America: an Empire in Denial By NIALL FERGUSON
Once there was an empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world's population, covered about the same proportion of the Earth's land surface, and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British empire was the biggest empire ever, bar none. How an archipelago of rainy islands off the northwest coast of Europe came to rule the world is one of the fundamental questions not just of British but of world history.
Why should Americans care about the history of the British empire? There are two reasons. The first is that the United States was a product of that empire -- and not just in the negative sense that it was founded in the first successful revolt against British imperial rule. America today still bears the indelible stamp of the colonial era, when, for the better part of two centuries, the majority of white settlers on the Eastern Seaboard were from the British Isles. Second, and perhaps more important, the British empire is the most commonly cited precedent for the global power currently wielded by the United States. America is the heir to the empire in both senses: offspring in the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is, Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited? I do not believe that question can be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell; and of what it did, not just for Britain but for the world as a whole.
Was the British empire a good or bad thing? It is nowadays quite conventional to think that, on balance, it was a bad thing. One obvious reason for the empire's fall into disrepute was its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself. This is no longer a question for historical judgment alone; it has become a political, and potentially a legal, issue. The questions recently posed by an eminent historian on BBC television may be said to encapsulate the current conventional wisdom. "How," he asked, "did a people who thought themselves free end up subjugating so much of the world? ... How did an empire of the free become an empire of slaves?'' How, despite their "good intentions," did the British sacrifice "common humanity" to "the fetish of the market"?
Despite a certain patronizing fondness for postcolonial England, most Americans need little persuading that the British empire was a bad thing. The Declaration of Independence itemizes "a long train of abuses and usurpations" by the British imperial government, "pursuing invariably the same Object," namely "a design to reduce [the American colonists] under absolute Despotism" and to establish "an absolute Tyranny over these States." A few clear-sighted Americans -- notably Alexander Hamilton -- saw from an early stage that the United States would necessarily become an empire in its own right; the challenge, in his eyes, was to ensure that it was a "republican empire," one that did not sacrifice liberty at home for the sake of power abroad. Even Hamilton's critics were covert imperialists: Jefferson's expanding frontier implied colonization at the expense of Native Americans. Yet the anti-imperialist strain in American political rhetoric proved -- and continues to prove -- very resistant to treatment.
full: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i29/29b00701.htm
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
