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The end of the Cold War ushered in a moment of nearly pure American dominance on the world stage, yet that era now seems ages ago. Since 9/11 many informed commentators have focused on the relative decline of American power in the global system. While some have welcomed this as a salutary development, outspoken proponents of American power--particularly neoconservatives--have lamented this turn of events. As Jeanne Morefield argues in Empires Without Imperialism, the defenders of a liberal international order steered by the US have both invoked nostalgia for a golden liberal past and succumbed to amnesia, forgetting the decidedly illiberal trajectory of US continental and global expansion. Yet as she shows, the US is not the first liberal hegemon to experience a wave of misguided nostalgia for a bygone liberal order; England had a remarkably similar experience in the early part of the twentieth century. The empires of the US and the United Kingdom were different in character--the UK's was territorially based while the US relied more on pure economic power--yet both nations mouthed the rhetoric of free markets and political liberty. And elites in both painted pictures of the past in which first England and then the US advanced the cause of economic and political liberty throughout the world.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part One: Strategies of Antiquity
- Chapter One: Alfred Zimmern's "Oxford Paradox ": Displacement and Athenian Nostalgia
- Chapter Two:Falling in Love With Athens: Donald Kagan on America and Thucydides' Revisionism.
- Part Two: Metanarrative Strategies
- Chapter Three: The Round Table's Story of Commonwealth.
- Chapter Four: The Empire Whisperer: Niall Ferguson's Misdirection, Disavowal and the Perilousness of Neoliberal Time.
- Part Three: Strategies of Character
- Chapter Five: Empire's Handyman: Jan Smuts and the Politics of International Holism.
- Chapter Six: Michael Ignatieff's Tragedy: Just As We Are, Here and Now.
- Conclusion: Conceptual Horizons and Conditions of Possibility: Is This the Swaraj That We Want?
About the author
Jeanne Morefield is Associate Professor of Politics, Whitman College; author of Covenants without Swords (Princeton UP, 2005)
Summary
Empires Without Imperialism shows how at the times of their decline, elites in both the UK and the US utilized the attributes of an imagined past to essentialize the nature of the liberal state.
Additional text
Morefield offers an original, thought-provoking and century-spanning account of Anglo-American international thought. Her book deserves a wide readership among intellectual and international historians, political theorists and scholars of foreign policy, as well as anyone interested in contemporary international relations.
