Colossus: The Rise and Fall of American Empire

Read for Network Imperialism and to satisfy personal burning curiosity.

Bibliographic Deets

 * Ferguson, Niall 2005. Colossus: The Rise and Fall of American Empire. Penguin Books, London.

Preface to Paperback Edition

 * Simplified Overview (viii)
 * 1) The United States has always been, functionally if not self-consciously, an empire
 * 2) That a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to available alternatives, but
 * 3) That financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and
 * 4) That therefore the American empire, in so far as it continues to exist, will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity


 * "Of all the misconceptions that need to be dispelled here, this is perhaps the most obvious: that simply because American say they do not "do" empire, there cannot be such a thing as American imperialism" (ix)

Introduction

 * "But what the worlds needs today is not just any kind of empire. What is required is a liberal empire- that is to say, one that not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labor and capital, but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function- peace and order.." (2)


 * "Although the United States seems in many ways ideally endowed- economically, militarily, politically- to run such an 'empire of liberty' (Thomas Jefferson's phrase), it practice it has been a surprisingly inept empire builder" (2)


 * Four of five Americans polled by the Pew Global Attitudes survey last year [2003] agreed it was "good that American ideas and customs were spreading around the world" (7)


 * "Its methods of formal rule are primarily military in character; its methods of informal rule rely heavily on nongovernmental organizations and corporations and, in some cases, local elites" (13)

Anglophone Empires: Compare with British Empire

 * At its height, British covered 23 percent of the world's land surface
 * Of which only 0.2 was the UK itself


 * Today the US accounts for 6.5 percent of the land surface
 * The other terrorities (former Caribbean and Pacific islands = less than 0.5 percent)


 * Population -> US and dependencies = 5 percent world population
 * British rule 1/4 th of World Population


 * All this is page 15


 * "If military power is the sine qua non of an empire, then it is hard to imagine how anyone could deny the imperial character of the United States today. Conventional maps of U.S. military deployments understate the extent of America's military reach. A Defense Department map of the world, which shows the areas of responsibility of the five major regional commands, suggests that America's sphere of military is now literally global." (17)


 * "The global spread of information technology" ... "To put it simply, soft power - or what other writes have called Americanization - can reach the parts that hard power cannot reach" (20).


 * Ferguson is skeptical of this power -> "more limited that generally assumed" (21)

Part of At Cambridge