Roman Imperialism.”
10. M. I. Finley, “Manpower and the Fall of Rome,” in Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), The
Economic Decline of Empires. London: Methuen, 1970, p. 85.
11. Details in James, Rome and the Sword, pp. 261–63.
12. Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005,
p. 2.
13. Ramsey McMullen, “The Power of the Roman Empire,” Historia: Zeitschrift für
Alte Geschichte, 55(4), 2006, p. 471.
14. Donald Kagan (ed.), “Introduction,” The End of the Roman Empire. Lexington,
MA: DC Heath, 1992, p. 2.
15. Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the
Barbarians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 439.
16. “210 Reasons for the Decline of the Roman Empire,” University of Texas: avail-
able at http://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html.
17. Gibbon, quoted in Kagan, The End of the Roman Empire, p. 4.
18. Cited by John Matthews, “Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire: Causes
and Circumstances,” in Rosamund McKitterick and Ronald Quinault (eds.),
Edward Gibbon and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997,
p. 13.
19. Cited in Harold James, The Roman Predicament. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2006, p. 11.
20. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 443.
21. Cited in Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009, p. 18.
23. Ibid., p. 436.
24. Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell, p. 406.
25. Ibid., p. 414.
26. Ibid., p. 415.
28. Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America.
Boston: Mainer, 2007, p. 32.
29. Richard Mansfield Haywood, The Myth of Rome’s Fall. London: Alvin Redman,
1958, pp. 18–25.
30. Johan Galtung, Tore Heiestad, and Eric Rudeng, “On the Decline and Fall of
Empires: The Roman Empire and Western Imperialism Compared,” Review,
4(1), 1980, p. 95.
31. For details, see the classic study by A. H. Jones, The Later Roman Empire: 284–
602, Volume 2. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964, pp. 1053–58.
32. Haywood, The Myth of Rome’s Fall, pp. 102–3.

Notes 235
34. On this, see H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, pp. 196–264; and Martin
Albrow, Bureaucracy. London: Pall Mall, 1970.
35. Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire: AD 284–641. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007, p. 169.
36. Ibid., p. 55.
37. On this, see Adrian Goldsworthy, The Complete Roman Army. London: Thames
and Hudson, 2003, pp. 46–59.
38. Goldsworthy, The Complete Roman Army, p. 417.
39. Haywood, The Myth of Rome’s Fall, p. 120.
40. James, The Roman Predicament, p. 279.
41. Ibid., p. 280.
42. Ibid., pp. 283 and 285.
43. Ibid., p. 292.
44. Ibid., p. 285.
45. Aldo Schiavone, The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 181 and 171.
47. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso, 1974,
p. 56.
48. The details are in David, The Roman Conquest of Italy, pp. 94–95.
49. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, p. 60.
50. Parsons, The Rule of Empires, p. 31.
51. Ibid., p. 61.
52. Schiavone, The End of the Past, p. 38.
53. Peter Temin, “The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire,” Journal of Inter-
disciplinary History, 34(3), 2004, p. 526.
54. Schiavone, The End of the Past, pp. 122–23.
56. Galtung et al., “On the Decline and Fall of Empires,” p. 100.
57. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 453–54. The only exceptions to this
loss of legal rights linked to class position were soldiers and veterans because of
the vital role the army played in maintaining internal order and external defense
(pp. 461–62 for details).
58. Schiavone, The End of the Past, pp. 131–46, 140, and 197.
60. Peter Temin, “The Economy of the Early Roman Empire,” Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 20(1), 2006, p. 134.
61. Galtung et al., “On the Decline and Fall of Empires,” p. 102. On the rural
exodus, see David, The Roman Conquest of Italy, p. 95.
62. Temin, “The Economy,” p. 135.

236 Notes
65. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, pp. 81–82. Also Schiavone, The
End of the Past, pp. 99–107 and 185–203.
66. Charles S. Maier, Among Empires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006, p. 272–73.
69. On this, see McMullen, “The Power of the Roman Empire,” p. 476. For a
discussion of the reliability of this number, see Averil Cameron, The Medieval
World in Late Antiquity AD 395–600. New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 98.
70. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, p. 35.
72. Schiavone, The End of the Past, pp. 198–99.
73. Aurelio Barboni, “The Economic Problems of the Roman Empire at the Time
of Its Decline,” in Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), The Economic Decline of Empires.
London: Methuen, 1970, p. 55.
75. See James, The Roman Predicament, pp. 287 and 289.
76. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle, pp. 502–3.
77. Haywood, The Myth of Rome’s Fall, p. 109. On how modern societies fully
mobilize for war but ancient societies could not (because of primitive technol-
ogy and low standards of living), see Finley, “Manpower and the Fall of Rome,”
p. 88.
78. Barboni, “The Economic Problems,” p. 73.
79. Ibid., pp. 81–83.
80. It was not always voluntary, hence the Social War in the early part of the last
century BC. On this, see David, The Roman Conquest of Italy, pp. 140–56.
84. Finley, “Manpower and the Fall of Rome,” p. 89.
85. Details in Schiavone, The End of the Past, pp. 124–37.
87. Barboni, “The Economic Problems,” pp. 48–49.
88. Peter Heather challenges this interpretation, putting greater emphasis on the
loss of territory (and therefore taxation) to barbarians in the last decades of the
western empire. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 341.
89. Barboni, “The Economic Problems,” p. 52.
91. “Even during the first century of the Empire, when the emperors were trying
to rule all the people with justice, there seems to have been no idea of relin-
quishing the privileged position of Italy as the mistress of the Imperial system,
dominating the subject provinces and receiving tribute from them.” Haywood,
The Myth of Rome’s Fall, p. 26.

Notes 237
93. Amy Chua, Day of Empire. New York: Doubleday, 2007, pp. 51–52.
94. Chua, Day of Empire, pp. 56–57.
95. Ibid., p. 149.
96. Vaclav Smil, Why America Is Not a New Rome. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2010, pp. 54, 29, 41, 104, 105, 146, and 158, respectively.
98. Kimberley Kagan, “Hegemony, Not Empire,” The Weekly Standard, May 6,
2002: available at http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/
000/000/001/183amzus.asp.
99. Robert Cox, “Beyond Empire and Terror: Critical Reflections on the Political
Economy of World Order,” New Political Economy, 9(3), 2004, p. 311.
100. Thomas Madden, Empires of Trust. New York: Dutton, 2008, p. 295.
106. Murphy, Are We Rome?, pp. 17–21. This list is based on Smil, Why America Is
Not a New Rome, p. 24.
107. Murphy, Are We Rome?, book cover.
108. Steven Strauss, “Is Our Republic Ending? 8 Striking Parallels between the Fall
of Rome and the U.S.,” posted on AlterNet, December 26, 2012: available
at http://www.alternet.org/economy/our-republic-ending-8-striking-parallels
-between-fall-rome-and-us.
109. Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York:
Metropolitan, 2006, pp. 55 and 279.
110. Paul Kennedy, “Rome Offers Obama Lesson in Limits,” The Financial Times,
December 30, 2009: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cb49b92a
-f4af-11de-9cba-00144feab49a.html.
111. Galtung et al., “On the Decline and Fall of Empires.”
112. See Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture. New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2000, pp. 91–90.
113. Niall Ferguson, Colossus. New York: Penguin, 2004, p. viii.
114. Madden, Empires of Trust; and Chua, Day of Empire.
116. Martijn Konings, “American Finance and Empire in Historical Perspective,”
in Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings (eds.), American Empire and the Political
Economy of Global Finance. Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008,
pp. 67–68.
117. Murphy, Are We Rome?, p. 1.
118. “Rome lived on its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only
true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia
Road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks
and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the
grain of Africa and Egypt—and the carts brought nothing out but loads of

238 Notes
dung. That was their return cargo.” Winwoode Reade, quoted in Clyde Pre-
stowitz, The Betrayal of American Prosperity. New York: Free Press, 2010, p. 1.
Chapter 4
1. The details are in John Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716. New York: Penguin,
2002, pp. 135–36 and 138–39.
3. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 62.
4. The story has recently been retold in Hugh Thomas, The Golden Empire: Spain,
Charles V, and the Creation of America. New York: Random House, 2010. The
Philippines (Spain’s most distant colony) was added in 1565.
5. Katherine Deagan, “Dynamics of Imperial Adjustment in Spanish America:
Ideology and Social Integration,” in Susan Alcock, Terence D’Altroy, Kathleen
Morrison, and Carla Sinopoli (eds.), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 179.
6. Timothy Parsons, The Rule of Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010,
p. 116.
7. Deagan, “Dynamics of Imperial Adjustment,” p. 179.
8. The details are in Stephen R. Bown, 1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval
Spain Divided the World in Half. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2011.
9. Henry Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?,” Past and Pres-
ent, 81, November, 1978, p. 25; and Dennis O. Flynn, “Fiscal Crisis and the
Decline of Spain (Castile),” Journal of Economic History, 42, March, 1982, p.
144.
11. Frederick Cooper, “Empires Multiplied: A Review Essay,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 46(2), 2004, p. 264.
12. Michael Doyle, Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 118.
13. Ibid.
14. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 62–63.
15. Ibid., p. 97.
16. Ibid.
to the United States. Cambridge: Polity, 2007, pp. 35–36 and 74.
18. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1973, p. 65.
19. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso, 1974, p. 74.
20. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. London: Unwin Hyman,
1988, p. 44.
21. When Spain and France clashed in Italy in the 1520s, no army was bigger than
30,000 men. A century later, the Spanish armies commanded by Philip IV
contained 300,000 men. Ibid., p. 45.

Notes 239
22. Kamen, “The Decline of Spain,” p. 511.

23. Anderson, Lineages, p. 62.
24. Davis, The Rise, p. 67.
25. Flynn, “Fiscal Crisis,” p. 146 for details.
26. Ibid.
29. Kennedy, The Rise, p. 43.
30. The distinction is again Elliott’s, Imperial Spain, p. 211.
31. Ibid., p. 406.
32. Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 206–7 for all the material in this paragraph.
33. Ibid., p. 207.
35. Kamen, “The Decline of Spain,” pp. 508–9.
37. There were apparently as many as 45 mutinies in the Spanish armies in the
Netherlands between 1572 and 1607, all triggered by the inability of the Span-
ish crown to pay them. This is in Charles Mann, 1493. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2011, p. 28.
38. Helen Thompson, “Debt and Power: The United States’ Debt in Historical
Perspective,” International Relations, 21(3), 2007, p. 310.
39. Yedor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 2007, p. 43.
41. Cited in Keith Thomas, “The Empires of Elliott,” The New York Review of
Books, February 21, 2013, p. 30.
42. John H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” Past and Present, 20, November, 1961,
p. 60.
45. On this, see Flynn, “Fiscal Crisis,” pp. 139–47.
46. Jaime Vicens Vives, “The Decline of Spain in the Seventeenth Century,” in
Carlo Cipolla (ed.), The Economic Decline of Empires. London: Methuen, 1970,
p. 121.
48. “The present picture of the Castilian population . . . suggests a rapid increase
slackening off towards the end of the sixteenth century, and then a catastrophic
loss at the very end of the century, followed by a further loss of 90,000 inhabit-
ants through the expulsion of the Moriscos.” Elliott, “The Decline,” p. 60.
50. Flynn, “Fiscal Crisis,” p. 145.
51. Ibid., p. 142.
52. Ibid., p. 141.
53. Details are in Elliott, “The Decline,” p. 68.

240 Notes
55. Vives, “The Decline of Spain,” p. 145.

56. Data in ibid., pp. 137–38.
58. Data in Vives, “The Decline of Spain,” pp. 139–40.
59. Earl J. Hamilton, “Revisions in Economic History: VIII.—The Decline of
Spain,” The Economic History Review, 8(2), 1938, pp. 168–79.
61. The expulsion of the Jews in four months in 1492 saw the departure of maybe
150,000 of the 200,000 practicing Jews and previous conversos living in the
states ruled by Isabella and Ferdinand—many of them “men of standing in
the Church, the administration and in the world of finance.” Elliott, Imperial
Spain, p. 109.
62. Ibid., p. 216.
63. Ibid., p. 110.
64. Kamen, “The Decline of Spain,” p. 497.
65. Tzevtan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. New
York: HarperPerennial, 1984, p. 49.
67. See Gabriel Paquette, “Historical Reviews: The Dissolution of the Spanish
Atlantic Monarchy,” The Historical Journal, 52(1), 2009, pp. 175–212.
69. Ibid., p. 121.
70. This logic need not delay us long here, because whatever else the United States
may or may not have, it does not have colonies far from its shores populated
by émigré Americans. Modern empires of the colonial kind invariably did have
such settlers—men and women whose self-preservation in the colonial setting
invariably required that the structure of empire remain firmly intact. To the
degree that ruling groups in the “mother country” eventually found the main-
tenance of colonial control beyond them for whatever reason, and so no lon-
ger in their interests, the relations between colonial settlers and the imperial
government invariably soured. The starkest examples of that souring in recent
times include the increasing tensions between Northern Ireland Protestants
and London-based governments after the outbreak of The Troubles in 1968,
between white settlers and London in what is now Zimbabwe but was then
Southern Rhodesia, and between Algerian settlers and the de Gaulle govern-
ment under the Fifth French Republic in 1958. The first generated Protestant
paramilitary strikes against the IRA, the second generated a Unilateral Decla-
ration of Independence by white settlers under Ian Smith, and the third the
Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) attempts at de Gaulle’s assassination.
71. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006, p. 383.
72. The details are in Paquette, “Historical Reviews,” pp. 183–87.
74. William S. Maltby, The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. Houndmills, Eng-
land: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 2.
75. Hamilton, “Revisions in Economic History: VIII,” p. 179.

Notes 241
Chapter 5
1. For a similar use of the British experience to deepen understanding of the Rus-
sian Empire, see Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 89–127.
2. In September 2014, the union narrowly survived a referendum on Scottish
independence: 55 percent of Scottish voters preferring to stay in the United
Kingdom, but 45 percent voting to leave.
3. The empire expanded between 1815 and 1865, largely unnoticed, “at an annual
average pace of about 100,000 square miles.” Kennedy, The Rise, p. 155.
1988, p. 226.
6. “During the imperial century [1815–1914] Great Britain added approximately
10 million square miles of territory and roughly 400 million people to its over-
seas empire.” Timothy Parsons, The British Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A
World History Perspective. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, p. 3.
7. Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006, p. 15.
8. Ibid.
9. John Darwin, The Empire Project. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009, p. 58.
10. Ibid., p. 1.
11. The claim was always false, of course, since it was initially made quite correctly
about the Spanish Empire.
13. David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the
Twentieth Century. London: Longman, 1991, p. 24.
14. Ibid., p. 29.
15. Cited in “The British Empire: Pondering the Past,” The Economist, September
15, 2012.
16. Ibid.
17. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction
1914–90. London: Longman, 1993, p. 3.
18. Perry Anderson. “Figures of Descent,” New Left Review, 161, January/February,
1987, p. 32.
19. Darwin, Empire Project, p. 37.
20. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 305.
21. Darwin, Empire Project, p. 10.
22. Andrew Gamble, “Hegemony and Decline: Britain and the United States,” in
Patrick O’Brien and Armand Cleese (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–
1914 and the United States 1941–2001. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, p. 131.
23. Y. Cassis, “British Finance: Success and Controversy,” in J. J. van Helten and
Y. Cassis (eds.), Capitalism in a Mature Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,
1990, p. 1.

242 Notes
24. There is a list in Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British
World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic, 2004, p. xxv.
25. On this, see Francois Crouzet, “Mercantilism, War and the Rise of British
Power,” in O’Brien and Cleese, Two Hegemonies, pp. 67–85.
27. Anderson, “Figures of Descent,” p. 37. The other two were that “it played no
role in the development of the basic grid of physical communication in the
new age, the railway system” and “it deferred any public education long after
universal elementary education had become established elsewhere.”
28. Post-1858, it was an army of 700,000 troops—one-third British, two-thirds
Indian. John Darwin, “Britain’s Empires,” in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British
Empire: Themes and Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, p. 12.
29. Parsons, Rule of Empires, p. 221.
31. Patrick O’Brien, “Imperialism and the Rise and Decline of the British Econ-
omy 1688–1989,” New Left Review, 238, November–December, 1999, p. 15.
32. For an overview of the British Empire at its peak, see Alfred W. McCoy, “Fatal
Florescence,” in Alfred W. McCoy, Joseph M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson
(eds.), Endless Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, pp. 8–9.
33. Crouzet, “Mercantilism,” p. 68.
35. Ibid., pp. 258–59.
36. Patrick O’Brien, “The Pax Britannica and American Hegemony: Precedent,
Antecedent, or Just Another History?,” in O’Brien and Cleese, Two Hegemo-
nies, p. 15.
38. Darwin, “Britain’s Empires,” p. 19.
39. O’Brien, “The Pax Britannica,” p. 53.
40. Reynolds, Britannia Overruled, p. 33.
41. This is the actual title of John Gallagher’s influential essay, published under that
title by Cambridge University Press in 1982.
42. Andrew Gamble, Britain in Decline, 4th ed. London: Macmillan, 1994, p. xiv.
43. Reynolds, Britannia Overruled, p. 11.
44. BIS Economics Paper 10b, Manufacturing in the UK: Supplementary Analysis,
December 2010, p. 2.
45. Data in David Coates, Models of Capitalism: Growth & Stagnation in the Mod-
ern Era. Cambridge: Polity, 2000, p. 3.
46. Eurostat news release 186/2011, December 2011.
47. Gamble, Britain in Decline, p. xviii.
48. Corelli Barnett, The Lost Victory. London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 7.
49. Colin Read, The Rise and Fall of an Economic Empire: With Lessons for Aspiring
Economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 200.
50. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1962, p. 363.

Notes 243
51. Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick, The Decline of the British Economy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 7.
52. “During the first decades of the twentieth century, proprietary capitalism gave
way to managerial capitalism as the dominant engine of industrial develop-
ment . . . Proprietary capitalism proved inadequate to deal with the technologi-
cal complexities and the attendant high fixed costs of the new industrial era.”
William Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 27.
53. Details in Lazonick, Business Organization, pp. 45–46.
54. Alex Callinicos, “Exception or Symptom? The British Crisis and the World
System,” New Left Review, 169, May/June, 1988, p. 103.
55. Anderson, “Figures of Descent,” p. 42.
56. W. B. Walker, “Britain’s Industrial Performance 1850–1950: A Failure to
Adjust,” in Keith Pavitt (ed.), Technological Innovation and British Economic
Performance. London: Macmillan, 1980, p. 27.
57. Robert Boyer, “Capital-Labour Relations in OECD Countries: From Fordist
Golden Age to Contrasted National Trajectories,” in J. Schor (ed.), Capital, the
State and Labour. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1996; and Ian Clark, “Employment
Resistance to the Fordist Production Process: ‘Flawed Fordism’ in Post-War
Britain,” Contemporary British History, 15(2), 2001, pp. 28–52.
58. For the distinction between positive and negative deindustrialization, see David
Coates, The Question of UK Decline. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf,
1994, pp. 10–12; and Bob Rowthorn, “Deindustrialization in Britain,” in
R. Martin and B. Rowthorn (eds.), The Geography of Deindustrialization. Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1986, p. 23.
59. Bob Rowthorn and John Wells, De-industrialization and Foreign Trade. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 91.
60. Although the general adherence to the gold standard in the late nineteenth
century was more accidental than planned, that to the dollar between 1944 and
1971 was the reverse! (O’Brien, “The Pax Britannica,” p. 24).
61. Bob Jessop, “The Transformation of the State in Post-War Britain,” in R. Scase
(ed.), The State in Western Capitalism. London: Croom Helm, 1997, p. 30.
63. Sam Aaronovitch and Ron Smith (with Jean Gardiner and Roger Moore), The
Political Economy of British Capitalism. London: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 61.
64. David Coates, “The Character and Origin of Britain’s Economic Decline,” in
David Coates and John Hillard (eds.), The Economic Decline of Modern Britain:
The Debate between Left and Right. Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986, pp. 270–71.
See also Coates, The Question of UK Decline, pp. 153–62.
65. Anderson, “Figures of Descent,” p. 42. “In the century between 1815 and
1914, Britain was a net capital exporter in all but three years (1840, 1842 and
1847).” Hans Overbeek, Global Capitalism and National Decline: The Thatcher
Decade in Perspective. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, p. 40.
66. Anderson, “Figures of Descent,” p. 34.
67. Ibid., p. 57.

244 Notes
68. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914. London:

Longman, 1993, p. 44 (also in their Crisis and Deconstruction, p. 298).
69. Cain and Hopkins, Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914, pp. 15, 23, 34,
45–46.
70. Porter, Empire and Superempire, pp. 50–52.
71. David Currie and Ron Smith, “Economic Trends and Crisis in the UK Econ-
omy,” in Coates and Hillard (eds.), Economic Decline, p. 226.
72. The term “liberal” is used here in its European (not American) sense. To be
liberal is to follow Adam Smith, who disliked large government and favored
deregulated market forces. The United States uses the term to mean “progres-
sive” and understands it to be exactly the reverse of a European “liberal.”
73. David Edgerton, “Liberal Militarism and the British State,” New Left Review,
185, January/February, 1991, p. 141.
74. See Andrew Thompson, “Empire and the British State,” in S. E. Stockwell
(ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2008, pp. 42–43.
75. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–
1783. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 40.
76. Ibid., p. 36.
77. Details in Reynolds, Britannia Overruled, p. 11.
78. Darwin, “Britain’s Empires,” p. 257.
79. Sir John Fisher, quoted in Reynolds, “Britain’s Empires,” p. 8.
80. Quoted in John Hobson, “Two Hegemonies or One: A Historical-Sociological
Critique of Hegemonic Stabilisation Theory,” in O’Brien and Cleese, Two
Hegemonies, p. 311.
81. David Edgerton, Warfare State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006,
p. 23.
82. Ibid., p. 66.
83. Malcolm Chalmers, Paying for Defense. London: Pluto, 1985, p. 1.
84. John Lovering, “Military Expenditure and the Restructuring of Capitalism:
The Military Industry in Britain,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 14(4),
1990, p. 455.
85. Edgerton, Warfare State, p. 70.
87. Details in Dan Milmo, “BAE Revenues Hit by Drop in US and UK Demand,”
The Guardian, August 2, 2012: available at http://www.theguardian.com/
business/2012/aug/02/bae-revenues-fall-uk-us.
88. The term is Edgerton’s, Warfare State.
89. Kiran Stacey, “UK Defence Spending to Fall below NATO Target, Says Research,”
The Financial Times, June 15, 2014: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/
0/81907de8-f089-11e3-8f3d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz35NQ69pVB. Also
Ron Smith, Military Economics: The Interaction of Power and Money. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 103.
90. Edgerton, “Liberal Militarism,” p. 164.

Notes 245
91. Tim Radford, “Military Dominates UK Science, Says Report,” The Guardian,
January 20, 2005.
92. Edgerton, “Liberal Militarism,” p. 164.
93. David Coates, Models of Capitalism, pp. 199–201; Smith, Military Economics,
pp. 159–71; Lovering, “Military Expenditure,” p. 453.
94. Stephen Blank, “The Impact of Foreign Economic Policy,” in Coates and Hill-
ard (eds.), Economic Decline, p. 207.
95. On this, see Simon Lee, “British Culture and Economic Decline,” in Andrew
Cox et al., The Political Economy of Modern Britain. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,
1997, pp. 98–100.
96. On this, see Simon Lee, “Industrial Policy and British Decline,” in ibid., pp.
108–65.
97. David Edgerton, “Liberal Militarism,” pp. 140–41.
98. Ben Fine and Lawrence Harris, The Peculiarities of the British Economy. Lon-
don: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985, p. 243.
99. For a strident critique of what he termed “illusions of grandeur,” see Sidney
Pollard, The Wasting of the British Economy, pp. 135–40 and 185–86.
100. Corelli Barnett, “British Economic Decline, 1900–1980,” in O’Brien and
Cleese, Two Hegemonies, pp. 144–45.
101. Ibid., pp. 143–44.
102. Gamble, “Hegemony and Decline,” p. 139.
103. Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis. New York: Henry Holt, 2006, pp. 79 and 87.
104. This is in Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 120.
105. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 26.
106. See David Anderson, “Atoning for the Sins of Empire,” The New York Times,
June 12, 2013: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/opinion/
atoning-for-the-sins-of-empire.html?_r=0. And more generally, see Richard
Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt. London: Verso, 2011.
107. Coates and Krieger (with Vickers), Blair’s War. Cambridge: Polity, 2004, pp.
92–129.
108. See David Coates, “Seen from Below: Labor in the Story of Capitalism,” http://
www.davidcoates.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Class-forces-doc.docx.
109. See Simon Hoggart, “Labour Sabres Still Rattle Loudest for the Falk-
lands, 30 Years On,” The Guardian, February 20, 2012: available at http://
www.theguardian .com /politics /2012 /feb /20 /falklands -defence -hammond
-commons.
110. Corelli Barnett, The Audit of War. New York: Macmillan, 1986; and The Col-
lapse of British Power. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1994, pp. 19–68.
111. Martin J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–
1980. New York: Penguin, 1985, p. 157.
112. David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society. London: Cape, 1988, p. 8.
113. Chalmers Johnson for one—while recognizing the bloody carnage associated
with the reluctant British retreat from empire in both South Asia and then

246 Notes
Africa—still gave the British credit for what he termed “choosing democracy
over imperialism.” Johnson, Nemesis, pp. 279.
114. For the Kenya story, see Parsons, Rule of Empires, pp. 289–350.
115. Ibid., p. 345.
116. Porter, Empire and Superempire, pp. 85–86.
117. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. London, 1952,
chapter 1.
Chapter 6
1. For the debate on whether the Soviet period is best understood as one of
“empire building” or “nation building,” see Ronald Grigor Suny, “Learning
from Empire: Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Coo-
per, and Kevin W. Moore (eds.), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and Ameri-
can Power. New York: New Press, 2006, pp. 85–91.
2. William C. Wohlforth, “The Russian-Soviet Empire: A Test of Neo-realism,” in
Michael Cox, Tim Dunne, and Ken Booth (eds.), Empires, Systems and States.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 213.
3. On this, see Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 224.
4. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 191. It is worth remembering that
“by the early twentieth century there were far more Muslims in the Russian
than the Ottoman empire.” (ibid., p. 355) A similar tension marked the end of
the Soviet Empire (on this, see Kennedy, The Rise, p. 502).
5. Brendan Sims, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present. New
York: Basic, 2013, p. 175.
6. Lieven, Empire, p. 262.
7. Sims, Europe, p. 179.
1988, p. 170.
10. Ibid.
11. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2008, p. 400.
12. See Ronald Grigor Suny, “Learning from Empire: Russia and the Soviet
Union,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore (eds.), Les-
sons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power. New York: New Press,
2006, p. 86; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, p. 396.
13. Darwin, After Tamerlane, pp. 124–25.
14. Details in Tom Kemp, Industrialization in Nineteenth Century Europe. London:
Longman, 1969, pp. 119–57.
16. Ibid., pp. 269–70.

Notes 247
18. On this, see Lieven, Empire, pp. 213–17.

19. Cited in Lieven, Empire, p. 220.
21. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1979, p. 91.
23. Kemp, Industrialization, p. 124.
24. Ibid., p. 137.
25. Ibid., p. 156.
26. See Alec Nove, “The Fall of Empires—Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Geir
Lundestad (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press,
1994, pp. 129–32.
27. For the details on Russia’s relative economic and military backwardness in 1914,
see Kennedy, The Rise, pp. 232–42.
28. Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 108–74.
29. Cited in Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, pp. 140 and 143.
30. Suny, “Learning from Empire,” p. 87.
31. Vladislav M. Zubok, “The Collapse of the Soviet Union: Leadership, Elites,
and Legitimacy,” in Lundestad, Fall of Great Powers, p. 158.
32. Suny, “Learning from Empire,” p. 86.
33. This is the title of the famous work by Milovan Dilas, published in 1957, which
was so significant at the time because of his position in the Yugoslav Commu-
nist Party.
34. See Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–
1956. New York: Doubleday, 2012.
35. Defense spending by the USSR increased from $722 million to $5429 million
between 1930 and 1938, a rate of increase outmatched only by Germany itself
(Kennedy, The Rise, p. 296).
36. On the scale and costs of all this, see Kennedy, The Rise, pp. 322–23.
37. Ibid., p. 363.
38. Ibid., p. 384.
39. Ron Smith, Military Economics: The Interaction of Power and Money. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 93.
41. Ibid., pp. 498–99.
42. Leon Trotsky, 1905. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 52.
43. Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 2007, p. 83.
44. Ibid., p. 89.
45. For the economic dilemmas faced by the Bolsheviks prior to the 1930s, see
Richard B. Day, Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973.
46. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 61.

248 Notes
47. On this, see Gaidar, Collapse, p. 77.

48. Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, p. 17.
49. Ibid., p. 40.
50. Gaidar, Collapse, pp. 95–96.
53. Herman Münckler, Empires. Cambridge: Polity, 2005, p. 3.
54. See Applebaum, Iron Curtain, for the brutality.
55. Details in Nove, “Fall of Empires,” p. 137.
57. Nove, “Fall of Empires,” p. 138.
59. Ibid., p. 178.
60. Zubok, “Collapse of the Soviet Union,” p. 158.
61. Nove, “Fall of Empires,” p. 142.
62. Brian Landers, Empires Apart: A History of American and Russian Imperialism.
New York: Pegasus, 2010.
64. Ibid., p. 318.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., p. 319.
67. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
New York: Metropolitan, 2000, p. 219.
Chapter 7
1. As cited earlier: Michael Doyle, Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1986; John Darwin, After Tamberlane. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000; Charles
Maier, Among Empires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; Her-
man Münckler, Empires. Cambridge: Polity, 2005; Jane Burbank and Frederick
Cooper, Empires in World History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2010.
2. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 311.
3. Carlo Cipolla (ed.), The Economic Decline of Empires. London: Methuen, 1970,
p. 1.
Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 207–45.
5. Ibid., p. 236.
6. Quoted in Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007, p. 7.
7. N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Book II, Chapter 4.
8. Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000, p. 315.
9. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Learning from Empire: Russia and the Soviet Union,”
in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore (eds.), Lessons of

Notes 249
Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power. New York: New Press, 2006, pp.
73 and 79.
10. Cited in Timothy Parsons, The Rule of Empires. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010, p. 349.
11. Adrian Goldsworthy, The Complete Roman Army. London: Thames and Hud-
son, 2003, pp. 418 and 423.
12. Cipolla, Economic Decline, p. 11.
13. Ibid.
14. Quoted in Malcolm Chalmers, Paying for Defence: Military Spending and British
Decline. London: Pluto, 1985, p. 13.
15. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, pp. 11–12.
16. Niall Ferguson is probably the best example of this, emphasizing the positive
role of the British Empire. On this, see Niall Ferguson, Empire. New York:
Basic, 2004.
17. For this argument applied to the British Empire, see John Darwin, Unfin-
ished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012,
pp. 401–2.
18. Colin Read, The Rise and Fall of an Economic Empire: With Lessons for Aspiring
Economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 200.
Chapter 8
1. Richard Sylla, quoted in Go, Patterns of Empire, pp. 35–36.
2. Julian Go, “Imperial Power and Its Limits: America’s Colonial Empire in the
Early Twentieth Century,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W.
Moore (eds.), Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power. New
York: New Press, 2006, p. 204.
3. “Americans caused the death of an estimated 250,000 Filipinos in their last
true imperial adventure in the early twentieth century without causing much
of an outcry.” Michael Mann, “The First Failed Empire of This Century,” in
David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi (eds.), American Power in the 21st
Century. Cambridge: Polity, 2004, p. 74.
4. Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2012, pp. 4 and 275–76.
5. On this, see Andrew Gamble, “Hegemony and Decline: Britain and the United
States,” in Patrick O’Brien and Armand Cleese (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Brit-
ain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002,
pp. 127–40.
6. Quoted in Brett Reilly, “Entangled Empires: Europe’s Decolonization and
Eisenhower’s System of Subordinate Elites,” in Alfred W. McCoy, Joseph M.
Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson (eds.), Endless Empire. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2012, p. 358.
7. The case against any simple reading of inevitable American decline off its Brit-
ish predecessor is most powerfully put by David Lake in “British and American
Hegemony Compared: Lessons for the Current Era of Decline,” in Jeffry A.

250 Notes
Frieden and David Lake (eds.), International Political Economy Perspectives on

Global Power and Wealth. New York: St Martin’s, 2000, pp. 106–22.
8. For the Pax America as the external face of a fragile, postwar social structure of
accumulation that included an internal capital-labor accord, see David Gor-
don, “Chickens Coming Home to Roost,” in M. Bernstein and D. E. Adler
(eds.), Understanding American Economic Decline. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1994, pp. 34–76.
10. Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006, p. 162.
11. Jack Snyder, “Imperial Temptations,” The National Interest, Spring 2003,
pp. 29–40.
12. Sheldon Pollock, “Empire and Imitation,” in Calhoun et al., Lessons of Empire,
p. 186.
13. Snyder lists eight such myths: “the most general of the myths of Empire is
that the attacker has an inherent advantage . . . Empires also become over-
stretched when they view their enemies as paper tigers, capable of becoming
fiercely threatening if appeased, but easily crumpled by a resolute attack . . .
Another myth of Empire is that states tend to jump on the bandwagon with
threatening or forceful powers . . . A closely related myth is the big stick theory
of making friends by threatening them . . . Another common myth of empire
is the famous domino theory. According to this conception, small setbacks at
the periphery of the empire will tend to snowball into an unstoppable chain of
defeats that will ultimately threaten the imperial core . . . Most of the central
myths of empire focus on a comparison of the alleged costs of offensive versus
defensive strategies. In addition, myths that exaggerate the benefits of imperial
expansion sometimes play an important role in strategic debates . . . The final
myth of empire is that in strategy there are no trade-offs.” Snyder, “Imperial
Temptations.”
14. On this, see Go, Patterns of Empire, p. 207. His alternative formulation is hege-
monic ascendancy, maturity and decline. p. xx.
15. The Congressional Budget Office, quoted in Mattea Kramer, “A People’s
Budget for Tax Day,” posted on TomDispatch, April 11, 2013: available at
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175686/tomgram%3A_mattea_kramer,_a
_people%27s_budget_for_tax_day.
16. David Gilson, “Don’t Tread on Me,” Mother Jones, January/February 2014,
p. 27.
17. David Coates, Models of Capitalism: Growth & Stagnation in the Modern Era.
Cambridge: Polity, 2000. pp. 201–10.
18. David Edgerton, “Liberal Militarism and the British State,” New Left Review,
185, 1991.
19. Simon Reich, The Fruits of Fascism, cited in Models of Capitalism, p. 204.
20. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Pelier, The U.S. Employment Effects of Mili-
tary and Domestic Spending Priorities: 2011 Update. PERI, University of

Notes 251
Massachusetts, Amherst, December 2011, p. 3: available at http://www.peri

.umass.edu/236/hash/0b0ce6af7ff999b11745825d80aca0b8/publication/489.
21. Aaron B. O’Connell, “The Permanent Militarization of America,” The New
York Times, November 5, 2012: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/
05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html?pagewanted=all.
22. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Pelier, “Benefits of a Slimmer Pentagon,” The
Nation, May 28, 2012: available at http://www.thenation.com/authors/robert
-pollin.
23. On this, see Rebecca U. Thorpe, The American Warfare State: The Domestic
Politics of Military Spending. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
24. The quote and the company data in detail are in David Vine, “Baseworld Profi-
teering,” posted on TomDispatch.com, May 14, 2013: available at http://www
.tomdispatch.com/blog/175699.
25. Darren Samuelsohn and Anna Palmer, “Defense Industry Finds Few Old
Friends on Hill,” posted on Politico, February 25, 2013: available at http://
www.politico.com/story/2013/02/defense-industry-finds-few-old-friends-on
-hill-87991.html.
26. Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis. New York: Henry Holt, 2006, p. 9.
27. O’Connell, “Permanent Militarization.”
28. Tom Engelhardt, “The Pentagon as a Global NRA,” posted on TomDispatch
.com January 13, 2013: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/
175637.
29. The US army remains by far the largest developer of labor skills in the entire
American economy.
30. Alfred W. McCoy, “Fatal Florescence,” in Alfred W. McCoy, Joseph M. Fradera,
and Stephen Jacobson (eds.), Endless Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2012, p. 27. On the murky details, see pp. 26–31.
31. Robert Scheer, “America’s Global Torture Network,” posted on The Huffing-
ton Post, February 8, 2013: available at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/
americas_global_torture_network_20130207.
32. Open Society Justice Initiative, Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention
and Extraordinary Rendition, February 22, 2012: available at http://www
.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention
-and-extraordinary-rendition.
33. Nick Turse, “The Hidden History of Water Torture,” posted on TomDispatch
.com February 24, 2013: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/
175653.
34. Porter, Empire and Superempire, p. 120.
35. Department of Justice White Paper, Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed
against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an
Associated Force, February 2013: available at http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/
national -security /department -of -justice -white -paper -reveals -united -states
-position-on-lethal-force-operations-targeting-u-s-citizens-abroad.
Broadway, 2013, p. 246.

252 Notes
37. “Search Results: Iraq,” FreedomHouse: available at http://www.freedomhouse

.org/search/Iraq.
38. Mehdi Hasan, “The Hawks Were Wrong: Iraq Is Worse off Now Saddam Is
Gone—But at What Cost?,” The New Statesman, February 14, 2013: available
at http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/hawkswere-wrong-iraq
-worse-now. See also Matt Bradley and Ali A. Nabhan, “Violence Reverses Gains
In Iraq,” The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2013: available at http://online.wsj
.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304682504579153773333835510.
39. Gideon Rachman, “The West Has Lost in Afghanistan,” The Financial Times,
March 26, 2012: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ae13198c-74e1
-11e1-ab8b-00144feab49a.html#axzz2c8QT3bMX.
40. See Scott Shane, “Debate Aside, Number of Drone Strikes Drops Sharply,” The
New York Times, May 21, 2013: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/
22/us/debate-aside-drone-strikes-drop-sharply.html?pagewanted=all.
41. James Meikle, “Jimmy Carter Savages US Foreign Policy over Drone Strikes,”
The Guardian, June 26, 2012: available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/
2012/jun/25/jimmy-carter-drone-strikes.
42. Ernesto Londoño, “Drones Cause ‘Growing Hatred of America,’ Bipartisan
Senate Panel Told,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2013: available at http://
articles .washingtonpost .com /2013 -04 -23 /world /38764755 _1 _drone -strike
-drone-program-yemenis.
43. Fred Banfman, “Obama’s Secret Wars: How Our Shady Counter-Terrorism
Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism,” posted on AlterNet, July 13,
2013: available at http://www.alternet.org/story/151596/obama%27s_secret
_wars%3A_how_our_shady_counter-terrorism_policies_are_more_dangerous
_than_terrorism.
44. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
New York: Metropolitan, 2000, p. xvi.
45. For details, see Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones,
Spires, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare. New York: Haymarket,
2012.
46. For details, see Juan Cole, “The Age of American Shadow Power,” The Nation,
April 30, 2012: available at http://www.thenation.com/article/167353/age
-american-shadow-power.
to the United States. Cambridge: Polity, 2007, p. 159.
48. Robert Cox, “Beyond Empire and Terror: Critical Reflections on the Political
Economy of World Order,” New Political Economy, 9(3), 2004, pp. 311–12.
49. For details, see Simon Reich, The Fruits of Fascism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1990, pp. 174–75.
50. Sam Gindin, “Empire’s Contradictions, Our Weaknesses; The Empire Stum-
bles On,” The Bullet, no. 57, September 17, 2007: available at http://mrzine
.monthlyreview.org/2007/gindin220907p.html.
51. Doug Stokes, “The Heart of Empire? Theorising US Empire in an Era of Trans-
national Capitalism,” Third World Quarterly, 26(2), 2005, p. 230.

Notes 253
52. Ibid., p. 231.

53. Cox, “Beyond Empire and Terror,” pp. 319–20.
54. Colin Crouch, “Privatized Keynesianism,” British Journal of Politics and Inter-
national Relations, 11(3), 2009, pp. 382–99.
55. Herman Schwartz, Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital and the
Housing Bubble. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 3–4.
56. Cox, “Beyond Empire and Terror,” p. 312.
57. Lawrence Summers, “The United States and the Global Adjustment Process,”
Peterson Institute for International Economics, March 2004: available at
http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/paper.cfm?researchid=200.
58. Helen Thompson, “Debt and Power: The United States in Historical Perspec-
tive,” International Relations, 21(3), 2007, p. 316.
59. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Superintending Global Capital,” New Left
Review, 35, September/October, 2005, p. 117.
60. Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings (eds.), American Empire and the Political
Economy of Global Finance. Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008,
p. 39
61. Schwartz, Subprime Nation.
62. See, for example, Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gŏkay, The Fall of the US
Empire. London: Pluto, 2012.
63. John Cassidy, “What Good Is Wall Street?,” The New Yorker, November
29, 2010: available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/
101129fa_fact_cassidy.
64. Ibid.
65. On this, see David Coates, Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative
Arguments. New York: Continuum, 2010, pp. 230–72; and David Coates,
Making the Progressive Case: Towards a Stronger U.S. Economy. New York: Con-
tinuum, 2011, pp. 160–88.
66. Heidi Shierholz, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball, The Class of 2014. Wash-
ington, DC: Economic Policy Institute: available at http://www.epi.org/
publication/class-of-2014.
67. Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Annual Report 2012, After the Fall: available
at http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/ar/2012/pages/ar12_1.cfm.
68. Adam Hudson, “The Astonishing Collapse of Black and Latino Household
Wealth,” posted on AlterNet, June 3, 2013: available at http://www.alternet.org/
print/economy/black-and-latino-household-wealth-has-collapsed.
69. Details in Robert Kuttner, “The Cost of Financial Favoritism,” The Ameri-
can Prospect, March 2012: available at http://prospect.org/article/cost-financial
-favoritism.
70. Nicole Allan, “Where the Money Went,” The Atlantic, April 2013: available
at http://theatlantic.datinggroud.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/where-the
-money-went/309269.
71. Schwartz, Subprime Nation, p. 18.
72. Didem Tüzemen and Jonathan Willis, “The Vanishing Middle: Job Polarization
and Workers’ Response to the Decline in Middle-Skill Jobs,” Federal Reserve

254 Notes
Bank of Kansas, Economic Review, First Quarter 2013: available at http://www

.kc.frb.org/publications/research/er/13q1.cfm.
73. Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. New York:
Harper, 2010, p. 379.
74. Cited in Ann Laura Stoller, “Imperial Formations and the Opacities of Rule,”
in Calhoun et al., Lessons of Empire, p. 57.
75. Cited in Porter, Empire and Superempire, p. 93.
76. Quoted in Morris Berman, Why America Failed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley,
2012, p. 167.
77. Porter, Empire and Superempire, p. 93.
78. See Pew Research, Public Sees U.S. Power Declining as Support for Global Engage-
ment Slips. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press,
December 3, 2013: available at http://www.people-press.org/2013/12/03/
public-sees-u-s-power-declining-as-support-for-global-engagement-slips.
79. Hunt and Levine, Arc of Empire, p. 3. As they put it later in the book, “The
American public was tolerant of empire at bargain-basement prices. But when
the costs started to rise, support began to fall” (p. 258).
80. Beinart, Icarus Syndrome, p. 381.
81. Hunt and Levine, Arc of Empire, p. 278.
82. Beinart, Icarus Syndrome, p. 389.
83. Berman, Why America Failed, p. xii.
84. Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spec-
tacle. New York: Nation, 2009, p. 45.
85. On this, see William Astore, “Bread and Circuses in Rome and America,” posted
on The Huffington Post, June 10, 2013: available at http://www.huffingtonpost
.com/william-astore/bread-and-circuses-in-rom_b_3414248.html.
86. Kristen Gwynne, “Survey: 48% of Christians Believe Jesus Is Coming Back in
Next 40 Years,” posted on AlterNet March 31, 2013: available at http://www
.alternet.org/survey-48-us-christians-believe-jesus-coming-back-next-40-years.
87. Hedges, Empire of Illusion, p. 189. See also his “The Folly of Empire,” posted
on NationOfChange, October 15, 2013: available at http://www.truthdig.com/
report/item/the_folly_of_empire_20131014.
88. Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton,
2000, pp. 19 and 159–60.
89. Morris Berman, Dark Ages America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, p. 2.
90. Ibid., p. 304.
Chapter 9
1. For a parallel argument with an environmental twist, see James Gustave Speth,
America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2012. See also Michael Moran, The Reckoning: Debt, Democracy
and the Future of American Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp.
201–18; and David Coates, Making the Progressive Case.
2. Richard Haass, Foreign Policy Begins at Home. New York: Basic, 2013, p. 1.

Notes 255
3. See Gerald F. Seib, “Public Turns Skeptical of Wars,” The Wall Street Jour-
nal, September 17, 2013: available at http://stream.wsj.com/story/syria/SS-2
-34182/SS-2-328768.
4. “McCain Town Hall Erupts With Opposition to Syria Strike,” Fox News
Insider, September 6, 2013: available at http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/03/
10/john-mccain-arizona-town-hall-erupts-opposition-syria-strike.
5. Barney Frank, “The New Mandate on Defense,” Democracy Journal, Winter,
2013, pp. 50 and 53.
6. Gideon Rachman, “The World Would Miss the American Policeman,” The
Financial Times, September 2, 2013: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/
0/fdbfa06c-13ba-11e3-9289-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2gtA00nPg.
7. On this, see Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s Not Just about Obama,” The New
York Times, May 3, 2014: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/
opinion/sunday/friedman-its-not-just-about-obama.html?_r=0.
8. See Mattea Kramer and Miriam Pemberton, “Downsizing the Military Mis-
sion, Upsizing the Peacetime One,” posted on TomDispatch, September 19,
2013: available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175749.
9. See Anthony J. Principi, “Wounded Vets Deserve Better,” The Wall Street
Journal, August 29, 2013: available at http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424127887324653004578652600179575338.html.
10. Bret Stephens, “The Retreat Doctrine,” The Wall Street Journal, May 28,
2013: available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323855
804578508984038618290.html.
11. Eliot Cohen, “American Withdrawal and Global Disorder,” The Wall
Street Journal, March 20, 2013: available at http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424127887324196204578300262454939952.html.
12. In Joseph Lieberman and John Kyl, “The Danger of Repeating the Cycle of
American Isolationism,” The Washington Post, April 25, 2013: available at
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-25/opinions/38817519_1_world
-war-ii-u-s-aid-retreat.
13. On this, see P. Eric Louw, Roots of the Pax Americana. Manchester, England:
Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 255–61.
14. On this, see Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006, p. 170–71.
15. Dimitri Simes, “America’s Imperial Dilemma,” Foreign Affairs, 82(6), 2003,
p. 101.
16. Haass, Foreign Policy, p. 5.
17. Cited in the editorial, “The End of the Perpetual War,” The New York Times,
May 23, 2013: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/opinion/
obama-vows-to-end-of-the-perpetual-war.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
18. These possibilities are well discussed by David Cole, “The End of the War
on Terror?,” The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2013, pp. 59–62:
available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/end-war
-terror.

256 Notes
19. The full text is available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text

-of -president -obamas -commencement -address -at -west -point /2014 /05 /28 /
cfbcdcaa-e670-11e3-afc6-a1dd9407abcf_story.html.
20. Quoted in Bill Schneider, “Americans Tire of ‘World Police’ Role,” posted on
The Huffington Post, September 9, 2013: available at http://www.huffingtonpost
.com/bill-schneider/americans-tire-of-world-p_b_3894020.html.
21. Martin Wolf, “Era of a Diminished Superpower,” The Financial Times, May 15,
2012: available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5e8e3902-9db1-11e1-9a9e
-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2gtA00nPg.
22. Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Best Last Hope. New York:
Henry Holt, 2010, pp. 194–96.
Broadway, 2013, pp. 249–52.
24. Robert F. Worth, “Al Qaeda-Inspired Groups, Minus Goal of Striking U.S.,”
The New York Times, October 27, 2012: available at http://www.nytimes
.com/2012/10/28/world/middleeast/al-qaeda-inspired-groups-minus-goal-of
-striking-us.html?pagewanted=all.
25. Johnson, Dismantling the Empire, p. 196.
26. Mark Helprin, “America’s Dangerous Rush to Shrink Its Military Power,” The
Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2010: available at http://online.wsj.com/
article/SB10001424052748703727804576017513713585854.html.
27. Quote and data from Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, “The Growth
of Finance,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(2), Spring 2013, pp. 3–28.
28. William K. Black, “How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance’s Five Fatal
Flaws,” posted on The Huffington Post, October 12, 2009: available at http://
www.huffingtonpost .com /william - k - black /how - the - servant - became - a _b
_318010.html.
29. Ibid.
30. Quoted in Lynn Stuart Parramore, “How Big Finance Crushes Innovation and
Holds Back Our Economy,” posted on AlterNet, July 26, 2013: available at
http://www.alternet.org/economy/economy-innovation.
31. Robert J. Shiller, The Best, Brightest and Least Productive?, posted at Project-
Syndicate, September 24, 2013: available at http://www.project-syndicate.org/
commentary/the-rent-seeking-problem-in-contemporary-finance-by-robert-j
-shiller.
32. Robert Creamer, “The Dominance of the Financial Sector Has Become a Mor-
tal Danger to Our Economic Security,” Huffington Post, March 18, 2010: avail-
able at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/the-dominance-of-the
-fina_b_317310.html.
33. See, for example, Steven Slivinski, The Corporate Welfare State: How the Federal
Government Subsidizes U.S. Businesses. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, May
2007: available at http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/corporate
-welfare-state-how-federal-government-subsidizes-us-businesses.

Notes 257
34. Charles Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom,” The Atlantic, March 2013: avail-
able at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing
-boom/309166.
35. On this, see Robert J. Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering
Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds.” NBER Working Paper No. 18315,
August 2012: available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w18315.
36. Michael Elsby, Barry Hobijn, and Ayşegül Şahin, The Decline of the U.S. Labor
Share. Washington, DC: Brookings, September 2013: available at http://
www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Fall%202013/2013b%20elsby
%20labor%20share.pdf.
37. President Obama, speaking in Illinois, July 24, 2013: speech available at http://
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/24/obamas-speech
-on-the-economy.
38. Vaclav Smil, Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of US Manufacturing. Bos-
ton: MIT Press, 2013.
39. See Jackie Calmes and Michael D. Shear, “Interview with President Obama,”
The New York Times, July 17, 2013: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/
07/28/us/politics/interview-with-president-obama.html?pagewanted=all.
40. Lydia DePillis, “Mississippians Are the Fattest People in the Nation, and Also
Have the Hardest Time Getting Fed,” The Washington Post, September 6, 2013:
available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/06/
mississippians-are-the-fattest-people-in-the-nation-and-also-have-the-hardest
-time-getting-fed.
41. Howard Schneider, “Americans Are Fat, Stressed, and Unhealthy,” The Wash-
ington Post, October 1, 2013: available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/
blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/01/americans-are-fat-stressed-and-unhealthy.
42. See Claudio Sanchez, College Board “Concerned” about Low SAT Scores, NPR,
September 26, 2013: available at http://www.npr.org/2013/09/26/226530184/
college-board-concerned-about-low-sat-scores.
43. David Coates, “Laying-off Teachers to Demonstrate How Much They Are
Appreciated,” May 12, 2011: available at http://www.davidcoates.net/2011/05/
12/laying-off-teachers-to-demonstrate-how-much-they-are-appreciated.
44. Lee Saunders, “America’s Class War: A Dispatch from the Front,” posted on
The Huffington Post, June 20, 2013: available at http://www.huffingtonpost
.com/lee-a-saunders/americas-class-war-a-disp_b_3461947.html.
45. Lawrence Mishel, The CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio in 2012 of 273 Was
Far above That of the Late 1990s and 14 Times the Ratio of 20:1 in 1965, Eco-
nomic Snapshot, Economic Policy Institute, September 24, 2013: available
at http://www.epi.org/publication/the-ceo-to-worker-compensation-ratio-in
-2012-of-273.
46. Data in Sean McElwee, “Awakening from the American Dream,” posted on
The Huffington Post, July 3, 2013: available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
sean-mcelwee/awakening-from-the-americ_b_3534107.html.

258 Notes
47. David Coates, “The State of the Union Address – Taking the Longer View,”
January 30, 2014: available at http://www.davidcoates.net/2014/01/30/the
-state-of-the-union-address-taking-the-longer-view.
48. C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) is
still very much in charge in contemporary America.
49. For such a view from a radical perspective, see Morris Berman, Why America
Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2012,
pp. 162–63. As he put it earlier, “we are witnessing the suicide of a nation, a
nation that hustled itself into the grave.” Ibid., p. 64.

Subject Index
Adrianople, Battle of, 57, 59, 85 Bolivia, 83, 100
Afghanistan, 9–13, 15, 35, 39, 75, 107, Bosnia, 75
138, 140, 173, 180–81, 183, 200, Bourbons, Spanish, 93, 96, 100, 101–2
202, 205 Brazil, 16, 115
Algeria, 133 Bread and circuses, 66, 199
American: century, 15; DNA, 35, 46; Bretton Woods, 114
Dream, 22, 194; economic decline, British Empire: imperial mindset, 128–
1, 9, 30–31; Empire, 8, 33–40, 31; liberal militarism, 123–28; loss
45–50, 178; exceptionalism, 1, of, 113–17; loss of manufacturing
7–8; freedom, 29–30; hegemony, dominance, 117–19; retreat from
47, 48; new imperialism, 49; empire, 132–35; rise (economic),
power, 183; power (benign), 111–13; rise (military), 110–11;
35–36, 195; power, resentment of, scale (formal), 105–8; scale
183; superempire, 47; superiority, (informal), 108–9; separation of
1, 7–8; supremacy, 1; three industry and finance, 119–23
empires, 46 Brunei, 125
Anti-Corn Law League, 112 Bureaucracy, 58–59, 70, 85–86
Antioch, 67 Burma, 113
Argentina, 100–101, 107, 153
Arms exports, 124–25, 207 Canada, 2, 26, 28, 40, 46, 106, 115,
Assassinations, 39, 179 153
Augustan Threshold, 54, 72 Canary Islands, 83–84
Australia, 26, 28, 106 Capital export, 120
Austria, 82, 115, 138 Capital punishment, 31
Authorization to Use Military Force Capitulaciones, 84
Act, 180, 205 Catholic Church, the, 86, 102–3
Catholic Kings, the, 82
BAE Systems, 125, 126 Center-periphery relations, 41, 67–68,
Balkans, 11, 50, 148 101
Baltic, 148 Central planning, 152
Bankers, 90–92 Child care, 29
Bases, 10, 38, 48, 125, 206 Chile, 83
Belgium, 115 China, 12, 17–21, 24–25, 27, 30–31,
Belize, 125 55, 113, 115, 124–25, 138, 147,
Benghazi, 203 153, 172, 184, 187–88, 197, 204,
Berlin Wall, 47 211
Blowback, 62, 183 Christianity, 56, 74, 199

260 Subject Index
CIA, 10, 180 Korea), 16, 184, 186; superiority,

City, the, 109, 121–23 111–13, 115–16
Civil wars, 57–58 Economy, rebalancing of, 208–14
Class: contradictions of, 71–72; Ecuador, 100
divisions, 193–94; issues of, 70–74 Education, 18–22, 198
Cold War, 16, 47, 145, 181–85, 207 Egypt, 107, 110
Colonial ingratitude, law of, 161–62 Elites, 70, 85
Columbia, 100 Empire: American and, 33–40, 45–50;
Comintern, 146–47 borders of, 61; cost of, 1, 78;
Commonwealth, the, 114 definition of, 40–45; dialectic
Communeros, 87 of, 162; fall of, 44–45, 133; by
Communism, 156 franchise, 83; hegemony and, 341;
Conquistadores, 83, 99 lessons of, 2, 159–67; question
Counter-Reformation, 82, 87, 98 of, 33–50; retreat from, 201–8;
Crimea, the, 110, 138–39, 142, 203 varieties of, 42, 43, 45, 48
Crimean War, 139, 142 Encomienda system, 85
Cuba, 81, 102 Enlightened despotism, 102
Culture: arrogance, 31, 99, 128–30, Equality, need for, 214–17
141–42, 166–67, 194–97; Ethnic cleansing, 46, 140
degradation, 76, 77, 78, 97–100,
Finance: fragility of, 189–90; growth
197–200; parochialism and,
of, 209; need to shrink, 208–10;
134–35, 197; sclerosis of, 164; of
regulation of, 201; in UK, 108–11,
slavery, 64–65
119–23
Cyprus, 107, 114, 125, 132
Finance and Empire, 90–91, 187–91
Czechoslovakia, 140, 148, 154
Financial arbitrage, 164, 187–88
Financial crisis (2008), 17, 190–91
Debt, 18, 28, 89–93, 187 Financial terror, balance of, 188
Deindustrialization, 24–25, 118–19, Financialization, 188
192–94, 208 Finland, 20, 28, 115, 138–39
Democracy: support for, 179; threat Fiscal-military state (UK), 11–12
to, 178 Flawed Fordism, 118, 123
Denmark, 115 France, 12, 16, 25, 28, 46, 92, 106,
Dictatorships, support for, 179 113, 115, 131, 137, 139, 142, 174
Dodd-Frank, 210 Free trade, 131, 186–87
Double lie, the, 147–48, 197
Double standard, 166, 195–96 Gender divisions, 193–94
Drones, 49, 182–83 General Motors, 26–27
Generational change, 22
Economic: backwardness, 142–43, Gentlemanly capitalism, 121–23
150–53; decline, 93–97, 165; Germany: contemporary, 12, 28, 115,
development, 67; growth, dash for, 188; East, 148; pre-1945, 53, 82,
143; growth, new model of, 212– 87, 90, 92, 106, 113, 117, 120,
13; miracles, 16; reconstruction 130–31, 144, 146, 150; West, 16,
(Germany), 16, 23, 184–85; 50, 184, 204
reconstruction (Japan), 16, 23, Ghana, 114
184, 186; reconstruction (South Gibraltar, 100, 107, 125

Subject Index 261
Glasnost, 155 Isolationism, 205

Governance, problems of, 58–60, Israel, 204–5
162–63 Italy, 16, 63, 67, 90, 106, 117
Grain imports, 67, 95, 153
Guam, 46, 81, 100, 172 Japan, 8, 14, 16, 28, 47, 120, 128,
Guatemala, 173 130–31, 144, 173, 184–86, 188,
Guerrilla warfare, 86, 132, 181 204
Gun lobby, 203 Jews, expulsion of, 97, 98
Gun ownership, 31 Jihad, 49
Jim Crow, 29
Habsburgs, 82
Hard power, limits of, 161–62, 207 Kenya, 114, 129, 132
Hegemony, 34, 45, 47, 48 Keynesianism, military, 209
Hidalgos, 89 Kosovo, 9
Holland, 106 Kulaks, 152
Hong Kong, 114, 125 Kuwait, 48
Hours worked, 27
Hubris, 31, 99, 128–30, 141–42, Labor: force, 17, 24; movement,
166–7, 194–97 moderation of, 40, 130; power of,
Hungary, 82, 138, 140, 148, 154–55 26–30, 40; productivity, 28; skills,
Huns, 57 21–22, 213
Labour Party, British, 130
Ideational inertia, 131 Labourism, British, 130
Illness, 27 Landowners, 58, 72, 84–85, 121,
Imperial: closure, 198; preference, 121; 140–41, 151
presidency, 163; rationales, 129; Latifundia, 64, 85
trajectories, 160 Latvia, 140
Imperialism, 36–40, 77, 107, 108–11, Lebanon, 9, 173
134, 145, 157 Leninism, 145–46
Incarceration, rates of, 29, 31 Liberalism, classical, 131
Index, the, 98 Liberal militarism, 123–28
India, 16, 21, 27, 55, 106–7, 113, 115, Libya, 39
132, 157, 161 Lie, beautiful, 194–95
Indian Army, 110 Lie, double, 147–48, 198
Indispensable nation, the, 49–50, Life expectancy, 27–28
203–4, 205–6 Liquidationism, 155
Industrial policy, 210–14 Living standards, 65, 73, 149, 152–53
Industrial revolution, the, 112–13 Long eighteenth century, 113, 123–24
Industry ministry, 127–28, 210 Loss of industrial spirit, 130
Inequality, 25, 28, 97, 98 Luxembourg, 115
Institutional rigidities, 117–18, 166
International division of labor, 112 Malaya, 113, 132
International Monetary Fund, 114 Malta, 107
Iran, 31, 107 Malvinas (Falkland Islands), 100, 114,
Iraq, 9–10, 12–14, 31, 39, 48–49, 114, 125, 130
173, 181, 183, 200, 202 Managerial capitalism, 118
Ireland, 105–6, 115, 124 Manchuria, 138

262 Subject Index
Manifest Destiny, 45, 194 Nobel Peace Prize, 50

Manufacturing: China and, 22–23; Nomenklatura, 165–66
decline of Castilian, 94–97; Norway, 28
hollowing out of, 25, 122–23;
importance of, 25–26, 213–14; Obesity, 27, 213
loss of dominance, 117–19; OECD, 19, 20, 22
strengthening, 208–14; United Opportunity costs, 13, 177
States and, 22–26 Outsourcing, 24, 191–94
Marxism, 145–46, 156
Maternity leave, 29 Pakistan, 11, 39, 49
Mesta, 93, 95 Path dependency, 103
Mexico, 24, 27, 46, 83, 86, 100, 102, Patriot Act, 180
188 Pax Americana, 75
Middle class, 27–28, 75, 98–99, 208 Pax Britannica, 123
Military: bases, 10, 38, 48, 125, Pax Romana, 61, 71, 73, 75
206; casualties, 13–14, 89; Perestroika, 155
composition of, 60–61, 74, Permanent revolution, theory of,
89; control of, 60–62, 162–63; 145–46
cost of, 11–15, 87–93, 148–50;
Persian Gulf, 9, 107
footprint, 9–11; multiplier and,
Peru, 86
176; privatization and, 11; R&D,
Philippines, 36, 46, 81, 100, 172–73
14, 125–26; size of, 9–10, 60,
Pied-noirs, 132
70, 91, 141; spending on, 12,
PISA, 19–20
175–76, 208; success of, 14–15,
Plague, 94
180–81; superiority of, 15–16,
Poverty, 28–29, 214–17
86, 88–89; technology and, 14,
176–77, 181 Preoccupied state, the, 183–87
Military-industrial complex, 127–28, Principate, 54, 83
141, 176–77, 178, 203 Prisons, secret, 10
Minimum wage, 29 Proprietary capitalism, 118
Monarchy, 54, 85, 81–83, 93, 96, 100, Prussia, 138
101–2, 105 Poland, 138, 140, 148, 154–55
Moriscos, 97 Portugal, 82–83, 96, 137
Multinational corporations, 24, Puerto Rico, 46, 81, 100, 172
186–87, 191–94 Punic Wars, 53
Pushback, 110, 132–33, 140, 148, 154,
NAFTA, 24, 114 161, 180–83
NATO, 47
Navy, 110, 123–24 Racial divisions, 193–94
Nazi-Soviet Pact, 146 Racism, 99, 107
Neoconservatives, 48–49 Reagan era, 26–27
Netherlands, 90, 115 Reaping machine, 65
New class, the, 148 Red Army, 139, 146
New Labour, 126 Reformation, the, 82, 98
New Zealand, 28, 106 Reform from above, 142–43
Nigeria, 157 Rendition, 10

Subject Index 263
Research and development, 14, 23, 24, 148, 154; rise of empire, 139–40,
125–26 144–48
Rhodesia, 114 Spanish Empire: culture of, 97–100;
Rome: armies, brutality of, 61–62, 76; economic underpinnings, 93–97;
armies, changing composition of, finances of, 89–93; last rites of,
61; armies, size of, 68; civil wars, 100–103; longevity of, 84–86;
57–58; class and culture, 70–74; military and, 87–89; rise of, 82–84
debate on, 55–58; division of, Spark, theory of, 145–46
59–60; fall of Republic, 54, 167; Sri Lanka, 42
fiscal crisis, 66–67; parallels to Stagnation, the great, 23
United States, 74–79; problems State, fiscal crisis of, 66–70, 164
of governance, 58–60; sack of, STEM graduates, 20–21
55; slave-based economy, 62–66; Stolypin reforms, 152
western empire, 53–55 Subempires, 107–8, 134
Russian empire, 137–39, 140–42, Sudan, 107
151–52 Sweden, 28, 115, 216
Switzerland, 28
Syria, 53, 206
Samoa, 46, 172
Sardinia, 82
Taxation, 68, 69–70, 78, 89–93, 96
Scotland, 18, 105–6
Technology, 64–65, 67, 75
Second serfdom, the, 140–41, 151
Tercio, 88
Serfdom, abolition of, 142–43
Tertiary sector, 96
Settler colonialism, logic of, 103, 132
Textile industry, 24–25
Sheep farming, 93–94
Thatcher, contribution to world peace,
Siberia, 139 52, 80, 104, 136, 168, 170
Sicily, 63, 82 Torture, 10, 129, 179
Silence of Pizarro, 99 Trade deficit, 17, 18, 24, 119
Silver, 83–84, 86, 90, 95
Singapore, 125 Ukraine, 139
Slave-based economies, problems of, Unemployment, 18, 190–91
62–66 United Kingdom, construction of,
Slave rebellions, 72 105–6
Socialism in one country, 146 Urbanization, 66
Social mobility, 2, 28, 216 Utrecht, Treaty of, 88
Soft power, 207–8
Somalia, 9, 11, 35, 39, 173 V2 Rockets, 182
South Africa, 106, 110 Venezuela, 101
South Korea, 9, 16, 50, 172–73, 180, Versailles, Congress of, 139
184–86, 204 Vietnam, 9, 36, 48, 172–73, 176, 180
South Yemen, 11, 39, 49 Visigoths, 56, 57
Soviet Union: collapse of, 16, 38;
crisis of legitimacy, 154–57, 158; Wages: increase in, 211–12, 216–17; in
economic backwardness and, manufacturing, 25–26; Roman,
150–51, 152–53; military burden 64; in United States, 17, 20,
and, 148–50; pushback, 140, 26–27, 187, 193

264 Subject Index
Wales, 105–6 Welfare provision, 29

Wall Street, 189–91 Westphalia, Treaty of, 88, 161
Walmart effect, 26, 208, 212 West Point, 205–6
War on poverty, 28 White dominions, the, 106
War on terror, 205 Winners curse, the, 44–45, 117, 167
Wars, 9, 48–49, 87–88, 110, 180, 181 Working class, 28, 149
Water mill, 65 Workshop of the world, the, 113

Name Index
Alexander I, 138, 141 Carville, James, 115
Allende, Salvador, 179 Cassidy, John, 189–90
Anderson, Perry, 38, 64, 65, 67, 89, Catherine II, 141
110, 121 Catherine the Great, 138
Attwood, Paul, 38 Chamberlain, Joseph, 122
Augustus, 54, 58 Charles III, 102
Charles V, 82, 87, 89–91, 93
Bacevich, Andrew, 38–39, 49 Cheney, Dick, 195
Barboni, Aurelio, 73 Chomsky, Noam, 38
Barnett, Corelli, 116, 128, 130–31 Chua, Amy, 73–74
Beinart, Peter, 194, 196–97 Churchill, Winston, 114, 116
Bello, Walden, 38 Cipolla, Carlo, 160, 166
Berger, Sandy, 33 Clinton, Hilary, 49
Berman, Morris, 77, 200 Cohen, Elliott, 37, 204
Bin Laden, Osama, 8–9, 38, 179–80, Columbus, Christopher, 82, 99
207
Constantine, 55, 66, 69
Blair, Tony, 114, 129, 194
Cooper, Frederick, 43, 159
Blank, Stephen, 127
Córdoba, Gonzalo de, 88
Blundell, Michael, 163
Cortés, 83, 86, 101–2
Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon (Napoléon
Cowen, Tyler, 23
III), 135
Cox, Michael, 36–37
Bonaparte, Napoléon, 87, 100, 112,
138, 161 Cox, Robert, 75, 183, 187
Boot, Max, 34–35 Creamer, Robert, 210
Branfman, Fred, 182 Cromwell, Oliver, 88
Bremmer, Paul, 49 Crouch, Colin, 187
Brezhnev, Leonard, 155–56 Crowley, Ambrose, 124
Brown, Gordon, 130
Burbank, Jane, 43, 159 Darwin, John, 86–87, 107–9, 113, 124,
Bush, George Herbert, 195 139–40, 159
Bush, George W., 10, 37, 38, 114, Davis, Ralph, 87, 94
180–81, 195 Demandt, Alexander, 56
De Witte, Sergei, 143, 149
Cable, Vince, 127 Diocletian, 55, 59, 66, 69–70
Cain, P. J., 121–22, 160 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 142
Caracalla, Emperor, 71 Doyle, Michael, 40–41, 44, 54, 62–63,
Carter, Jimmy, 182 72–73, 85, 99, 159

266 Name Index
Edgerton, David, 123, 177 Ignatieff, Michael, 36–37

Edward VII, 105 Isabella, Queen of Castile, 82, 84, 88,
Eisenhower, Dwight, 173, 177–78 98, 102
Elbaum, Bernard, 117 Ivan the Terrible, 138
Elliott, Sir John, 90–91, 93, 98, 101,
164 James, Simon, 54, 61–62, 71–72,
Engelhardt, Tom, 38 76–77
Jefferson, Thomas, 100, 198
Ferdinand, King of Aragon, 82, 84, 88, Joffe, Josef, 34–35
98, 102 Johnson, Chalmers, 38, 48, 76–77,
Ferguson, Niall, 37, 44, 77 129, 133, 158, 166, 178, 182,
Franklin, Benjamin, 2 196, 207
Friedman, Howard, 31 Johnson, Lyndon, 28
Gaidar, Yegor, 92, 153 Kagan, Kimberly, 75

Galtung, Johan, 64 Kagan, Robert, 30–31, 35–36, 39
Gamble, Andrew, 115, 128 Kamen, Henry, 89, 92, 99, 167
Garrett-Peltier, Heidi, 177 Kennedy, Paul, 77, 89–90, 92, 111,
George V, 105 125, 138, 143, 150, 153
Gerschenkron, Alexander, 117 Khrushchev, Nikita, 154–56
Konings, Martijn, 77
Gersemann, Olaf, 8
Kotkin, Stephen, 152–53, 156
Gibbons, Edward, 56–57, 159
Krauthammer, Charles, 30
Gindin, Sam, 39–40, 188–89, 191
Kyl, Jon, 204
Gingrich, Newt, 8
Go, Julian, 44, 160, 173–74
Landers, Brian, 157
Godunov, Boris, 138
Lazonick, William, 117
Goldsworthy, Adrian, 57–58, 60, 68,
Lenin, Vladimir, 146–47, 156
75–76, 166 Lieberman, Joseph, 204
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 153, 155–58, 163 Lieven, Dominic, 139, 141, 155,
Gordon, Robert J., 211 157–58, 161
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 7–8
Haass, Richard, 201, 205 Levine, Stephen, 36, 173
Hadrian, 54 Louis XIV, 87
Hamilton, Earl J., 94, 103 Louw, P. Eric, 46
Hardt, Michael, 39
Haywood, Richard Mansfield, 58, 69 Mabee, Bryan, 37
Heather, Peter, 57–58 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 161
Hedges, Chris, 199 Macmillan, Harold, 114
Helprin, Mark, 208 Madden, Thomas, 8, 34–35, 76–77
Hitler, Adolf, 182 Maddow, Rachel, 11, 180, 207
Hobson, J. A., 106 Magdoff, Harry, 38
Hopkins, A. G., 121–22, 160 Maier, Charles, 40–41, 67–68, 159
Hoskins, Geoffrey, 42 Mann, Michael, 38
Hunt, Michael, 36, 173 Marquand, David, 131
Hurrell, Andrew, 34 Marx, Karl, 135
Hussein, Saddam, 48, 180–81, 196 McCain, John, 202

Name Index 267
McCoy, Alfred, 15 Said, Edward, 195

McNally, Terrence, 39 Saunders, Lee, 216
Mitchell, Lawrence, 209 Scheer, Robert, 179
Mitchell, Stephen, 59 Schiavone, Aldo, 63–64, 66, 68
Motyl, Alexander, 41, 44 Schiller, Robert, 209
Münkler, Herfried, 43–44, 159 Schlesinger, Arthur, 36
Murphy, Cullen, 58, 76, 78 Schott, Peter K., 25
Schwartz, Herman, 187, 189, 191–92
Negri, Antonio, 39 Seeley, J. R., 37
Nelson, Lord, 100, 124 Simms, Brendan, 138
Nicholas II, 138 Simon, William, 216
Nove, Alec, 155–57 Smil, Vaclav, 74–75
Smith, Tony, 49
Obama, Barack, 10, 38, 50, 179, 206, Snyder, Jack, 174
212, 214 Spartacus, 72
Olivares, Count, 96 Stalin, Joseph, 139, 149–50, 156, 158
Steinmetz, George, 41, 45
Palin, Sarah, 154 Stephens, Bret, 203
Panitch, Leo, 39–40, 188–89, 191 Stokes, Doug, 48, 185
Parsons, Timothy, 83 Stone, Oliver, 38
Perot, Ross, 24 Strange, Susan, 77
Peter the Great, 138, 139 Summers, Lawrence, 188
Phillip II, 82, 87–93, 97 Suny, Ronald Grigor, 162
Phillip III, 97
Phillip of Burgundy, 82 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 161
Pierce, Justin R., 25 Thatcher, Margaret, 114
Piganoil, André, 57 Thayer, Bradley, 34–35
Pirenne, Henri, 55 Theodosius I, 59
Pizarro, 83, 99 Thompson, Helen, 92
Pollin, Robert, 177 Todorov, Tzvetan, 99
Pollock, Sheldon, 174 Trotsky, Leon, 145–46, 151
Porter, Bernard, 47, 106, 133–34, 174,
179 Valens, 59, 70
Pushkin, Alexander, 158
Walbank, F. W., 65
Rachman, Gideon, 181 Washington, George, 183
Read, Colin, 44, 117, 167 Weber, Max, 59
Reagan, Ronald, 2, 26–28, 195 Weiner, Martin, 130–31
Rhodes, Benjamin, 206
Romulus Augustus, 55 Yeltsin, Boris, 153
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 213
Rumsfeld, Donald, 2, 33, 181 Zakaria, Fareed, 20

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10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

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First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

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Coates, David, 1946–

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First edition: December 2014

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

III The Reckoning

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

full examination of that slippage awaits us in Chapter 1, but as a teaser,

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

preliminary assessment of America’s contemporary condition and then

David Coates, Wake Forest University, July 1, 2014

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

It is still conventional in American political discourse to treat this

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

individualism, populism, and laissez-faire. He thought those values were

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

no longer exceptional as a country or as a power. Nor do they regularly

The US Global Military Footprint

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

The Cost of That Footprint

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

Opportunity costs are always hard to measure with precision. The

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

a suicide rate for veterans of 22 suicides per day in 2012—2,700 suicides

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

Signs of Diminishing Economic Performance

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

There are several short-term indicators of growing American eco-

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

Weakening Economic Underpinnings: (1) Education

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

2008, as compared to annual rates of growth in the output of similar

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

Weakening Economic Underpinnings:

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

by the search for corporate cost competitiveness. The employment con-

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

Weakening Economic Underpinnings: (3) Labor

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

and post-Reagan years, so that American workers even in core manufac-

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

10.1057/9781137482600 - America in the Shadow of Empires, David Coates

available across the rest of the Western world—still remain to be won in