Niall Ferguson is professor of history at New York University, and rapidly becoming one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the United States.
His new book and television series, Colossus, is an attempt to persuade the US that it must take its imperial role seriously, becoming in the 21st century what Britain was in the 19th.
“Many parts of the world,” he claims, “would benefit from a period of American rule.” The US should stop messing about with “informal empire” and assert “direct rule” over countries that “require the imposition of some kind of external authority”. But it is held back by “the absence of a will to power”.
Colossus is erudite and intelligent. The quality of his research forces those of us who take a different view to raise our game. He has remembered what so many have chosen to forget: that the US is and has always been an empire — an “empire in denial”.
He shows that there was little difference between the westward expansion of the founding states and the growth of “the great land empires of the past”. He argues that its control of Central America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Middle East has long had an imperial character. He makes the interesting point that the US found, in its attempt to contain the Soviet Union, “the perfect ideology for its own peculiar kind of empire: the imperialism of anti-imperialism”.
But, he forgets those who are always forgotten by empire: the victims. He remembers, of course, that Saddam Hussein gassed his political opponents in Iraq. He forgets that the British did the same. He talks of the “genuine benefits in the form of free trade” granted by Britain to its colonies, but forgets the devastating famines this policy caused in India.
He writes of the “institutions, knowledge and culture” bequeathed to the colonies, but forgets that Britain deliberately destroyed the institutions, knowledge and culture (including hospitals and universities established by West Africans) of the colonised.
He forgets, too, that there was a difference between the interests of the British empire and those of its subject peoples. He writes of the massive British investments in “railways and port facilities” and “plantations to produce new cash crops” as if we seized the land, exploited the labour and exported the wealth of the colonies for the benefit of the natives.
Strangely, for one who knows empire so well, Ferguson also either forgets or fails to understand the current realities of the US’s informal rule. He dismisses the idea that the US wishes to control Middle Eastern oil reserves on the grounds that the US is already “oil rich”. It is not just that oil production peaked in the US in 1970. The US government knows that if you control the diminishing resource on which every other nation depends, you will, as that resource dries up, come to exercise precisely the kind of indirect rule that Ferguson documents elsewhere.
While brilliantly exposing the US’s imperial denial, he takes at face value almost every other story it tells about its role in the world. He accepts, for example, that the US went to war with Iraq because “its patience ran out” when Saddam failed to comply with the weapons inspectors. There is not a word about the way in which the US itself undermined and then destroyed the inspection missions.
When you forget, you must fill the memory gap with a story. And the story that all enthusiasts for empire tell themselves is that independent peoples have no one but themselves to blame for their misfortunes.
The problem faced by many African states, Ferguson insists, “is simply misgovernment: corrupt and lawless dictators whose conduct makes economic development impossible”. “Simply” misgovernment? This is a continent, let us remember, whose economies are largely controlled by the International Monetary Fund. As Joseph Stiglitz has shown, it has used its power to run a virtual empire for US capital, forcing poorer nations to remove their defences against financial speculators and corporate theft.
This is partly why some of the poorest African nations have the world’s most liberal trade regimes.
It is precisely because of forced liberalisation of the kind Ferguson recommends that growth in sub-Saharan Africa fell from 36% between 1960 and 1980 (when countries exercised more control over their economies) to minus 15% between 1980 and 1998. The world’s problem, Ferguson contends, is that the unaccountable government of the poor by the rich, which already has had such disastrous consequences, has not gone far enough.
The timing of all this is appalling. As the US has sought to impose direct imperial rule in Iraq, it has earned the hatred of much of the developing world. But we should never underestimate the willingness of the powerful to flatter themselves.
Unaccountable power requires a justifying myth, and the US government might just be dumb enough to believe the one that Ferguson has sought to revive.
But even he doesn’t seem to believe it. His book, above all, is a lament for the opportunities the US has lost. It is, he admits, so far from finding the will to recreate the British empire that the world could soon be left “without even one dominant imperial power”.
What better opportunity could there then be to press for global democracy?