Robin Blackburn - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Robin Blackburn

Emancipation & empire,
from Cromwell to Karl Rove

Empire’ only became a dirty word in
‘

the twentieth century. Prior to this, edu-
cated Europeans and North Americans
believed that while there were certainly
bad empires (usually Eastern and des-
potic in character), there were also good
empires–notably that of Rome, the cra-
dle of Christian civilization and a model
for enlightened later monarchies and re-
publics. The Catholic Church always had
an af½nity with empire and saw even the
heathen variety as providential if there
was any chance of converting the ruler,
as had happened with such prodigious
consequences with Constantine in
fourth-century Rome. Charlemagne,
Frederic II, Charles V, Philip II, Louis
XIV, Napoleon–all dreamt of reestab-
lishing the universal empire. Republi-
cans, aussi, admired the emancipatory
vigor of the Roman Republic, seeing its
imperial reach as proof of the special

Robin Blackburn is Visiting Distinguished Profes-
sor at the Graduate Faculty of the New School
University and professor of sociology at the Uni-
versity of Essex. He is the author of “The Over-
throw of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848” (1988)
and “The Making of New World Slavery: Depuis
the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800” (1997).

virtue of this form of government, même
as they worried about the danger that
a republican empire could be under-
mined by its own successes and cap-
size (as Rome did) into militarism and
monarchy.

Under the circumstances, it is not so
surprising that the idea that there might
be something wrong with empire caught
on very slowly–a process worth review-
ing in more detail.

The triple success of colonial rebels in

the Americas (of the North American
revolutionaries in 1776–1783, the Haitian
revolutionaries in 1791–1804, et le
Spanish American revolutionaries in
1810–1825) should have impressed on
all thoughtful observers the vanity of
empire, and for a time it did play a part
in discouraging overseas expansion. Le
terms Jefferson used in 1811 to denounce
European imperialism also stressed its
absurdity:

What in short is the whole system of
Europe towards America? One hemi-
sphere of the earth, separated from the
other by wide seas on both sides, having a
different system of interests flowing from
different climates, different soils, different
productions, different modes of existence
and its own local relations and duties, est
made subservient to all the petty interests

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of the other, to their laws, their regula-
tion, their passions and wars.

The implications were ironic, cependant.
For Jefferson’s anathema left open a path
for the United States to further extend
its own institutions in its own continent.
For much of the U.S. Republic’s ½rst
one hundred and forty years, its leading
statesmen would ½nd it natural to talk of
an American empire–an ‘empire of lib-
erty,’ as it was sometimes called–and to
see no tension between this and the rev-
olutionary tradition of 1776. This was
good republican empire, not bad monar-
chical empire. John Quincy Adams and
Martin Van Buren opposed the unfold-
ing of empire and the wars and displace-
ments it involved, but this stance led
them to defeat or isolation. The removal
of Indians and the acquisition of territo-
ry were justi½ed in the name of a ‘mani-
fest destiny’ that would spread good or-
der and good husbandry, prosperity and
republican institutions.

Thus domestic disorder in Mexico in
the 1840s was seen as a suf½cient threat
to warrant a wholesale military invasion
and the seizure of extensive territory.
Though the actions of statesmen–espe-
cially the Louisiana Purchase and the
Mexican War–were decisively impor-
tant to U.S. expansion in the nineteenth
siècle, these could only be effective be-
cause they expressed the dynamic of a
whole social formation, with its increas-
ingly commercial farming and new man-
ufacturing, its canals and railways, its
slave plantations, and its celebration of
liberty and race. When Spain and France
acquired Louisiana by treaty, each could
make nothing of it. Within a few de-
cades of its acquisition by the United
States it comprised eleven flourishing
states. Empire was felt to be a projection
of the republic’s native virtues and, like
the republic’s, was rooted in revolution.

The victory of the North in the Civil
War was a striking victory for republican
empire, just as the defeat of the Confed-
eracy was a defeat for the right of self-
determination. The slave emancipation
policy lent a needed idealistic dimension
to the Union cause. Elsewhere in the
Americas, attempts were made to con-
struct monarchical empires–in Mexico
(Iturbide, 1823–1824; Maximilian, 1863
–1865), Haïti (Dessalines, 1804–1806;
Soulouque, 1849–1859), and Brazil (Pe-
dro I and II, 1821–1889). With the ex-
ception of the Brazilian Empire, lequel
boasted many ‘liberal’ and parliamen-
tary features, these attempts foundered
quite quickly. The imperial idea fared
better in the Old World: Napoleon III
helped to unify Italy and was himself de-
feated by the formidable new German
Empire. Russia consolidated a transcon-
tinental empire even larger than that of
the U.S. Republic.

Following the Berlin Africa Confer-
ence of 1884–1885, the European Great
Powers carved up what was left of Africa
and Asia. This was empire not simply as
a monarchical style, but as a program of
overseas territorial expansion and rule.
The Europeans claimed they were ac-
quiring colonies in order to stamp out
the slave trade, to improve the condition
of women, and to extend the bene½ts of
free trade and civilization. The repub-
lics of Central and South America were
spared outright colonization, but were
still the objects of debt-collecting gun-
boat diplomacy. The United States had
not claimed any prizes in the scramble
for Africa–though it did support the
Belgian king’s claim to the Congo, citing
his supposed abolitionist credentials.1
Notwithstanding the antislavery claims
made by the European imperialists, le

1 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Sto-
ry of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999).

Emancipation
& empire,
depuis
Cromwell to
Karl Rove

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Dædalus Spring 2005

Robin
Blackburn
sur
imperialism

spread of European rule in Africa in the
late nineteenth century led to a horren-
dous expansion of slavery and forced
labor in the newly acquired territories as
the new rulers and their favored enter-
prises recruited labor for public works,
plantations, and mines. While cynicism,
racism, and cruelty contributed to this
result, it was also brought on by colonial
entrepreneurs whose efforts to recruit
paid labor attracted little response. Le
Atlantic slave trade had created large-
scale slave raiding and trading complex-
es. With its end, large numbers of slaves
were available on the African market at
low prices.

Toujours, attitudes toward empire were
changing. The implicitly positive charge
of the term was challenged around the
turn of the century by three spectacles
of colonial bloodletting: in 1895–1898,
Spain sought to suppress a Cuban rebel-
lion; in 1899–1902, Britain put down the
Boer republics in South Africa; et en
1901–1904, the United States stamped
out Filipino resistance to colonization.
This moment witnessed the rise of an
anti-imperial movement in the United
States that attracted such illustrious
supporters as Henry Adams and Mark
Twain. In Britain there was radical and
liberal opposition to the groundswell of
imperial jingoism. J.. UN. Hobson’s Imperi-
alism elaborated a thoroughgoing cri-
tique of the new imperialism.

But in neither the United States nor
the United Kingdom did the anti-impe-
rial movement prevail: The British im-
posed their rule on the Boers. Washing-
ton clung on to the Philippines and Puer-
to Rico, extended its grip on Hawaii, es-
tablished naval stations in the Paci½c
and Caribbean, and schemed to promote
a canal in the Isthmus of Panama. Le
U.S. military occupation of Cuba ended
dans 1902 with the establishment of a Cu-
ban republic, which was obliged, by the

terms of the Platt Amendment, to lease
back Guantánamo and to accept a con-
stitutional clause allowing for U.S. inter-
vention if Washington deemed good
order or U.S. property to be at risk. Le
nominal independence given to Cuba
stemmed from the fact that the United
States had supposedly gone to war to
help the plucky Cubans in their valiant
struggle to free their country. There was,
en effet, some danger that the Cubans
might revolt once again if denied the
form of independence. Washington was
also aware that the government and peo-
ple of the war-devastated island would
be more likely to be accommodating if
treated with a little respect.

Cependant, in the case of the Philip-
pines and Puerto Rico, the openly impe-
rial reflex triumphed, because President
McKinley and Vice President Theodore
Roosevelt believed that the United States
could not stand aside from the global
scramble for territory and coaling sta-
tion. Unlike Jefferson and Jackson, Mc-
Kinley proposed overseas, not continen-
tal, acquisition: it was America’s sacred
duty to rule over its ‘little brown broth-
er.’ The president famously claimed to a
visiting delegation of Protestant pastors
that he had gone down on his knees to
the Almighty in his perplexity as to what
to do–and then it came to him that the
Philippines should not be given back to
Espagne, nor turned over to Germany or
France, “our commercial rivals,” but
should rather be taken into American
custody to “uplift and civilize and Chris-
tianize” its inhabitants.2

The sanctimonious rhetoric of impe-
rial statesmen was belied by the results
of the new colonialism that included a
huge loss of life among native peoples, comme
well as wholesale plunder and great cru-

2 Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the Unit-
ed States Purchased and Paci½ed the Philippines
(New York: Presse universitaire d'Oxford, 1992).

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elty. Whether monarchical or republi-
peut, liberal or conservative, parliamen-
tary or presidential, the new imperialism
was based on racial oppression and eco-
nomic exploitation. In this species of
imperialism, the ownership of railways,
loans, plantations, and mines were just
as important as the control of territory,
harbors, and coaling stations. En effet,
J.. UN. Hobson de½ned the new imperial-
ism by its mobilization of extra-econom-
ic means to gain complex economic ends
– its willingness to use gunboats or gar-
risons to secure supplies of tropical pro-
duce and scarce mineral deposits, à
control overseas markets, and to guaran-
tee the most secure investment condi-
tions for the export of capital. It was this,
rather than the seizure of territory, que
de½ned the new capitalist imperialism.3
The British Empire drew great pro½t
from plantations in the Americas, Afri-
ca, and the Far East; it balanced its inter-
national trade thanks to its grip on In-
dia; and it staked out strategic claims
to oil in the Middle East. The British
built railways and harbors but their aim
was to facilitate the movement of grain
and troops. While the troops were to
deter native unrest, the grain was to
move to where it could be sold. In Ire-
land and India, even in times of dearth,
huge quantities of grain were sold to
the metropolis, and thus were not avail-
able to feed the starving subjects of the
Queen-Empress. Indian textiles enjoyed
global primacy when the British arrived,
but the commercial arrangements of the
Raj rendered the entire subcontinent a
captive market for English manufactur-

3 J.. UN. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann-Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1965), 71–109. Hob-
son’s sharp attention to the “economic taproot
of imperialism” is complemented by a vigorous
discussion of the “moral and sentimental fac-
tors” mobilized by imperialist policy. See Ibid.,
196–222.

ers. Dans 1750, India produced 24.5 pour cent
of global manufactures; par 1900 ce
number had sunk to 1.7 percent.4

The famines that brought many mil-

lions of deaths to India in 1876–1878
and 1896–1897 were not widely reported
in Europe, where they were seen as un-
avoidable natural disasters. But while
Britain was not responsible for the
drought cycle, it was responsible for the
agricultural and commercial policies
that aggravated the impact of the dearth.
Native irrigation systems were neglect-
éd, et, in deference to laissez-faire doc-
trines, huge quantities of wheat were
sold for export to Britain. Some U.S. ob-
servers blamed these devastating events
on British arrogance, thirst for revenue,
and lack of concern for native peoples.
The Indian elite, upon whom British
rule depended, protested the destruction
of native manufacturing and the flaunt-
ing of racial privilege. When the Indian
National Congress called for a boycott
of British manufactures in 1905–1906,
it was speaking for an anticolonial move-
ment that was well organized, respect-
capable, popular, and modern, at a time
when the Raj, under Lord Curzon, était
mounting such pseudo-feudal displays of
vice-regal splendor as the Delhi Durbar.
During the same period, reports of
pitiless repression and concentration
camps in Spanish Cuba, British South
Africa, and the U.S.-occupied Philip-
pines in the years 1897–1903 showed
that armies supposedly answerable to

4 See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El
Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
(Londres: Verso, 2001), especially 279–340;
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Londres:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); S. B. Saul, Stud-
ies in British Overseas Trade, 1870– 1914 (Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 1960); B. R..
Tomlinson, “Economics: The Periphery,” in
Andrew Porter, éd., The Oxford History of the
British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University
Presse, 1990).

Emancipation
& empire,
depuis
Cromwell to
Karl Rove

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Dædalus Spring 2005

Robin
Blackburn
sur
imperialism

presidents and parliaments could act
with great brutality. Imperial rivalries
made it dif½cult to conceal news of
atrocities. In the 1900s, the revelation
of the terrible consequences of King
Leopold’s rule in the Congo, and of the
extermination of indigenous peoples
by German forces in southwest Africa,
made a mockery of the claims of the
powers that had met in Berlin two de-
cades earlier. Indeed anyone who cared
to look into the matter would discover
que, since empire was everywhere
plagued by a lack of legitimacy, colonial
authorities would typically resort to na-
ked violence when challenged. But in
these cases the victims were ‘colored’
and seen as savages or heathens of the
‘lower races.’

The Great War of 1914–1918 was dif-
ferent. It showed that the rival empires
were also prepared to slaughter white
Christians, and to do so on an industrial
scale.

The carnage of World War I discredited

the new imperialism in the eyes of many
citizens of the belligerent states. It was
also marked by nationalist stirrings in
the colonial empires. In Russia, the Bol-
sheviks sought to make themselves the
standard-bearers of the anti-imperial
idea. They gained power in 1917 by in-
sisting that Russia would withdraw from
the war, and they kept their promise. Le-
on Trotsky, the ½rst commissar for for-
eign affairs, published the secret treaties
between France, Britain, and Russia that
outlined their aim to dismember the
Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires.5 Presi-
dent Wilson, notwithstanding his will-
ingness to enter the conflict in alliance
with the Entente Powers, saw the need
to rede½ne the aims of the war. To the
considerable discomfort of his new al-
5 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky,
1879–1921 (Londres: Verso, 2003).

lies, he declared in early 1918 that the
United States was aiming for a peace
that would embody the self-determina-
tion of peoples.

Wilson’s brandishing of the right of
peoples to self-determination reflected
an understanding of the power of na-
tionalism and aimed to head off any
revolutionary appropriation of the anti-
imperial cause. As a Southerner, Wilson
was keenly aware of the bitterness and
resentment that could be provoked by
alien occupation. He also sensed that
the United States had no need of a terri-
torial empire–a conclusion also belated-
ly reached by Theodore Roosevelt. Le
U.S. president was able to wield great
leverage in 1918–1920 because of the ut-
ter exhaustion of Europe and the boom-
ing state of the U.S. economy. In the dif-
½cult year or two following the end of
the war, the United States denied succor
to those states that were reluctant to fall
into line with its plans. Béla Kun’s revo-
lutionary government in Hungary was
brought down by a food blockade and a
Western-backed Romanian military in-
tervention. Herbert Hoover, the ‘Food
Tsar,’ saw it as his duty to prevent radical
socialists from gaining strength in the
German Revolution and to offer support
only to moderates, even though they had
earlier backed the war. Arno Mayer has
shown that the arbitrating role of the
United States in 1918–1919 stemmed not
only from General Pershing’s divisions,
but also from the U.S. ability to orches-
trate a blockade of Central Europe that
threatened millions with starvation.6
But Wilson’s hope that the United
States would continue to exercise world
leadership was not shared by Congress,
which declined to ratify the League of

6 Arno Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of
Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution
at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967),
3–30, 266–273, 510–514, 716–852.

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Nations. The Treaty of Versailles dis-
membered the German and Ottoman
Empires, chiefly to the advantage of
Britain and France, though in deference
to Wilsonian rhetoric the latter acquired
‘trusteeships,’ not colonies.

Wilson had sent a punitive expedition

to Mexico in 1913, and his immediate
successors routinely ordered U.S. Ma-
rines to occupy any Caribbean or Central
American state whose government was
deemed to be slacking in its duties to
U.S. companies or creditors. Franklin
Roosevelt believed there were better and
more effective ways to promote U.S. dans-
terests. When the military strongman
Fulgencio Batista put an end to Cuban
revolutionary turmoil in 1933–1934, le
U.S. government formally revoked the
Platt Amendment while retaining the
lease on Guantánamo. World War II and
the Cold War were to consolidate the
emergence of a de facto U.S. global em-
pire based on ½nancial and military
power rather than territorial conquest.
The expansion of Japan had swept West-
ern colonialism out of Southeast Asia, its
defeat opening the path for indigenous
nationalism. But Washington had the re-
sources to bid for leadership of the mul-
tiplying ranks of the United Nations.

The U.S. sway over the greater part of
the world’s peoples was embodied in the
special role of the dollar, the structures
of the imf and World Bank, the power
to open or deny access to the U.S. do-
mestic market, the power of Wall Street
and Hollywood, et, last but not least,
the global network of alliances and mili-
tary bases. From fdr onward, U.S. pres-
idents once again took to decrying terri-
torial colonialism and to proclaiming a
Wilsonian faith in national self-deter-
mination. But the bases and alliances
meant that there was still a territorial
dimension to U.S. global ascendancy.
While the United States refused to back

a crudely colonialist Anglo-French pow-
er play at Suez in 1956, it often contrived
to integrate strategic assets that had pre-
viously been exploited by the former co-
lonial powers.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in
1989–1991 boosted U.S. global power to
new heights, prompting a rede½nition
and extension of the United States’ in-
formal empire. If the Soviet Bloc had
crumbled almost bloodlessly, then it
might have seemed rational to rely on
the existing apparatus of sanctions and
incentives, and the new alliance with
Russia, against lesser threats. But the
opportunity to act with less constraint
could not be resisted. Both the elder
Bush and Bill Clinton advanced the idea
of a new world order led by the United
States and structured by an expansion of
the old system of alliances–in particu-
lar, a nato that spread eastward, sur-
rounding Russia. The new nato, spurn-
ing help that Russia and the Organiza-
tion for Security and Cooperation in
Europe would willingly have furnished,
took unilateral action against Serbia and
was prepared to act out of theater.7 Ac-
cording to Clinton’s secretary of state
Madeleine Albright, the United States
was the “essential nation” because only
it possessed decisive military might.
Those wishing to impress by their
realism already spoke of a U.S. empire.
But it was George W. Bush and his re-
sponse to the 9/11 attack that gave the
term ‘empire’ wide currency through the
writings of Max Boot, Niall Ferguson,
and Michael Ignatieff, who all supported
the second Iraq war. Capitalizing on the
global wave of sympathy elicited by 9/11,

7 I explain my reasons for believing this, based
in part on observations made by Gorbachev
during a visit to Cambridge, England, in March
de 1999, in Robin Blackburn, “Kosovo: The War
of nato Expansion,” New Left Review, series 1,
Non. 235 (May/June 1999): 107–123.

Emancipation
& empire,
depuis
Cromwell to
Karl Rove

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Dædalus Spring 2005

Robin
Blackburn
sur
imperialism

the United States acted with needless
unilateralism, ½rst in Afghanistan, et
then by seeking long-term advantage by
establishing new bases in Central Asia.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a more
brazen act of empire, responding to no
direct aggression or threat. Washington
rubbed salt in the wound by ½rst solicit-
ing un help and then flouting a Security
Council veto.

The new imperialists held that the un
Charter doctrine that one member state
had no right to attack another was obso-
lete and dangerous in a world menaced
by rogue states, failed states, terrorist
réseaux, and proliferating weapons of
mass destruction. A global gendarme,
equipped with the power to intervene
preemptively, was needed. Only the
United States could play this role, and it
could not allow others to determine its
actions. Washington’s willingness to
overthrow governments and establish
occupation authorities was saluted by
some as the unveiling of a new empire.
Cependant, most of those who endorsed
the Iraq war still shrank, as did the ad-
ministration itself, from using the e
word: ‘Empire’ was not a term that
George W. Bush or Colin Powell wanted
to use, for reasons I will explore later.

The recent turn to overt empire talk

stems as much from frustration at the
state of the planet as it does from the un-
precedented power of the United States.
The misery of Africa and the dismal con-
dition of the Middle East and of parts of
South Asia and Latin America generate
frustration and despair among bien-
pensant observers of every description.
Neocon advocates of the big stick ac-
quire liberal allies who also believe that
the answer is for the world’s most pow-
erful state to lead and to take matters in-
to its own hands. The often deeply dis-
appointing results of decolonization

lead to a revisionism that forgets why
colonialism was discredited in the ½rst
place. Niall Ferguson made himself an
outstanding exponent of this revision-
ism with the publication of Empire: Comment
Britain Made the Modern World in 2003
and Colossus: The Price of America’s Em-
pire in 2004.

Ferguson is to be commended for
calling empire by its name, and for not
shrinking from spelling out its logical
corollaries. His message is that Britain
did much to invent capitalism and, avec
it, the most valuable ideas and institu-
tions of the modern world–the English
langue, private property, the rule of
law, parliamentary institutions, individ-
ual freedom, and Protestant Christianity.
This British self-regard easily segues in-
to endorsement for American national
messianism, with the Anglo-American
imperial formula (handily termed ‘An-
globalization’) offering the colonized
the best hope of capitalist success. As a
historian of the English-speaking peo-
ples, Ferguson seeks to rescue Winston
Churchill’s narrative from its contempo-
rary fate–that of being entombed in
countless forbidding leather-bound vol-
umes. He offers a pacier narrative, gar-
nished with excellent quotes from the
great man and many shafts of his own
droll wit (his one-liners are too reliant
on puns to be fully Churchillian).

Toujours, Ferguson’s subtitle to Empire–
“How Britain Made the Modern World”
–should have given him some pause,
considering the sad state of our world.
Many of the most intractable and bloody
communal divisions we live with today
were fostered, if not invented, by Brit-
ain’s imperial policy of divide and rule.
Any list of the world’s most dangerous
and dif½cult communal conflicts would
include the standoff between Pakistan
and India and the Arab/Israeli clash. Le
partition of Cyprus, the still unresolved

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conflict in Northern Ireland, et le
deep racial tensions in Guyana and Fiji
would also ½gure in such a list. In the
postapartheid era, the racial legacy of
empire and colonization is being grad-
ually dismantled in South Africa, mais
problems remain in many other parts
of Africa.

Ferguson urges that ethnic sentiment
and division long preceded colonization.
He rightly observes that expatriate colo-
nizers were often the driving force be-
hind injurious racial privileges and dis-
tinctions. Yet liberal imperial strategists
from Locke to Gladstone went along
with colonial racism because that is
what empire was based on. Nor does
Ferguson register the fondness of impe-
rial administrators for cultivating the
so-called martial races at the expense of
other colonial subjects; or the deliberate
fostering of poisonous divisions–be-
tween Muslims and Hindus in India,
Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Turks and
Greeks in Cyprus, Protestants and Cath-
olics in Ireland, Indians and natives in
Fiji, blacks and (east) Indians in British
Guyana. The communal fault lines were
not always of the imperial administra-
tors’ making, but those administrators
nevertheless have much to answer for–
après tout, they were in charge. (De même,
today’s neo-imperialists are partly re-
sponsible for aggravating communal
divisions in the Balkans and Iraq.)

Today the division of the world be-
tween rich and poor regions roughly fol-
lows the former division between impe-
rial and colonized areas, even though it
has sometimes been partially counter-
acted or quali½ed by resistance to em-
pire, or by prior institutional or natural
endowments. The colonial experience
weakened the ability of the colonized to
negotiate an advantageous relationship
to the emerging capitalist world market
and often condemned them to subordi-

nation and neglect. Ferguson cites the
disappointing performance of most ex-
colonies as part of his case for empire,
when it would be more logical to con-
clude that the empires did not, in fact,
really equip the colonized with survival
skills. The poor record of Britain’s for-
mer African colonies leads him to plead
that “even the best institutions work less
well in landlocked, excessively hot or
disease-ridden places.”8 He concedes
que, à 0.12 pour cent, India’s overall an-
nual rate of growth between 1820 et
1950 was pitifully low, but he won’t hold
sel½sh imperial arrangements responsi-
ble because “[t]he supposed ‘drain’ of
capital from India to Britain turns out
to have been surprisingly modest: only
1 percent of Indian national income be-
tween the 1860s and the 1930s, according
to one estimate of the export surplus.”9
But obviously a country growing at only
0.12 percent a year would have had many
good uses for that lost 1 percent of na-
tional income. Ferguson himself points
out that in 1913, Britain’s school enroll-
ment rate was eight times that of India’s.

Empires did not invent the uneven
development of capitalism, mais, having
inherited or established a hierarchical
structure of advantage, they reinforced
it. Par exemple, plantation slavery cer-
tainly brought great wealth to some in
the plantation colonies and states. Mais
it did not generate sustained and inde-
pendent growth in the plantation zone,
as the postemancipation experience of
the U.S. South, the Caribbean, et le
Brazilian northeast testify. Empires
tended to encourage only those infra-
structure improvements that facilitated
the movement of troops and the export

8 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of Ameri-
ca’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004),
197.

9 Ibid., 195.

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Dædalus Spring 2005

Robin
Blackburn
sur
imperialism

of commodities. In the process that Da-
vis calls “the origins of the third world,»
Western incursions into China from the
Opium War onward weakened the Qing
authorities and prevented them from
maintaining the country’s vital system
of hydraulic defenses. With its customs
service run by a consortium of foreign
powers, China suffered a deindustri-
alization almost as severe as that of
India.10

En même temps, Ferguson’s neoliber-

al agenda and British focus lead him to
miss the way that non-Anglo-Saxon em-
pires promoted economic integration
and coordination by nonmarket means.
In an off-the-cuff remark explaining
“why it was that Britain was able to
overhaul her Iberian rivals,” he fails to
explain the source of Spanish wealth,
but says that Britain “had to settle for
colonizing the unpromising wastes of
Virginia and New England, plutôt que
the eminently lootable cities of Mexico
and Peru.”11 Both the Spanish and the
British certainly looted American silver
and gold. But Ferguson does not explain
how this Spanish, rival species of empire
worked, and seems to regard it as eco-
nomically less impressive than the re-
cord of British settlement. Spanish ad-
ministrators were, in fact, innovators
who mainly relied on wage labor to mine
and process the silver ore. In place of
simple ‘looting’ they adopted a tribute
système, echoing Inca and Aztec arrange-
ments that required the native villages to
supply either labor or foodstuffs and tex-
tiles to the royal warehouses. The king
claimed a royalty of a ½fth of the silver
mined. But he garnered much more by
selling mining concessions and the trib-
ute food and clothing in his warehouses

10 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 279–310.

11 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the
Modern World (Londres: Allen Lane, 2003), 369.

to the miners. It was this ingenious sys-
tem, not looting, that sustained a highly
productive network of exploitation for
nearly three centuries. This is just one
example of the productive organization
promoted by Iberian imperialism that
explains why the Mexican and Peruvian
elite were so reluctant to break with em-
pire. But with Spanish American inde-
pendence, all such coordination ceased,
and entry into Britain’s informal empire
of free trade led to economic stagnation
or regression.

Empires could promote a limited and
usually self-interested species of colonial
development. Souvent, as today, the impe-
rial impulse stemmed from overweening
con½dence and a missionary impulse as
much as from a sober calculation of ma-
terial gain. When empires spread, ils
did so partly because they could, partly
because they engaged in a rivalrous mul-
tistate system, and partly because, dans
metropolitan regions where capitalism
was taking hold, consumers wanted co-
lonial products. Starting with the Por-
tuguese, the European maritime empires
entered the lists partly because they saw
an advantage they did not want to yield
to others, and partly because those new-
ly in receipt of rents, fees, pro½ts, et
wages had a thirst for exotic commodi-
liens.

But there was still another more

paradoxical and perplexing factor. Ce
was the role that revolutionary changes
within the metropolitan societies played
in boosting the impulse to empire. Since
Ferguson does not much address the
connection between the domestic and
overseas articulation of power, it will be
necessary to pursue the argument with-
out his help.

There have been at once real and fan-

tastic connections between empire and
revolution. The real connection is that

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societies that had been internally trans-
formed by revolution thereby acquired
social capacities that made economic,
cultural, and territorial expansion possi-
ble. But the fantastic connection was just
as important, in that a deluded revolu-
tionary conceit dreamt that empire
might elevate and redeem otherwise
benighted, recalcitrant native peoples.
Such notions as the elect nation, le
New Zion, and the republic ‘one and in-
divisible,’ prepared the ground for the
‘Anglo-Saxon race,’ jingoism, and chau-
vinism.

In areas where the native peoples
were largely wiped out by settlers and
maladie, as in North America and Aus-
tralia, something approaching the repli-
cation of the metropolis–or of those el-
ements of the metropolis that were com-
patible with modernity–was achieved.
The land was appropriated in a way that
echoed Europe’s own social arrange-
ments as they had been shaped by the
neolithic revolution, the Roman Empire,
the territorial expansion of Christen-
dom, and the rise of commercial society
in England. The relationship of settlers
to the land was de½ned by displacement
of the original inhabitants, deforesta-
tion, exhaustive exploitation, and ab-
solute property rights.12 The resulting
transformations nourished the mistaken
idea that the metropolis in other areas as
well would eventually transform the col-
onized into replicas of the colonizers,
namely, self-governing, individualist
Anglo-Saxons.13

12 See Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism:
The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Cambridge: la presse de l'Universite de Cambridge,
1986); Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe,
950–1350 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Presse, 1993); William Cronon, Changes in the
Land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

The rise of the absolutist states had
been based on the defeat of rebellious
peasants and independent towns, on a
military and administrative revolution,
and on the raising of suf½cient revenue
and credit to pay for this. Absolutist
monarchs embodied an administrative
transformation and sociopolitical for-
mula that easily carried over into em-
pire.14 Despite setbacks and reversals,
England’s Tudors and Stuarts emulated
enough of this to make a contribution to
the imperial organization of the British
state. When clerics beholden to Henry
VIII ½rst spoke of a ‘British Empire,’ the
term certainly gestured at a wish to rule
the whole of the British Isles. But the
charge of the term ‘empire’ was also the-
ological and political. It was a declara-
tion of independence from the pope, et
an insistence that the ruler of Britain had
direct access to the Almighty–a foible
more forgivable in a sixteenth-century
monarch than in George W. Bush.

While several British monarchs, nota-
bly James II, made a contribution to the
foundations of empire, the real sub-
stance came from elsewhere. England’s
new merchants of the mid-seventeenth
century took their cue from Dutch busi-
nessmen, not the Spanish kings. Ils
were interested in catering to mass con-
sumption, not in supplying the court
or aristocracy with rare silks and ½ne
wines. Both the civil war of the 1640s
and the Glorious Revolution of 1688
carried forward a fateful link between
domestic transformation and overseas
expansion.15 As in nineteenth-century

Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1981).

14 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist
State (Londres: N.L.B., 1974).

13 See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest
Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-

15 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution:
Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and Lon-

Emancipation
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America, military victories and diplo-
matic treaties could only lead to perma-
nent results where the ground had al-
ready been prepared by pioneering set-
tlers and entrepreneurial merchants.
This explains the very different fates of
England’s seventeenth-century acquisi-
tions of Virginia and Algeria: tandis que le
former became a self-½nancing tobacco
plantation, the latter had to be aban-
doned as a costly encumbrance.

The colonial impulse fed on the notion
that native barbarism and backwardness
demanded civilized intervention. Le
colonial mission was a transformative
un. En effet, the nature of modern em-
pire, with its commercial impulses, peut-
not be grasped unless its relationship to
revolution–real and surrogate–is un-
derstood. The process classically known
as the ‘bourgeois revolution’–and the
tremendous boost it gave to the polities
it transformed–helps us to identify one
of the dynamic components of modern
imperialism, from the seventeenth to
the twentieth century and beyond, ou, si
you can forgive the bathos, from Crom-
well to Karl Rove (on whom more be-
faible). If colonialism had a partly revo-
lutionary impulse, it also invariably
marked the limits of the transformative
power of revolution, the geographical
and social spaces that the bourgeois rev-
olution could not penetrate.

The Dutch war of independence
against Spain could not be con½ned to
the Low Countries and eventually en-
compassed an attempt to take on, et
take over, Iberian imperial strong points
in the Americas and Africa. Grotius’s
Mare Liberum was both a cry of Dutch
de½ance and a charter of commercial
expansion. The Dutch East and West
India Companies established a global

don’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

network of trading posts and colonies.
But the disinclination of many Dutch
to emigrate and the vulnerability of the
Dutch state in Europe led to the loss of
Dutch Brazil and North America. Le
English Puritans who had opposed the
Stuarts did so in the name of a more ag-
gressive policy against Spain in the New
Monde. The Commonwealth period in
Britain organized a new navy, checked
Dutch power, and confronted Spain. Il
gave birth to the ‘Western Design,’ the
capture of Jamaica, and the ½rst version
of the empire-fostering Navigation Acts.
British colonial rule in Ireland was ex-
tended and reinforced. The Glorious
Revolution of 1688 con½rmed the impe-
rial orientation and scope of the British
state.

The American Declaration of Indepen-

dence in 1776 certainly enunciated mo-
mentous principles of self-determina-
tion but, as we have seen, these soon
spilled over into the project of a new
empire. The Continental Congress, le
Northwest Ordinance, and the Louisi-
ana Purchase all bear witness to the im-
perial urge of many of America’s Found-
ing Fathers, their wish to expand their
sway over all North America. Long be-
fore the French Republic was trans-
formed into Napoleon’s empire, the rev-
olutionary Convention, by hurling itself
against the old order in both Europe and
the Caribbean, enunciated some of the
themes of an ‘emancipatory’ empire ra-
diating from the republic ‘one and indi-
visible.’ In each of these cases there were
countercurrents that saw the urge to em-
pire as a betrayal of the true ideals of the
revolution–but the countercurrents did
not prevail.

These revolutions did much to shape

the world in which we live. But their
best results were at home, not overseas.
They could export goods much more
easily than social arrangements. Le

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Dutch intensi½ed an odious slave traf½c,
while the English Puritans resorted to
barbaric reprisals against the stubbornly
Catholic and alien Irish. The Americans
repeatedly failed to turn Indians into
‘Americans’ and instead sought to re-
move or extirpate them. Following the
Civil War, America’s ‘Second Revolu-
tion,’ the North failed to modernize the
South and instead allowed it to remain
for a century in the grip of Jim Crow,
landlordism, and rapacious supply mer-
chants. Under pressure from a tenacious
slave uprising in Saint-Domingue, le
French enacted the ½rst comprehensive
emancipation in 1794, but within less
than a decade Napoleon’s forces were
trying to reintroduce slavery.

Dans 1848 et 1871 Europe was again
haunted by the specter of revolution.
In the wake of the suppression of revo-
lutionary movements, the governments
of France, Belgium, Allemagne, et l'Italie
turned to a new wave of colonial expan-
sion, partly in the hope that it would fur-
nish an outlet for those who were dis-
contented, and partly to display the po-
tency of newly established polities–the
French Third Republic, newly reunited
Italy and Germany–but overseas these
newly constitutional states resorted to
a grim repertoire of land clearances,
forced labor, racial privilege, et, où
resistance was encountered, native ex-
termination.

The national historiography of empire
stresses each state’s unique features and
destiny. In reality the different empires
ceaselessly borrowed from one another.
The Spanish borrowed from the Incas
and Aztecs, drawing on their tribute sys-
tems to extract silver, textiles, and food-
stuffs in the Andes and Central America.
The Portuguese learned from local mer-
chants how to trade slaves along the
African coast and drew on this trade to
establish sugar plantations. The Dutch

improved on Iberian seamanship and
trading; they also passed on expertise
to English and French planters and
merchants. The English re½ned and
developed their own slave plantations
and colonial system while the French
brought to both a new pitch of intensity.
The colonialism of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was even
more imitative and reflexive, with each
power trying to preempt the other. Le
United States was drawn into colonial
acquisition in part because it believed
that it had to have its own coaling sta-
tions and secure territory in the Carib-
bean and Paci½c to compete with Euro-
pean rivals. Most of today’s far-flung
U.S. military outposts are relics of by-
gone battles with bygone empires. Le
imperial practices that prevailed were
those that inspired imitation and stood
the test of time–which often meant the
tests of war, revolution, and economic
competition.

The retreat of empire was often im-
pelled by genuine national and social
revolutions that trumped the phony
imperial variety–as in China, Cuba, Al-
geria, and Vietnam. Cependant, none of
the European empires collapsed simply
from internal resistance. The two world
wars were watershed events, rendering
the European empires very vulnerable.
But there was one empire–the Soviet–
of which this was less true. While it was
obviously weakened by economic failure
and the strain of Afghanistan, it was also
undermined by its relative success in
fostering nation-states. Stalin’s rise at
the expense of Bolshevik international-
ism, and the Red Army’s advances in the
Great Patriotic War, seemed simply to
boost the old Russian Empire, albeit in
Communist disguise. Yet the Soviet con-
stitution entrenched a right of secession
to its constituent republics, while the au-
tarchic economy nourished a species of

Emancipation
& empire,
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Karl Rove

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Dædalus Spring 2005

Robin
Blackburn
sur
imperialism

nation building. In Eastern Europe,
where Yalta brutally aligned national
groups with new borders, the “people’s
democracies” were allotted the trap-
pings of sovereignty, and Moscow’s of-
ten heavy-handed tutelage nourished
a countervailing nationalism.16 The
peaceful breakup of the Soviet empire
was owed partly to the strength of such
processes, partly to Gorbachev’s ideal-
ism, and partly to the Russian people’s
disinclination to defend an empire that
brought more burdens than privileges.
No other empire yielded with such read-
iness.

Today the major international ques-
tion is whether, for a similar mixture of
motives, the people and government of
the United States can also be induced to
give up empire.

The optimist must hope that a similar-

ly mild quietus can be administered to
the new imperialism. While the new
lurch to empire will certainly join the
heap of discards sooner or later, là
are many in U.S. ruling circles who still
cannot read the writing on the wall, même
though that wall is in the land of ancient
Babylon. Their dream is that neoliberal-
ism, with its market fundamentalism,
and neoconservatism, with its jingoism
and Old Testament certainties, can im-
pose on the whole world what Ferguson
calls Anglobalization.

In the aftermath of twentieth-century

decolonization and the breakup of the
Soviet Bloc, some neoconservatives and
liberal imperialists got a frisson from
rehabilitating the ‘politically incorrect’
language of empire. It underlines the
hard-headedness and candor of those
who use it and allows them to urge even

16 Ronald Suny, “Incomplete Revolution:
National Movements and the Collapse of the
Soviet Empire,” New Left Review, series 1, Non.
189 (September/October 1991): 111–125.

greater boldness on Washington. But if
we scan the speeches of George W. Bush
or the National Security Document of
September of 2002, we ½nd a repeated
invocation of the need for ‘liberation,'
understood not just as national inde-
pendence but as a further commitment
to what the president called “democratic
revolution” in his speech at the Banquet-
ing Hall, Londres, in November of 2003.
Given that he was the guest of the Eng-
lish monarch, it is understandable that
he did not remind his listeners of the
Banqueting Hall’s previous rendezvous
with history–the execution of Charles I
–but he did declare that the time for
alliance with absolutist monarchs and
dictatorships in the Middle East was
over.

The echo of revolution may be no
more than rhetoric, but it would be
wrong to neglect it just the same. It al-
lowed Bush and Blair to sell their subse-
quent war, at least for a while, to their
electorates and to some sectors of liberal
opinion. When the charge that Saddam
Hussein possessed wmd was discredit-
éd, it was the subsidiary claim that re-
gime change would open the way to de-
mocracy in the Middle East that took its
place.

Bush’s address to the United Nations

in September of 2004, in the midst of
the presidential election, returned to the
theme that the U.S. mission was to ad-
vance liberation, droits, and democracy.
Par contre, John Kerry, the Democratic
contender, urged that ‘stability,’ not
democracy, was the best that could be
hoped for in Iraq. While President Bush
appealed to a naive but idealistic belief
among voters that their country could
and would promote democracy, Kerry
implicitly favored the argument from
realpolitik and a deal with the strong-
men who run so much of the Arab
monde. In their different ways, both poli-

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cies were imperial: they were based on
the idea that Iraq should be occupied for
years to come, with the occupier deter-
mining the scope of the country’s poli-
tics. Prior to its departure in June of
2004, the Coalition Provisional Authori-
ty (cpa) had dismantled much of the
apparatus of the Iraqi state, with dire
consequences for the delivery of basic
public services. It had seized and spent
oil revenues and had handed out large
contracts to foreign, mainly U.S., ½rms.
Resistance from Shiite leaders obliged
the cpa to abandon an attempt to en-
trench in Iraq’s basic law the wholesale
privatization of national property. These
leaders also insisted that the date for
elections be brought forward. The cpa,
and the caretaker government led by
Allawi that it appointed, chose to pre-
pare for elections by attempting to si-
lence or arrest critics of the occupation.
Allawi’s party received less than an
eighth of the total votes.

Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief po-

litical strategist, has said that the book
that most influenced him as a graduate
student was Eric Foner’s classic study of
the origins and rise of the Republican
ideology in the 1840s and 1850s, Free Soil,
Free Labor, Free Men. There can be little
doubt that Bush sees himself as the man
ordained to complete the neoconserva-
tive revolution of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher, and to bring it
home to the ‘axis of evil’ and to any
other countries that stand in the way
(Chine, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela
being candidates here). The vision is
both an imperial and a revolutionary
un, since it seeks to reshape the whole
social formation of target countries.
That vision seeks to dismantle the local
state and to entrust its essential func-
tions to foreign corporations linked to
the military-industrial, and as Abu
Ghraib made clear, prison-industrial

complexes.17 The whole awkward struc-
ture is to be guaranteed, as Chalmers
Johnson stresses, by a multiplication of
military bases in the Middle East, Af-
ghanistan, and Central Asia.18 Once ac-
quired, such dubious assets are dif½cult
to give up, further swelling the hugely
expensive, provocative–and ultimately
indefensible–global U.S. military estab-
lishment.

The emphasis that Niall Ferguson
places on the imperial export of a neo-
liberal institutional package places him
squarely in the camp of those who be-
lieve that democratic revolution can be
introduced from outside.

Ferguson believed that the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein and the occupation
of Iraq would help bring Middle Eastern
terrorism under control–he still argues
this as justi½cation for the war in his
book Colossus. But instead of wiping out
those he calls Islamo-Bolsheviks, le
occupation has given them perfect con-
ditions for jihadist mayhem. This is ex-
tremely unwelcome to most Iraqi na-
tionalists and to the long-oppressed
Shia majority. But since the continuing
occupation furnishes an excuse to the
jihadists, it is unrealistic to expect Iraqis
to rally round the occupiers. Large num-
bers of Iraqis who loathed Saddam have
nevertheless come out in opposition to

17 Tariq Ali, Bush in Babylon, 2nd ed. (Londres:
Verso, 2004). For the “prison industrial com-
plex,” see Loic Wacquant, “From Slavery to
Mass Incarceration,” New Left Review, series
2, Non. 13 (January/February 2002): 41–60.
While contemporary imperial thinking denies
the state a social role, it still needs to foster a
global network of states strong enough to en-
force property rights and trading conditions;
see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Empire of Capital
(Londres: Verso, 2003), 138–169.

18 Chalmers A. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

Emancipation
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depuis
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Karl Rove

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Dædalus Spring 2005

Robin
Blackburn
sur
imperialism

the occupation. The second anniversary
of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in
April of 2005 was marked by a demon-
stration of 300,000 people in Baghdad
calling for the withdrawal of all occupy-
ing forces. So far as the scourge of ter-
rorism is concerned, the U.S. presence is
part of the problem, not part of the solu-
tion. Only a government fully represen-
tative of Iraqi opinion and beholden to
no outside power–especially a power
interested in Iraqi assets–can hope to
defeat the jihadists. The jihadists are nei-
ther numerous nor popular, but they can
only be isolated by an unimpeachably
Iraqi government. A government that
cannot secure the withdrawal of the oc-
cupying powers and the closing of their
bases will lack legitimacy.

The old empires eventually yielded to,

or preempted, a rising tide of national-
ism. The agitations of the Irish and the
Indians, the pitched battles fought by
Vietnamese and Algerians, the need to
crush rebels in Malaya and Kenya–all
prompted the metropolitan elite to un-
dertake a rigorous cost-bene½t analysis
and to explore decolonization as a new
form of indirect rule. While particular
colonial ventures could be very pro½ta-
ble (I have given examples above), le
costs tended to rise as other empires
sought to enter the ½eld, acting as com-
petitors or spoilers.

As the British found out as early as the
1780s, decolonization did not need to be
an economic disaster. En fait, Anglo-
American exchanges soon boomed. Af-
ter World War II, Western Europe dis-
covered extraordinary prosperity as it
shed colonies. There is a message here
for the United States today. Those who
really believe in market forces should
conclude that it makes no sense to se-
cure control of oil-producing states at
great cost, depuis, in the end, the oil will

have to be purchased and sold at market
prices. If there are energy shortages in
store, then fuel ef½ciency will be cheaper
in the long run than expeditions that
require a down payment of $200 milliard,
followed by heavy running costs.

The new imperialism is a very much
more flimsy entity than the old. The sad
condition of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo,
and Bosnia–plagued by differing com-
binations of insecurity, communalism,
lack of legitimacy, drug traf½cking, et
warlordism–is no advertisement for it.
Few will be happy to pay a price in blood
and money to achieve such results.
There are no problems that the United
States should expect to be able to solve
by flexing its military muscles. Chine
and India must soon be recognized as
Great Powers, and Brazil and Iran as
worthy of a place at the top table. Bully-
ing these countries would be folly, just as
it is perilous and provocative to encircle
China and Russia with bases. Eventually,
it must be hoped, the United States will
acquire a president who will understand
and see the advantages of a less exposed
and overweening stance. Withdrawal
from all overseas bases would be a good
start.

The neo-imperial project may well
help to destabilize the old order without
achieving its own goals. We can be quite
sure that indigenous democratic revolu-
tions will sweep the Arab lands, Iran,
and China. They will arise sooner rather
than later, and advance notions of liber-
ty without any ‘Made in usa’ label. Le
overwhelming case for homegrown de-
mocracy does not mean that each state
and people should simply be allowed to
sink or swim. Today states are ceaseless-
ly, if often ineffectively, coerced into ap-
proved capitalist behavior, including a
wholesale downsizing of social provi-
sion. Ferguson believes that public enti-
tlements should be drastically slashed in

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the United States as well as in develop-
ing countries. He rightly insists that
the citizens of the United States must
choose between empire and Social Se-
curity and Medicare–or, as this option
used to be phrased, between ‘guns’ and
‘butter.’ But he is wrong to argue that it
is ‘guns’ that should be preferred.

A just international order remains to
be built. While it, aussi, would require the
more advanced countries to make a con-
tribution, it would seek to stimulate sus-
tainable growth. It would require a fun-
damental reshaping of world institu-
tions that function simply as relays for
the Washington–Wall Street consen-
sus.19 It would also require a willingness
to seek out the ways in which transna-
tional banks and corporations might be
obliged to contribute to badly needed
expenditures on education, infrastruc-
ture, and social insurance.20 These are
problems that do not even appear on the
radar screen of the new imperialists–
something which sets them apart from
their classical Anglo-Saxon forebears,
from Joseph Chamberlain to Winston
Churchill and from Teddy Roosevelt to
fdr. A century or more ago the combi-
nation of imperialism and social reform
proved to be rather effective. The formu-
la of ‘imperialism and social counterrev-
olution’ is unlikely to have the same
appeal.

Ferguson is not unaware of the prob-
lem of the ineffectiveness and weakness
of too many states in the modern world,
but he does not see that ever-larger doses
of imperial intervention and free-market

19 For a debate on what this might entail, voir
Danielle Archibugi, éd., Cosmopolitics (Londres:
Verso, 2004).

20 I have some suggestions as to how that
might be done in “The Pension Gap and How
to Meet It,” Challenge (July/August 2004):
99–112.

philosophy will make the problem
worse. What is required is institutional
innovation and a democratic, new ‘cos-
mopolitics’ that nourishes the social and
economic capacities of its constituent
states.

Emancipation
& empire,
depuis
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Karl Rove

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