Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

  Yet if the British Empire was America’s precursor as the global hegemon, might not the United States equally well be Britain’s successor as an Anglophone empire? Most historians would agree that, if anything, American economic power after 1945 exceeded that of Britain after 1815, a comparable watershed of power following the final defeat of Napoleonic France. First, the extraordinary growth in productivity achieved between around 1890 and 1950 eclipsed anything previously achieved by Britain, even in the first flush of the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, the United States very deliberately used its power to advance multilateral and mutually balanced tariff reductions under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization). Thus the reductions of tariffs achieved in the Kennedy Round (1967) and in subsequent “rounds” of negotiation owed much to American pressures such as the “conditionality” attached to loans from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund. By contrast, the nineteenth-century spread of free trade and free navigation—the “public goods” most commonly attributed to the British Empire—were as much spontaneous phenomena as they were direct consequences of British power. Thirdly, successive U.S. governments allegedly took advantage of the dollar’s role as a key currency before and after the breakdown of Bretton Woods. The U.S. government had access to a “gold mine of paper” and could therefore collect a subsidy from foreigners in the form of seigniorage (by selling foreigners dollars and dollar-denominated assets that then depreciated in value).54 The gold standard offered Britain no such advantages, and perhaps even some disadvantages. Finally, the Pax Britannica depended mainly on the Royal Navy and was less “penetrative” than the “full-spectrum dominance” aimed for today by the American military. For a century, with the sole exception of the Crimean War, Britain felt unable to undertake military interventions in Europe, the theater most vital to its own survival, and when it was forced to do so in 1914 and in 1939, it struggled to prevail.55 We arrive at the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that a hegemon can be more powerful than an empire.

  The distinction between hegemony and empire would be legitimate if the term empire did simply mean, as so many American commentators seem to assume, direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. But students of imperial history have a more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. At the time, British colonial administrators like Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly—that is, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the imperialism of free trade.” This encapsulated the way the Victorians used their naval and financial power to open the markets of countries outside their colonial ambit.56 Equally illuminating is the now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and “informal empire.” The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on its fiscal and monetary policy that Argentina’s independence was heavily qualified.57 In the words of one of the few modern historians to attempt a genuinely comparative study of the subject, an empire is “first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era … a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multi-ethnicity is one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire…. An empire is by definition … not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its peoples. [But] by a process of assimilation of peoples of democratization of institutions empires can transform themselves into multinational federations or even nation states.”58 It is possible to be still more precise than this. In table 1 below I have attempted a simple typology intended to capture the diversity of forms that can be subsumed under the category “empires.” Note that the table should be read as a menu rather than as a grid. For example, an empire could be an oligarchy at home, aiming to acquire raw materials from abroad, thereby increasing international trade, using mainly military methods, imposing a market economy, in the interests of its ruling elite, with a hierarchical social character. Another empire might be a democracy at home, mainly interested in security, providing peace as a public good, ruling mainly through firms and NGOs, promoting a mixed economy, in the interests of all inhabitants, with an assimilative social character.

  The first column reminds us that imperial power can be acquired by more than one type of political system. The self-interested objectives of imperial expansion (column two) range from the fundamental need to ensure the security of the metropolis by imposing order on enemies at its (initial) borders to the collection of rents and taxation from subject peoples, to say nothing of the perhaps more obvious prizes of new land for settlement, raw materials, treasure and manpower, all of which, it should be emphasized, would need to be available at lower prices than they would cost in free exchange with independent peoples if the cost of conquest and colonization were to be justified.59 At the same time, an empire may provide “public goods”—that is, intended or unintended benefits of imperial rule flowing not to the rulers but to the ruled and indeed beyond to third parties: less conflict, increased trade or investment, improved justice or governance, better education (which may or may not be associated with religious conversion, something we would not nowadays regard as a public good) or improved material conditions. The fourth column tells us that imperial rule can be implemented by more than one kind of functionary: soldiers, civil servants, settlers, voluntary associations, firms and local elites all can in different ways impose the will of the center on the periphery. There are almost as many varieties of imperial economic system, ranging from slavery to laissez-faire, from one form of serfdom (feudalism) to another (the planned economy). Nor is it by any means a given that the benefits of empire should flow simply to the metropolitan society. It may only be the elite of that society that reaps the benefits of empire (as Lance E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback claimed in the case of the British Empire);60 it may be colonists drawn from lower-income groups in the metropole; it may in some cases be subject peoples or the elites within subject societies. Finally, the social character of an empire—to be precise, the attitudes of the rulers toward the ruled—may vary. At one extreme lies the genocidal empire of National Socialist Germany, intent on the annihilation of specific ethnic groups and the deliberate degradation of others. At the other extreme lies the Roman model of empire, in which citizenship was obtainable under certain conditions regardless of ethnicity (a model with obvious applicability to the case of the United States). In the middle lies the Victorian model of complex racial and social hierarchy, in which inequalities of wealth and status were mitigated by a general (though certainly not unqualified) principle of equality before the law. The precise combination of all these variables determines, among other things, the geographical extent—and of course the duration—of an empire.

  TABLE 1

  With a broader and more sophisticated definition of empire, it seems possible to dispense altogether with the term hegemony. Instead, it can be argued with some plausibility that the American empire has up until now, with a few exceptions, preferred indirect rule to direct rule and informal empire to formal empire. Indeed, its cold war–era hegemony might better be understood as an “empire by invitation.”61 The question is whether or not the recent, conspicuously uninvited invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq presage a transition to more direct and formal imperial structures. Adapting the terminology of table 1, the American empire can therefore be summed up as follows. It goes without saying that it is a liberal democracy and market economy, though its polity has some illiberal characteristics62 and its economy a surprisingly high level of state intervention (“mixed” might be more accurate than “market”). It is primarily concerned with its own security and maintaining international communications and, secondarily, with ensuring access to raw
materials (principally, though not exclusively, oil). It is also in the business of providing a limited number of public goods: peace, by intervening against some bellicose regimes and in some civil wars; freedom of the seas and skies for trade; and a distinctive form of “conversion” usually called Americanization, which is carried out less by old-style Christian missionaries than by the exporters of American consumer goods and entertainment. 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.

  Who benefits from this empire? Some would argue, with the economist Paul Krugman, that only its wealthy elite does—specifically, that part of its wealthy elite associated with the Republican Party and the oil industry.63 The conventional wisdom on the Left is that the United States uses its power to impoverish people in the developing world. Others would claim that many millions of people around the world have benefited in some way or another from the existence of America’s empire—not least the West Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans who were able to prosper during the cold war under the protection of the American nuclear “umbrella”—and that the economic losers of the post—cold war era, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, are victims not of American power but of its absence. For the American empire is limited in its extent. It conspicuously lacks the voracious appetite for territorial expansion overseas that characterized the empires of the West European seaboard. It prefers the idea that foreigners will Americanize themselves without the need for formal rule. Even when it conquers, it resists annexation—one reason why the duration of its offshore imperial undertakings has tended to be, and will in all probability continue to be, relatively short. Indeed, a peculiarity of American imperialism—perhaps its principal shortcoming—is its excessively short time horizon.

  ANGLOPHONE EMPIRES

  All told, there have been no more than seventy empires in history. If the Times Atlas of World History is to be believed, the American is, by my count, the sixty-eighth. (Communist China is the sixty-ninth; some would claim that the European Union is the seventieth.) How different is the American empire from previous empires? Like the ancient Egyptian, it erects towering edifices in its heartland, though these house the living rather than the dead. Like the Athenian Empire, it has proved itself adept at leading alliances against a rival power. Like the empire of Alexander, it has a staggering geographical range. Like the Chinese Empire that arose in the Ch’in era and reached its zenith under the Ming dynasty, it has united the lands and peoples of a vast territory and forged them into a true nation-state. Like the Roman Empire, it has a system of citizenship that is remarkably open: Purple Hearts and U.S. citizenship were conferred simultaneously on a number of the soldiers serving in Iraq last year, just as service in the legions was once a route to becoming a civis romanus. Indeed, with the classical architecture of its capital and the republican structure of its constitution, the United States is perhaps more like a “new Rome” than any previous empire—albeit a Rome in which the Senate has thus far retained its grip on would-be emperors. In its relationship with Western Europe too, the United States can sometimes seem like a second Rome, though it seems premature to hail Brussels as the new Byzantium.64

  The Roman parallel is in danger of becoming something of a cliché.65 Yet in its capacity for spreading its own language and culture at once monotheistic and mathematical the United States also shares features of the Abbasid caliphate erected by the heirs of Muhammad. Though it is often portrayed as the heir—as well as the rebellious—product of the western European empires that arose in the sixteenth century and persisted until the twentieth, in truth the United States has as much, if not more, in common with the great land empires of central and eastern Europe. In the nineteenth century the westward sweep of American settlers across the prairies had its mirror image in the eastward sweep of Russian settlers across the steppe. In practice, its political structures are sometimes more reminiscent of Vienna or Berlin than they are of The Hague, capital of the last great imperial republic, or London, hub of the first Anglophone empire. To those who would still insist on American “exceptionalism,” the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all the other sixty-nine empires.

  Let us consider more precisely the similarities and differences between this American empire and the British Empire, against which the United States at first defined itself, but which it increasingly resembles, as rebellious sons grow to resemble the fathers they once despised. The relationship between the two Anglophone empires is one of the leitmotifs of this book for the simple reason that no other empire in history has come so close to achieving the things that the United States wishes to achieve today. Britain’s era of “liberal empire”—from around the 1850s until the 1930s—stands out as a time when the leading imperial power successfully underwrote economic globalization by exporting not just its goods, its people and its capital but also its social and political institutions. The two Anglophone empires have much in common. But they are also profoundly different.

  As we have seen, the United States is considered by some historians to be a more effective “hegemon” than Great Britain. Yet in strictly territorial terms, the latter was far the more impressive empire. At its maximum extent between the world wars the British Empire covered more than 13 million square miles, approximately 23 percent of the world’s land surface. Only a tiny fraction of that was accounted for by the United Kingdom itself: a mere 0.2 percent. Today, by contrast, the United States accounts for around 6.5 percent of the world’s surface, whereas its fourteen formal dependencies66—mostly Pacific islands acquired before the Second World War—amount to a mere 4,140 square miles of territory. Even if the United States had never relinquished the countries it at one time or another occupied in the Caribbean and Latin America between the Spanish-American War and the Second World War, the American empire today would amount to barely one-half of 1 percent of the world’s land surface. In demographic terms, the formal American empire is even more minuscule. Today the United States and its dependencies together account for barely 5 percent of the world’s population, whereas the British ruled between a fifth and a quarter of humanity at the zenith of their empire.

  On the other hand, the United States possesses a great many small areas of territory within notionally sovereign states that serve as bases for its armed services. Before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military had around 752 military installations in more than 130 countries.67 Significant numbers of American troops were stationed in 65 of these.68 Their locations significantly qualify President Bush’s assertion in his speech of February 26, 2003, that “after defeating enemies [in 1945], we did not leave behind occupying armies.”69 In the first year of his presidency, around 70,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Germany, and 40,000 in Japan. American troops have been in those countries continuously since 1945. Almost as many (36,500) were in South Korea, where the American presence has been uninterrupted since 1950. Moreover, new wars have meant new bases, like Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, acquired during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, or the Bishkek air base in Kyrgyzstan, an “asset” picked up during the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. At the time of writing, about 10,000 American troops are still based in Afghanistan, and it seems certain that a substantial force of 100,000 will have to remain in Iraq for at least the next few years.70

  Nor should it be forgotten what formidable military technology can be unleashed from these bases. Commentators like to point out that “the Pentagon’s budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations” and that “the US accounts for 40–45 per cent of all the defense spending of the world’s 189 states.”71 Such fiscal measures, impressive though they sound, nevertheless understate the lead currently enjoyed by American armed forces. On land the United States has 9,000 Ml Abrams tanks. The rest of the world has nothing that can compete. At sea the United States possesses nine “superc
arrier” battle groups. The rest of the world has none. And in the air the United States has three different kinds of undetectable stealth aircraft. The rest of the world has none. The United States is also far ahead in the production of “smart” missiles and pilotless high-altitude “drones.”72 The British Empire never enjoyed this kind of military lead over the competition. Granted, there was a time when its network of naval and military bases bore a superficial resemblance to America’s today.73 The number of troops stationed abroad was also roughly the same.74 The British too relished their technological superiority, whether it took the form of the Maxim gun or the Dreadnought. But their empire never dominated the full spectrum of military capabilities the way the United States does today. Though the Royal Navy ruled the waves, the French and later the Germans—to say nothing of the Americans—were able to build fleets that posed credible threats to that maritime dominance, while the British army was generally much smaller and more widely dispersed than the armies of the continental empires.