Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline

by Alfred W. McCoy (Editor), Josep M. Fradera (Editor), Stephen Jacobson (Editor)

Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors.
    As Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power,
• erosion of economic and fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scale
• misuse of military power through micro-military misadventures
• breakdown of alliances among major powers
• weakened controls over the subordinate elites critical for any empire’s exercise of global power
• insufficient technological innovation to sustain global force projection.

Genres: History, Politics, United States

492 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2012

About the author

Dr Alfred W. McCoy is professor of SE Asian History at the U. of Wisconsin at Madison where he also serves as director of the Center for SE Asian Studies, a federally-funded National Resource Center. He's spent the past quarter-century writing about the politics & history of the opium trade. In addition to publications, he serves as a correspondent for the Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues in Paris & was plenary speaker at their '92 conference in Paris sponsored by the European Community. In '93, he presented a paper on the Mafia & the Asian heroin trade at the Conference in Honor of Giovanni Falcone in Palermo, Sicily. In 3/96, he was the plenary speaker at the 7th International Conference on Drug Harm Reduction in Hobart, Australia. He's served as expert witness & consultant to the Canadian Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical use of Drugs, the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs, the Minister of Administrative Services, Victoria State Parliament, & the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Drug Enforcement Policy & Support in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense. Recently, he worked as consultant & commentator for a tv documentary on the global heroin traffic produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, accompanying the crew to locations in Burma, Thailand, Vietnam & Laos.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection of revisionists talking about the messiness and indeterminacy of colonial endings and handoffs. The concept of "micromilitary adventurism" as an indicator of imperial senescence is deep but perhaps slipperier than it appears at first glance. The general point that formal coupures de pouvoir should nit distract us from continuities of institutional authority is also crucial. A missing element, perhaps, from all the essays, is any attention to subnational dynamics, that is the microgeographies of imperial practice, in both the colonies and the metropole.

[Mills College Library]

325.32 E5661 2012