Colossus: The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire

Is America the new world empire? Presidents from Lincoln to Bush may have denied it but, as Niall Ferguson's brilliant and provocative book shows, the US is in many ways the greatest imperial power of all time. What's more, it always has been an empire, expanding westwards throughout the nineteenth century and rising to global dominance in the twentieth. But is today's American colossus really equipped to play Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on its shoulders? The United States, Ferguson reveals, is an empire running on empty, weakened by chronic defecits of money, manpower and political will. When the New Rome falls, he warns, its collapse may come from within.'One of the timeliest and most topical books to have appeared in recent years' Literary Review'Yet another tour de force from a writer who displays all his usual gifts of forceful polemic, unconventional intelligence and elegant prose ... guaranteed to spark fierce debate' Irish Times'A bravura exploration of why Americans are not cut out to be imperialists but nonetheless have an empire. Vigorous, substantive, and worrying' Timothy Garton Ash

Is America the new world empire? Presidents from Lincoln to Bush may have denied it but, as Niall Ferguson's brilliant and provocative book shows, the US is the greatest military and economic colossus of all time. What's more, it always has been an empire, with its founding fathers battling westwards for territory and their successors spreading freedom across the world - at gunpoint if necessary. Yet is the US really equipped to play Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on its shoulders? America, Ferguson reveals, is now an empire running on empty, backing away from the crucial imperial commitments of time, money and manpower - and resting on perilous financial foundations. When the New Rome falls, its collapse may come from within.

Whether China can overtake the US as the largest economy in the near future, therefore, becomes a worrying question for many Americans, concerned as they are about the possibility of the US losing its status as the world's strongest power. With such worries comes the "China threat" fallacy, which has been combined with the conspiracy theory to paint a picture of how China's rise poses a threat to the security of the US and the world at large.

The American Empire Project, www.americanempireproject.com/index.html. Set up by Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser and based around the related book series they edit for Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project focuses on the character and nature of American imperial power, providing a list of relevant books, opinion pieces, information, and a vibrant forum for discussion. Accessed July 18, 2009.

As the various essays here illustrate, there is no consensus as to what signifieds--still less what referents--are subsumed by this volatile signifier, no agreement as to whether it is 'centripetal' or 'centrifugal', a function of the economic base or the cultural superstructure, a sociopolitical, electronic or even primarily discursive phenomenon--the rise of English as universal lingua franca. Cultural commentators differ even in the precise terminology to be used. Michael Murphy discusses Bayly's hypothesis of 'archaic globalisation', while Sharon Ouditt invokes de Sousa Santos' 'localised globalism'. Holderness and Loughrey cite Gabardi's rebarbative 'glocalization' to define 'overlapping fields of global-local linkages ... globalized panlocality'. For some, its development is identical with the evolution of the European empires from the sixteenth century onwards. Edward Larrissy however stresses the distinction between colonial and high imperialist eras in the construction of modern Ireland, and the crucial influence of the multinational corporation. What Immanuel Wallerstein calls the 'transnationality of commodity chains' is considered by several contributors, and addressed directly in Liam Connell's survey of... 2b1af7f3a8