Hegemony and Empire
Professor Naill Ferguson
2004
In this short extract from Nail Ferguson’s recent book Colossus: The
Rise and Fall of the American Empire he explores the various current
definitions of terms such as hegemony, global leadership and empire.
Drawing on his extensive historical research on empires he outlines in
table format a Typology of Empire. This enables a comparison to be
made between the current America Empire and that of other empires in
particular the former British Empire.
Hegemony and Empire
Professor Naill Ferguson
2004
“I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank
boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central
American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of
racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 - 1912. I brought light to the
Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make
Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903 …….. Looking
back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he
could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines
operated on three continents.”
General Smedley D. Butler, US Marine Corps, 1935 1
Julius Caesar called himself imperator but never king. His adopted heir Augustus
preferred princeps. Emperors can call themselves what they like, and so can empires.
The kingdom of England was proclaimed an empire – by Henry VIII – before it
became one2. The United States by contrast has long been an empire, but eschews the
appellation.
Define the term empire narrowly enough, of course, and the United States can easily
be excluded from the category. Here is a typical example:
“Real imperial power ……… means a direct monopoly over the organisation and use
of armed might. It means direct control over the administration of justice and the
definition thereof. It means control over what is bought and sold, the terms of trade
and permission to trade …… Let us stop talking of an American empire, for there is
and there will be no such thing.”3
For a generation of realist writers, eager to rebut Soviet charges of American
imperialism, it became conventional to argue that the United States had only briefly
flirted with this kind of formal empire, beginning with the annexation of the
Philippines in 1898 and ending by the 1930s.4 What the United States did after the
end of the Second World War was, however, fundamentally different in character.
According to one recent formulation, it was “not an imperial state with a predatory
intent”; it was “more concerned with enhancing regional stability and security and
protecting international trade than enlarging its power at the expense of others.”5
If the United States was not an empire, then what was it? And what is it now that the
Soviet empire it was avowedly striving to “contain” is no more? “The only
superpower” – existing in a unipolar world – is one way of describing it.
Hyperpuisance was the (certainly ironical) coinage of the former French foreign
minister Hubert Verdine. Some writers favour more anaemic terms like global
leadership,6 while Philip Bobbitt simply regards the United States as a particularly
successful form of nation-state.7 A recent series of seminars at Harvard’s Kennedy
School opted for the inoffensive term primacy. But by far the most popular term
among writers on international relations remains hegemony8.
What is this thing called hegemony? Is it merely a euphemism for empire, or does it
describe the role of the primus inter pares, the leader of an alliance, rather than a ruler
over subject peoples? And what are the hegemon’s motives? Does it exert power
beyond its borders for its own self-interested purposes? Or is it engaged altruistically
in the provision of international public goods?
The word was used originally to describe the relationship of Athens to the other Greek
city-states when they leagued together to defend themselves against the Persian
Empire; Athens led but did not rule over the others9. In so-called world-system
theory, by contrast, hegemony means more than mere leadership, but less than
outright empire10. In yet another, narrower definition, the hegemon’s principal
function in the twentieth century was to underwrite a liberal international commercial
and financial system11. In what became known, somewhat inelegantly, as hegemonic
stability theory, the fundamental question of the postwar period was how far and for
how long the United States would remain committed to free trade once other
economies, benefiting from precisely the liberal economic order made possible by US
hegemony, began to catch up. Would Americans revert to protectionist policies in an
effort to perpetuate their hegemony or stick with free trade at the risk of experiencing
relative decline? This has been called the hegemon’s dilemma that Britain had faced
before 191412.
Yet if the British Empire was America’s precursor as the global hegemon, might not
the United States equally well be Britain’s successor as an Anglo-phone empire? Most
historians would agree that if anything, American economic power after 1945
exceeded that of Britain after 1815, a comparable watershed of power following the
final defeat of Napoleonic France. First, the extraordinary growth in productivity
achieved between around 1890 and 1950 eclipsed anything previously achieved by
Britain, even in the first flush of the Industrial Revolution. Secondly, the United
States very deliberately used its power to advance multilateral and mutually balanced
tariff reductions under the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (later the World
Trade Organisation). Thus the reductions of tariffs achieved in the Kennedy Round
(1967) and in subsequent “rounds” of negotiation owed much to American pressures
such as the“conditionality” attached to loans from the Washington-based
International Monetary Fund. By contrast, the nineteenth-century spread of free trade
and free navigation – the “public goods” most commonly attributed to the British
Empire – were as much spontaneous phenomena as they were direct consequences of
British power. Thirdly, successive US governments allegedly took advantage of the
dollar’s role as a key currency before and after the breakdown of Bretton Woods. The
US government had access to a “gold mine of paper” and could therefore collect a
subsidy from foreigners in the form of seigniorage (by selling foreigners dollars and
dollar-denominated assets that then depreciated in value)13. The gold standard offered
Britain no such advantages, and perhaps even some disadvantages. Finally, the Pax
Britannica depended mainly on the Royal Navy and was less “penetrative” than the
“full-spectrum dominance” aimed for today by the American military. For a century,
with the sole exception of the Crimean War, Britain felt unable to undertake military
interventions in Europe, the theatre most vital to its own survival, and when it was
forced to do so in 1914 and in 1939, it struggled to prevail14. We arrive at the
somewhat paradoxical conclusion that a hegemon can be more powerful than an
empire.
The distinction between hegemony and empire would be legitimate if the term empire
did simply mean, as so many American commentators seem to assume, direct rule
over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. But
students of imperial history have a more sophisticated conceptual framework than
that. At the time, British colonial administrators like Frederick Lugard clearly
understood the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” rule; large parts of the
British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly – that is, through the agency
of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced
by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on “the
imperialism of free trade”. This encapsulated the way the Victorians used their naval
and financial power to open the markets of countries outside their colonial ambit15.
Equally illuminating is the now widely accepted distinction between “formal” and
“informal empire”. The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but
the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on its
fiscal and monetary policy that Argentina’s independence was heavily qualified16 . In
the words of one of the few modern historians to attempt a genuinely comparative
study of the subject, an empire is “first and foremost, a very great power that has left
its mark on the international relations of an era …….. a polity that rules over wide
territories and many peoples, since the management of space and multi-ethnicity is
one of the great perennial dilemmas of empire …… An empire is by definition …….
not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its peoples. [But] by a process of
assimilation of peoples of democratisation of institutions empires can transform
themselves into multinational federations or even nation states.”17 It is possible to be
still more precise than this. In the table below I have attempted a simple typology
intended to capture the diversity of forms that can be subsumed under the category
“empires”. For example, an empire could be an oligarchy at home, aiming to acquire
raw materials from abroad, thereby increasing international trade, using military
methods, imposing a market economy, in the interests of its ruling elite, with a
hierarchical social character. Another empire might be a democracy at home, mainly
interested in security, providing peace as a public good, ruling mainly through firms
and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), promoting a mixed economy, in the
interests of all inhabitants, with an assimilative social character.
The first column reminds us that imperial power can be acquired by more than one
type of political system. The self-interested objectives of imperial expansion (column
two) range from the fundamental need to ensure the security of the metropolis by
imposing order on enemies at its (initial) borders to the collection of rents and
taxation from subject peoples, to say nothing of the perhaps more obvious prizes of
new land for settlement, raw materials, treasure and manpower, all of which, it should
be emphasised, would need to be available at lower prices than they would cost in free
exchange with independent peoples if the cost of conquest and colonisation were to be
justified18. At the same time, an empire may provide “public-goods” – this is,
intended or unintended benefits of imperial rule flowing not to the rulers but to the
ruled and indeed beyond to third parties: less conflict, increased trade or investment,
improved justice or governance, better education (which may or may not be
associated with religious conversion, something we would not nowadays regard as a
public good) or improved material conditions.
Typology of Empires
Metropolitan
System
Self-interested
Objectives
Public
Goods
Methods of
Rule
Economic
System
Cui Bono?
Social
Character
Tyranny
Security
Peace
Military
Plantation
Ruling Elite
Genocidal
Aristocracy
Communications
Trade
Bureaucracy
Feudal
Metropolitan
Hierarchical
Oligarchy
Land
Investment
Settlement
Mercantilist
Settlers
Converting
Democracy
Raw Materials
Law
Market
Local Elites
Assimilative
Treasure
Governance
Nongovernmental
Organisations
Mixed
All
Inhabitants
Manpower
Education
Firms
Planned
Rents
Conversion
Delegation to
Local Elites
Taxation
Health
The fourth column tells us that imperial rule can be implemented by more than one
kind of functionary: soldiers, civil servants, settlers, voluntary associations, firms, and
local elites all can in different ways impose the will of the centre on the periphery.
There are almost as many varieties of imperial economic system, ranging from
slavery to laissez-faire, from one form of serfdom (feudalism) to another (the planned
economy). Nor is it by any means a given that the benefits of empire should flow
simply to the metropolitan society. It may only be the elite of that society that reaps
the benefits of empire (as Lance E Davis and R. A. Huttenback claimed in the case of
the British Empire)19; it may be colonists drawn from lower-income groups in the
metropole; it may in some cases be subject peoples or the elites within subject
societies. Finally, the social character of an empire – to be precise, the attitudes of the
rulers towards the ruled – may vary. At one extreme lies the genocidal empire of
National Socialist Germany, intent on the annihilation of specific ethnic groups and
the deliberate degradation of others. At the other extreme lies the Roman model of
empire, in which citizenship was obtainable under certain conditions regardless of
ethnicity (a model with obvious applicability to the case of the United States). In the
middle lies the Victorian model of complex racial and social hierarchy, in which
inequalities of wealth and status were mitigated by a general (though certainly not
unqualified) principle of equality before the law. The precise combination of all these
variables determines, among other things, the geographical extent – and of course the
duration – of an empire.
With a broader and more sophisticated definition of empire, it seems possible to
dispense altogether with the term hegemony. Instead, it can be argued with some
plausibility that the American empire has up until now, with a few exceptions,
preferred indirect rule to direct rule and informal empire to formal empire. Indeed, its
cold war–era hegemony might better be understood as an “empire by invitation”20.
The question is whether or not the recent, conspicuously uninvited invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq presage a transition to more direct and formal imperial
structures. Adapting the terminology of the Typology of Empires table above, the
American empire can therefore be summed up as follows. It goes without saying that
it is a liberal democracy and market economy, though its polity has some illiberal
characteristics21 and its economy has a surprisingly high level of state intervention
(“mixed” might be more accurate than “market”). It is primarily concerned with its
own security and maintaining international communications and, secondarily, with
ensuring access to raw materials (principally, though not exclusively, oil). It is also in
the business of providing a limited number of public goods: peace, by intervening
against some bellicose regimes and in some civil wars; freedom of the seas and skies
for trade; and a distinctive form of “conversion” usually called Americanisation,
which is carried out less by old –style Christian missionaries than by the exporters of
American consumer goods and entertainment. Its methods of formal rule are primarily
military in character; its methods of informal rule rely heavily on nongovernmental
organisations and corporations and, in some cases, local elites.
Who benefits from this empire? Some would argue, with the economist Paul
Krugman, that only its wealthy elite does – specifically, that part of its wealthy elite
associated with the Republican Party and the oil industry22. The conventional wisdom
of the Left is that the United States uses its power to impoverish people in the
developing world. Others would claim that many millions of people around the world
have benefited in some way or another from the existence of America’s empire – not
least the West Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans who were able to prosper
during the cold war under the protection of the American nuclear “umbrella” – and
that the economic losers of the post-cold war era, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa,
are victims not of American power but of its absence. For the American empire is
limited in its extent. It conspicuously lacks the voracious appetite for territorial
expansion overseas that characterised the empires of the West European seaboard. It
prefers the idea that foreigners will Americanise themselves without the need for
formal rule. Even when it conquers, it resists annexation – one reason why the
duration of its offshore imperial undertakings has tended to be, and will in all
probability continue to be, relatively short. Indeed, a peculiarity of American
imperialism – perhaps its principal shortcoming – is its excessively short time
horizon.
“The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist.
MacDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas …….. And the
hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to
flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”
Thomas Friedmann, 1999, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalisation
(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York), p.373.
Source:
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, London, 2004, Price UK£8.99
Pages: 7 - 13
ISBN 0-141-01700-7
Alternative Perspectives and Analysis:
For those seeking an alternative historical perspective and analysis from the point of
view of the colonised see Walter Rodney’s ground breaking and classic study on
Africa:
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Bogle-L’Ouveture Publications (Jamaica &
London), 1972.
And on Slavery see:
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
References
1
Schmidt, Hans, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D Butler and the Contradictions of
American Military History (Lexington, Ky., 1987), p231. The quotation comes from an article
written by General Butler – the most decorated marine of his generation – in an article he
wrote for the magazine Common Sense in 1935.
Davis, R.R., The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093 –
1343 (Oxford, 2000).
2
3
Ibid.
4
Schwabe, Klaus, The Global Role of the United States and Its Imperial Consequences, 18981973, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel (eds) Imperialism and After:
Continuities and Discontinuities, (London, 1986) pp13-33. And in the words of Michael
Mandelbaum, “was given up in the twentieth century:” Mandelbaum, M., Ideas That
Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century,
(New York, 2002) p87.
5
Kupchan, Charles A., The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics
of the Twenty-first Century (New York, 2002) p228.
6
Mandelbaum, M., Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in
the Twenty-first Century, (New York, 2002) p88.
Bobbitt sees imperialism as a thing of the past, having been one of the “historic, strategic
and constitutional innovations” of the “state-nation” in the two centuries before 1713 and
1914. Bobbitt, Phillip, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and Course of History (New York,
2002).
7
8
Kagan, Robert, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New
York, 2003) p88; Kupchan, Charles A., The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy
and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (New York, 2002) p266.
9
Johansson, S. Ryan, National Size and International Power: A Demographic Perspective on
Hegemony, in Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Britain
1846 – 1914 and the United States 1941 – 2001 (Aldershot/Burlington , Vt., 2002) p352.
A hegemonic power was “a state ……… able to impose its set of rules on the interstate
system, and thereby create temporarily a new political order,” and which offered “certain
extra advantages for enterprises located within it or protected by it, advantages not accorded
by the ‘market’ but obtained through political pressure” Wallerstein, Immanuel, Three
Hegemonies in Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Britain
1846 – 1914 and the United States 1941 – 2001 (Aldershot/Burlington , Vt., 2002) p357.
10
This notion can be traced back to Charles Kindleberger’s seminal work on the interwar
world economy, which described a kind of “interregnum” after British hegemony, but before
American. See Kindleberger, Charles, The World in Depression, 1929 – 1939 (Berkeley,
Calif., 1973).
11
12
Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1989).
13
Calleo, David, Reflections on American Hegemony in the Postwar Era, in Patrick Karl
O’Brien and Armand Clesse, (eds.), Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846 – 1914 and the United
States 1941 – 2001 (Aldershot/Burlington , Vt., 2002). See also Rosecrance, Richard, Croesus
and Caesar: The Essential Transatlantic Symbiosis, National Interest, 72 (Summer 2003),
pp31-35.
O’Brien, Patrick Karl, The Pax Britannica and American Hegemony: Precedent,
Antecedent or Just Another History? in Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, (eds.), Two
Hegemonies: Britain 1846 – 1914 and the United States 1941 – 2001 (Aldershot/Burlington ,
Vt., 2002), pp3-64.
14
15
Gallagher, John, and Robinson, Ronald, The Imperialism of Free Trade, Economic History
Review, 2nd Series, 6 (1953), pp1-15.
16
See Robert Freeman Smith, Latin America, the United States and the European Powers,
1830 – 1930, in Leslie Bethall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol.4
(Cambridge, 1986),p85-88 also Cain, P.J and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688 -2000,
2nd ed. (Harlow, 2001).
17
Lieven, Dominic, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, (London, 2000), p.xiv.
18
See for an attempt at a formal economic theory of empire Grossman, Herschel I., and Juan
Mendoza, Annexation and Conquest? The Economics of Empire Building, NBER Working
Paper, 8109 (February 2001).
19
Davis, Lance E., and R. A. Huttenback, Mammom and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political
Economy of British Imperialism, 1860 – 1912 (Cambridge, 1986).
Lundestad, Geir, The American “Empire” and Other Studies of US Foreign Policy in a
Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 1990).
20
21
Zararia, Fareed, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New
York, 2003), p162.
22
For some recent examples, see Joseph Nye, The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians:
How America Should Wield Its Power, Economist, March 23, 2002; Jonathan Freeland,
Rome AD ….. Rome DC, Guardian, September 18, 2002; Robert Harris, Return of the
Romans, Sunday Times, August 31, 2003