Colossus

by Niall Ferguson

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  ———, “The Governance of Globalization: The Political Economy of Anglo-American Hegemony,” CESifo Working Paper, 1023 (September 2003).

  , and Armand Clesse (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001 (Aldershot/Burlington Vt., 2002).

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  ———, and ———, “Sovereign Risk, Credibility and the Gold Standard: 1870–1913 versus 1925–31,” NBER Working Paper, 9345 (November 2002).

  ———, and ———, “Globalization and Capital Markets,” in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago, 2003), pp. 121–83.

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  Osterhammel, Jürgen, “Britain and China, 1842–1914,” in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford/ New York, 1999), pp. 146–69.

  ———, “China,” in Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4: The Twentieth Century (Oxford/New York, 1999), pp. 643–66.

  Pagden, Anthony, “The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of the Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700,” in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 34–54.

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  ———, “Competitive Imperialism: British and American Tutelage and the Open Door,” panel contribution, “Empire as Education: British and American Teaching in the World,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting (January 9, 1998).

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  ———, “Croesus and Caesar: The Essential Transatlantic Symbiosis,” National Interest, 72 (Summer 2003), pp. 31–35.

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  ———, and ———, “Fundamental Sources of Long-Run Growth,” American Economic Review, 87, 2 (1997), pp. 184–88.

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  Schularick, Moritz, “Development Finance in Two Eras of Financial Globalization, (1890–1914 vs. 1990–2000),” draft chapter, Free University, Berlin (2003).

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  Smith, Neil, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).

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  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been written had I not gone to live in the United States in January 2003. It is the first fruit of what has proved to be a revitalizing transatlantic migration. I arrived in New York with a hypothesis about “American empire” in my luggage. Working in the world metropolis has forced me to do more than unpack it. The result is a synthesis—not just of the published and unpublished works cited in the bibliography, but also of innumerable conversations on the subject of American power, past, present and future. The past is, of course, the proper concern of the historian. However, what I have to say about recent events and possible futures gains, I hope, from being located in what is primarily a work of history. My principal aim is simply to encourage Americans to relate their country’s current predicament to the experiences of empires past. I write not as a carping critic but as an avid admirer of the United States who wants it to succeed in its imperial undertakings and who fears the consequences if it should fail.

  More than any previous book I have written, this book is the result of intercourse with people and institutions as well as with published and unpublished texts. My first and largest debt is to New York University, and in particular to the Leonard N. Stern School of Business. When the-then dean of the Stern School, George Daly, suggested that I might like to come and teach at NYU it seemed at first a fantastic idea. It turned out to be a fantastically good idea. I am grateful not only to him but also to his successor, Tom Cooley, as well as to all the faculty and administrative staff at Stern. I owe a special debt to Dick Sylla, whose friendship and intellectual companionship were among the strongest arguments for my move to West Fourth Street, and to Luis Cabral, his successor as chair of the economics department. It is usually invidious to name some names when an entire institution has been so welcoming, but a number of my colleagues at Stern and at NYU deserve special thanks, usually because they commented on seminar papers and other writings that eventually mutated into chapters of this book. My thanks, then, to David Backus, Tom Bender, Adam Brandenburger, Bill Easterly, Nicholas Economides, Shepard Forman, Tony Judt, Fabrizio Perri, Tom Sargent, Bill Silber, George Smith, Larry White and Bernard Yeung. Thanks for administrative and secretarial support are also due to Kathleen Collins, Melissa Felci and Janine Lanzisera (in New York), Katia Pisvin (in Oxford) and Maria Sanchez (in Stanford).