ABOUT THIS BOOK

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, including:
• 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of Policing America’s Empire. Josep M. Fradera is professor of history at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and author of many books on Spanish colonial history, including Colonias para después de un imperio. Stephen Jacobson is associate professor of history at Pompeu Fabra and author of Catalonia’s Advocates.

REVIEWS

“A rich combination of historical expertise, comparative perspective, and engagement with contemporary trends at the outset of the twenty-first century. It should be a foundational text and point of reference for teaching and scholarship on imperial histories and on American power in today’s world.”—John Sidel, London School of Economics

“An exceptionally comprehensive look at empire in a genuinely global context. The scope and sophistication of these essays are unequaled anywhere.”—Franklin W. Knight, Johns Hopkins University

“Without doubt an important contribution to world diplomacy and a credit to the University of Wisconsin Press for publishing it.”—Red Wing Republican Eagle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Introduction

Fatal Florescence: Europe's Decolonization and America's Decline

Alfred W. McCoy

Part 2: Spain's Long Imperial Retreat

Eclipse and Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1650–1898

Josep M. Delgado Ribas

Empires in Retreat: Spain and Portugal after the Napoleonic Wars

Josep M. Fradera

Imperial Ambitions in an Era of Decline: Micromilitarism and the Eclipse of the Spanish Empire, 1858–1923

Stephen Jacobson

"The Empire Is No Longer a Social Unit": Declining Imperial Expectations and Transatlantic Crises in Metropolitan Spain, 1859–1909

Albert Garcia Balañà

Part 3: Imperial Transitions in Latin America and Philippines

Facing South: The Liberal Traditions in the Americas

Greg Grandin

"Alliance Imperialism" and Ango-American Power after 1898: The Origins of Open-Door Internationalism

Courtney Johnson

Pro-Imperialist Nationalists in Spain's Caribbean Empire

Francisco A. Scarano

Imperial Transition in the Philippines: The Making of a Colonial Discourse about Spanish Rule

María-Dolores Elizalde

The Broken Image: The Spanish Empire in the United States after 1898

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

Part 4: British Global Dominion and Decline

Information and Intelligence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Crisis in the British Empire

Tony Ballantyne

The Fin-de-siècles of Great Britain and the United States: Comparing Two Declining Phases of Global Capitalist Hegemony

Kelvin Santiago-Valles

The Geopolitics of Decolonization

John Darwin

Part 5: Complexities and Contradictions of French Decolonization

The Absent Empire: The Colonies in French Constitutions

Emmanuelle Saada

When Did Decolonization End? France and the Ending of Empire

Robert Aldrich

Decolonizing France: L.S. Senghor's Redemptive Program for African Socialism

Gary Wilder

Part 6: Subordinate Elites and Imperial Decline in Southeast Asia

Informal Empire: The Case of Siam and the Middle East

Gregory A. Barton

Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia

Warwick Anderson and Hans Pols

Decolonization and the Roots of Democracy

Remco Raben

Part 7: Imperial Decline and National Identities

Natives Who Were Citizens and Natives Who Were Indígenas in the Portuguese Empire, 1900–1926

Cristina Nogueira da Silva

From Subjecthood to Citizenship in South Asia: Migration, Nationality, and the Post-Imperial Global Order

Joya Chatterji

Part 8: U.S. Global Hegemony

The "Three R's" and the Making of a New World Order: Reparation, Reconstruction, Relief, and U.S. Policy, 1945–1952

Greg Bankoff

Entangled Empires: The United States and European Imperial Formations in the Mid-twentieth Century

Julian Go

Cold War Transition: Europe's Decolonization and Eisenhower's System of Subordinate Elites

Brett Reilly

Imperial Illusions: Information Infrastructure and the Future of U.S. Global Power

Alfred McCoy

Contributors

Index

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