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"America is in trouble at home. Difficulties abound: unemployment and poverty for many, financial pressure for most, opulence for just a privileged few. Yet America is also active abroad, in a role that is equally troubling and difficult. The book explores the relationship between problems at home and challenges abroad, to see if by reducing the latter we can improve the former.. It does so by examining the fate of economies and societies that have also briefly enjoyed global dominance. The premise of the book is that, by looking back at what went wrong for them, we might go forward avoiding similar mistakes. The empires that preceded us - and left the greatest imprint upon us - are the ones chosen for particular attention here: the empires of Rome, Spain, Britain and Russia (both Tsarist and Soviet). They ultimately fell. Must America follow suit, or can we learn from their mistakes how best to avoid our own?"--
List of contents
Contents Introduction PART I: THE PROBLEM 1. The Nature of Our Contemporary Condition 2. The Question of Empire PART II: THE PARALLELS 3. The Glory that was Rome 4. Spain: The Rise and Fall of a Dynastic Empire 5. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire 6. Russian Empires Old and New 7. Lessons of Empire PART III: THE RECKONING 8. A New Rome on the Potomac? 9. Towards a Better America Notes
About the author
David Coates holds the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University, USA. He previously held personal chairs at the universities of Leeds and Manchester in the UK. He has written extensively on US and UK public policy, comparative political economy, and the history of labor movements.
Summary
The focus of the book is the cost of empire, particularly the cost in the American case – the internal burden of American global leadership. The book builds an argument about the propensity of external responsibilities to undermine the internal strength, raising the question of the link between weakening and the global spread of American power.
