Neocolonialism

Neocolonialism is what the Marxist theorist and economist Harry Magdoff called quite simply "imperialism without colonies" (1972, p. 144). It has also been referred to as "informal imperialism," "the imperialism of free trade," and particularly in the context of Latin American history, "dependency." Neocolonialism can generally be defined as the ability of a powerful state to secure economic, strategic, and other benefits from a weaker state without possessing or directly governing it in any formal, legal, or institutional form as a colony.

The concept of neocolonialism has been widely employed since the 1970s in historiography to describe and explain the policies and behavior, primarily, of Great Britain and the United States in specific parts of the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the time of its invention in the 1950s, however, this historical concept has been and remains controversial among scholars of imperialism and colonialism. Those who adopt the concept of neocolonialism believe it is useful in explaining an apparent anomalous historical development: that the essential characteristics of imperialism can exist without possession and control of a territorial empire. Critics of the concept, on the other hand, argue that there is an important difference between territorial colonialism and the political and economic influence or even dominance of a strong state over a weaker one. "Informal imperialism" creates more problems than it solves," writes Winfred Baumgart. "If subjected to logic it creates no clear border line. It is synonymous with any form of dependence and it is therefore unacceptably vague" (1982, p. 6).

Reference to any asymmetrical relationship between a strong and a weak state using the terminology of imperialism since the mid-twentieth century has more polemical than descriptive power. For some time now, Western colonialism has been widely assumed to be, and depicted as, morally wrong and evil in academic and popular literature, as well as in documentaries for television and in feature films. Those scholars, political activists, and statesmen who have employed the term neocolonialism during the past several decades have been, for the most part, ideological radicals influenced by the strong theoretical currents of Marxism, structuralism, dependency, and postcolonialism more than their critics who have followed a more empirical approach.

There was scattered criticism of British and American "exploitation" and "bullying" in securing trade agreements, taking over important sectors of the national economy, and cozying up with or strong-arming local elites and their governments in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The related ideas of neocolonialism, informal empire, and dependency emerged in academic and political discourse in the era of decolonization after World War II (1939–1945). It is interesting to note that while these ideas and concepts appeared almost simultaneously during the postwar era of decolonization, they actually developed in isolation of one another, from different historiographical and theoretical traditions.

INFORMAL IMPERIALISM

Let us begin with the British and the concept of informal imperialism. By the early-to-mid nineteenth century, the British state possessed the military power and financial resources to seize, conquer, or annex more territories and peoples and expand its already worldwide colonial empire. In a number of different cases, however, British statesmen opposed the assumption of new colonial annexations. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal article "The Imperialism of Free Trade," published in 1953, challenged the mid-Victorian view that the new policy that favored trade over rule was anti-imperialist. Gallagher and Robinson argued that although the means may have changed, the ends were the same. For the British state and merchants, the rule was: "Trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary" (Gallagher and Robinson 1953, p. 13).

H. S. Ferns (1953) and later Peter Winn (1976) adopted this model to demonstrate Britain's "informal empire in Argentina and Uruguay. The Gallagher and Robinson model stimulated considerable interest and research regarding British influence in many parts of the world. With respect to China, D. K. Fieldhouse noted that the two Opium Wars of the nineteenth century were excellent examples of the imperialism of free trade. These wars demonstrated that "where economic considerations were allowed to predominate and where an indigenous political structure could provide the essential framework of order, economic forces did not necessarily lead to formal empire" (1973, pp. 476-477). Robinson and Gallagher (1961/1981) directed their research to Africa and the Victorians and explained, this time, how the British imposed formal rule on territories that previously had been under informal control. Their argument, in this case, was strategic rather than economic. The British Crown sought to protect the routes to India round the Cape and through the Suez Canal.

In the nineteenth century, Great Britain was the "superpower" of the age. In 1815 the British state had concluded a "hundred years' war" with France over the balance of power in Europe, control of North America, maritime supremacy in the Atlantic, and more. By midcentury, the British Empire had some 40,000 British troops stationed in India and a force of 200,000 Indians in arms. The British Indian army was deployed not only in India and Afghanistan, but also in garrisons from the Red Sea to China. The total strength of the British army in 1848 was only 130,000 men. This meant that in most colonies, local settlers and natives were recruited into military service to man the posts in Quebec, New Zealand, Cape Town, Jamaica, and Peshawar on the Northwest Frontier.

Also by midcentury, the British Royal Navy had 129 warships serving exclusively its foreign stations and guarding the world's main shipping routes. This overseas navy was divided into seven squadrons for the key regions necessary to dominate the high seas: North America, South America, the West Indies, the East Indies, Gibraltar, Cape Colony, and West Africa. By the nineteenth century the Royal Navy had expanded its responsibilities to not only protect British merchant shipping but the merchant marine of all peaceful countries. British warships escorted unarmed trading ships through wartorn regions and during the 1860s cleared out the pirates in the China Sea. In 1851 the Royal Navy had bases at Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Bombay, Trincomalee, Seychelles, Mauritius, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sidney, the Sandwich Islands, Valparaiso (Chile), the Falkland Islands, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Ascension, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, Bermuda, Halifax, and Newfoundland.

The first steam-powered battleship ever built was a Royal Navy ship put into service in 1844. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy created ironclad steam-powered battleships with enormous guns and self-propelled torpedoes, true behemoths—Warrior (1860), Devastation (1871), Inflexible (1875), Dreadnought (1879), and dozens more with names like Invincible, Indomitable, and Indefatigable. The designer of the Inflexible wrote: "Imagine a floating castle which the progress of invention in artillery has finally driven us to resort to" (quoted in Herman 2004, p. 459). This navy did indeed rule the waves and police that era's new world order.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the British superpower, particularly in the first decades following the defeat of France, used its military and commercial power and influence for a number of purposes. One of these was to bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade. Britain abolished its own trade in slaves in 1807, and after the defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) at Waterloo, Belgium, in 1815, Britain exercised its considerable influence in trade treaties with Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and other countries to reduce or end their slave trades. These treaties generally gave the British Royal Navy the right to enforce the terms of the treaties. As a result, warships were maintained on the African coast and in the West Indies to inspect cargo ships suspected of carrying slaves. In the 1830s Britain abolished slavery in its American plantations and liberated more than 600,000 Africans and New World blacks. The British abolition influenced the French, who freed the slaves in their Caribbean colonies, Martinique and Guadeloupe, in 1848.

Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple, 1784–1865), as foreign secretary in the 1830s and 1840s and prime minister of Britain from 1855 to 1865, endeavored to shut down the Atlantic slave trade, bring an end to human slavery, and open the world's markets to free trade for the benefit of both Great Britain and, he believed, the less fortunate peoples of the world. Palmerston, and "Palmerstonianism," accepted the idea that commerce was more important, and more moral, than colonialism. When he rejected the annexation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the 1840s, Palmerston declared: "all we want is trade and land is not necessary for trade; we can carry on commerce very well on ground belonging to other people" (quoted in Lynn 1999, p. 108).

Palmerston, however, was not opposed to the annexation of new colonies when they were deemed necessary. The Palmerstonian approach is clearly what historians have in mind when they refer to the "imperialism of free trade." Under Palmerston, British consuls, goods, investments, merchant colonies, fashions, and even sports became influential in Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, West Africa, Persia, and China. British cultural influence expanded significantly when more than twenty-two million English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish men and women left home between 1815 and 1914 and sailed for the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Egypt, and who knows where.

The British state and statesmen took actions in the hope of economic gain, strategic advantage, and moral progress without knowing the long-term outcome of their endeavors. The nineteenth-century British superpower sought economic penetration and political influence not only in the new nation-states of Latin America but in the crumbling empires of the Ottomans and the Chinese, and the generally weak and divided coastal states of tropical Africa. The British exercised more power in these regions, particularly in Egypt, which became a protectorate due to the strategic significance of the Suez Canal.

Britain, the first power to do so, followed by France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, and Italy, established a system of international treaties, which the Chinese called capitulations, that opened specific Chinese ports to foreign trade, imposed a free-trade regime at these ports, and gave foreigners legal privileges and immunities in these ports. By 1878 there were six so-called treaty ports in China. The treaty port system did not fully open the interior of China to foreign trade, and thus the promise of an unquenchable market was never realized. The system did encourage China to promote industrialization in the 1890s, and it fueled the fire of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Humiliation at the hands of foreigners promoted nationalism and revolution and finally led to the abrogation of the treaties in 1943. Compared to Latin America, British trade with China by the late nineteenth century, and with the Ottoman Empire and tropical Africa, was a pittance.

This first age of commercial and financial globalization was made possible, to a considerable extent, because of the Pax Britannica, a long peace supervised by a great power willing to sustain a stable and open international order using its military and financial resources. As a result, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the volume of world trade more than doubled. During the second half, the volume of world trade increased by a factor of ten times. In 1827 Britain exported £50 million (British pounds) in goods, most of which went to the United States and western Europe. Four decades later the value of British exports had reached £180 million (with about £50 million going to the "captive markets" of the British Empire—India, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand). In the new age of globalization, Britain sold more of its cottons, woolens, and steam engines to the "free markets" of the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Britain's largest customer was still the United States at £22 million. Latin America purchased £12 million worth of goods, while tropical Africa imported less than £9 million.

By 1890 Great Britain had more registered shipping tonnage than the rest of the world combined. By 1913 the total value of British commerce was £1,294 million, with £525 million in exports and £769 in imports. On the eve of World War I (1914–1918), Great Britain had a nominal trade imbalance quite contrary to the economic nostrums of the day, which demanded that industrial nations export their surplus manufactures and maintain a trade surplus in order to avoid the perils of overproduction, declining profits and wages, labor unrest, and worse. One is reminded of the persistent trade imbalances of the present-day superpower, the United States, and the heretical idea that free trade regimes may over time be more likely to promote world development (however unevenly) at the expense of taxpayers, workers, and consumers at home.

Latin America offers an excellent testing ground for the arguments for and against "informal imperialism." After Gallagher and Robinson's groundbreaking article in 1953, a number of scholars focused on making the case of Britain's informal empire in Latin America and in specific countries of Latin America. In the nineteenth century, British consuls, merchants, financiers, and others invaded the ports and backlands of Latin America. A flood of cheap British textiles in the 1820s, it is claimed, destroyed the infant industrialization of the region. British exports to Latin America increased from £5 million in the 1840s to £55 million by 1913. (British imports from Latin America, primarily basic foodstuffs, fibers, and minerals, were valued at £76 million in 1913, or nearly 140 percent the value of Britain's exports.) British investment in Latin America increased from £30 million in 1826 to over £80 million by 1865 and £1,180 in 1913. These monies built railroads, docks and warehouses, processing plants, public utilities, and refurbished mines.

Gallagher and Robinson and the "informal imperialism" thesis pursued by other historians was quickly subsumed in a scholarly dispute that has continued to this day under different terms and concepts. H. S. Ferns (1960), a Canadian historian who at first embraced "informal imperialism" as a model for Latin America, turned around a few years later in a research monograph to argue that Great Britain did not have the power to force Argentina to pay a debt, or a dividend, or to export or import any particular commodity. The commercial relationship between Argentina and Great Britain, Ferns concluded, resembled one of mutual advantage more than informal imperialism.

Ferns and other historians of Argentina demonstrated that that country had the most diversified exports and sustained a high level of export expansion, which translated into national economic growth for several decades. By 1913 Argentina was the wealthiest country in Latin America (as measured by per capita gross national income) and one of the wealthiest countries in the world with a real income higher than Austria-Hungry, Finland, Portugal, and Italy. The countries of Latin America that participated most intensely in the international economy—Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, and Chile—also had the highest national incomes.

Thirteen other Latin American countries also adopted similar export-led growth models, but these economies produced modest, and in a number of cases quite poor, results in terms of growth and development. The problem is often attributed to the failure of the model, which in turn is portrayed as the critical element of Latin America's era of neocolonialism. It is difficult to escape from the conclusion, writes economic historian Victor Bulmer-Thomas, "that any model adopted by the thirteen countries … would have shown a poor rate of return. Political instability, administrative incompetence, poor transport systems, lack of capital, shortages of labor, and the small sizes of internal markets would have overwhelmed any conceivable alternative to exportled growth in the nineteenth century" (Bulmer-Thomas 1994, p. 153).

MARXIST THEORIES OF NEOCOLONIALISM

Also beginning in the 1950s, another approach to neocolonialism appeared, this time in the literature of the scholarly and activist left. The Marxist economist Paul Baran (1957) argued for the first time in Marxist literature that the capitalism of the advanced industrial countries was responsible for the impoverishment of the third world. Contrary to the analysis of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), as well as that of V. I. Lenin (1870–1924), Baran proposed that poverty was not the inevitable condition of human beings, but had been introduced into the third world by capitalism via colonialism and neocolonialism.

As Harry Magdoff (1972) would note later, a common feature of all Marxist approaches is the understanding that imperialism survived decolonization intact. Unlike the "informal imperialism" thesis, which focused on the power of the imperial state to control or favorably influence trade, the Marxist theory of neocolonialism assumes that imperial control continues through foreign (capitalist) investment. Thus when we look at mid-to-late nineteenth-century Latin America, British and then U.S. investment in railroads facilitated the production and exchange of primary products—unprocessed raw materials and foodstuffs—transported to port cities, and not the creation of an integrated national market. The "insidious" aspect of foreign investment, from the Marxist point of view, is its seductive appeal to local elites to remake their values to conform to those of the capitalist investors, entrepreneurs, and merchants from Britain and the United States.

The prominent African anticolonialist leader, Marxist theorist, and first president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), applied the concept of neocolonialism to independent Africa in his book of the same name in 1965. "The result of neocolonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than the development of the less developed parts of the world," wrote Nkrumah. "Investment under neocolonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world" (1965, p. x).

DEPENDENCY THEORY

By the 1960s and 1970s, a third model of neocolonialism had appeared in the scholarly literature. This model came to be called dependency theory, a sweeping historical and analytical explanation of economic development and underdevelopment that derived from the structuralist theories elaborated by Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986), who headed the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to the idea of informal imperialism (which charged that control of trade was more important than control of territory) and contrary to the Marxist notion of "imperialism without colonies" (which held that capitalist investment was the instrument for enriching the industrial countries and impoverishing all of the rest), dependency theory claimed a radical inheritance from Marxism but focused the neocolonial connection on patterns of unequal trade.

The Spanish and the Portuguese in their colonial empires in the Americas first set the pattern of unequal trade through mercantilist decrees and monopoly trading systems that required their American colonies to produce and export primary products, luxury foodstuffs, and minerals in exchange for more valuable manufactured goods from Europe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Great Britain, and increasingly the United States, replaced the old colonial powers and dominated Latin American markets. Although the commercial relationship was less than grand in the first half of the nineteenth century, business picked up during the last several decades of the century. Latin American countries, as a result of the rise of stable governments and collaborating elites, the growth of foreign demand, increased foreign investment, and the ability of Latin American producers to increase production of coffee, sugar, wool, cotton, nitrates, copper, and more, became part of the new globalized world order of the late nineteenth century. Latin America's role was to produce primary commodities for the factories and consumers of the industrialized countries of western Europe and the United States and, in turn, to purchase the manufactured goods of these nations and indefinitely put off their own industrialization.

It is difficult to find a textbook on Latin American history today without the obligatory chapter or section on "neocolonialism." Benjamin Keen's perennial A History of Latin America (5th ed., 1996) has long had a chapter entitled "The Triumph of Neocolonialism," which refers to the era 1870 to 1914. John Charles Chasteen, in his concise history of Latin America, Born in Blood and Fire (2nd ed., 2006), calls his chapter on the period 1870 to 1930 simply "Neocolonialism." These textbook authors, and many others, employ dependency analysis, Marxist theory, and informal imperialism explanations in their narratives regarding how "despite many transformations, neither Latin America's subordinate relationship to European countries nor its basic social hierarchy—created by colonialism—had changed" (Chasteen 2001, p. 180).

Neocolonialism, the unhealthy alliance between foreign governments, financiers, merchants, and entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and collaborating Latin American governing officials, bureaucrats, landowners, and military officers (the so-called comprador elites) on the other, is given as the explanation for all the ills of late nineteenth-century Latin American societies: that is, authoritarian dictatorships or presidencies; small, powerful oligarchies; latifundia and the decline of peasant landholding; the rise of debt servitude and the decay of the standard of living for most rural families; and national economies tied to one or two commodity exports that were vulnerable to fluctuations, and therefore the cycles of boom and bust that most national economies suffered during the age of the "neocolonial order."

Dependency theory was popular and influential in academia and in progressive activist circles in the 1970s and 1980s. During this same period, critics of the approach went to the archives and tested the theory. Over time, in books and articles, the key components of dependency theory were undermined and discredited. "Once the disjuncture between radical theories and archival realities became evident," writes Rory Miller, "historians found themselves in a cul-de-sac" (1999, p. 446). An almost discouraged Florencia E. Mallon asked: "What is a progressive scholar to do? If we continue to commit to emancipatory, bottom-up analysis and yet can no longer simply ride one of our various Marxist or Marxian horses into the sunset, what are the alternatives?" (1994, p. 1491). The alternative she suggested, and one that many have taken up in Latin American studies, is postcolonialism and a turn from the political and economic to all things cultural. Thus, in a recent collection of essays, Gilbert M. Joseph notes that "today, with theories of imperialism and dependency under attack and the once-discredited diffusionist model recycled (yet again) in 'neoliberal' form by the managers of the 'New World Order,' Latin Americanists across a variety of disciplines and a new generation of historians of U.S. foreign relations (once known as 'diplomatic historians') are challenged to study the region's engagement with the United States in innovative ways" (Joseph et al. 1998, p. 4).

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Scholars and political activists have viewed and studied Great Britain and the United States quite differently through the prism of neocolonialism. The most striking difference between the two powerful modern nationstates and their histories is that Great Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a vast colonial empire and exercised what some scholars and anticolonial leaders believed was and is "informal imperialism" through unequal treaties, investments, powerful consuls, the threat and occasional use of gunboats, and so on. The United States, on the other hand, despite picking up a few scattered islands at the end of the nineteenth century, never followed the western European model in creating a serious and substantial overseas colonial empire. The question for scholars, progressives, and radical activists, then, was not about "informal imperialism" (a concept invented specifically for Britain to contrast "informal colonies" from formal colonies). Since the United States did not have a real colonial empire, the question was more fundamental regarding the nature of the United States. Was the United States an empire or not?

The United States was created in an anticolonialist revolution in 1776 against the British Empire, and American statesmen and public opinion have long expressed anticolonial sentiments. In The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton (1755/57–1804) noted that:

The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominions over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. (Hamilton 1787)

But no longer, proclaimed Hamilton, would this stand. "Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness!"

During the nineteenth century, the United States was an expansionist, and at times aggressive, state that acquired contiguous territory within the continental boundaries of North America. American constitutional law provided for the full and equal incorporation of new territorial acquisitions, thus continental expansion did not create western colonies but, in time, new self-governing states with representation in Congress and full citizenship for their settler population. This continental expansion was imperial if not colonial. The American state used military force, bribes, and other means to defeat and remove the indigenous peoples from their lands and resettle them on much smaller and poorer "reservations." From 1835 to 1836, American settlers to the Mexican province of Tejas (in fact, Coahuila y Tejas) rebelled, defeated the Mexican Army, and established the breakaway Lone Star Republic. Ten years later, an American president annexed Texas and used a border incident to invade and defeat Mexico and annex nearly one-half of its national territory, the most important being the fertile valleys, gold fields, and seaports of California.

When presented with opportunities for overseas annexations, the United States generally turned away, with the early exception of Alaska, which was considered a "folly" at the time. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, as the United States began to grow into an economic powerhouse, American capital investment began to increase in Mexico, Cuba and other Caribbean countries, Central America, and Colombia. American-financed railroads reaching into Mexico brought American merchants, manufactures, planters, settlers, and missionaries to Mexico, and, in turn, they carried Mexican cattle, copper, cotton, silver, coffee, rubber, and much more to the United States. By 1910 Americans owned 130 million acres in Mexico, or 27 percent of the land.

The Mexican petroleum industry was dominated by two foreign interests, the California oilman Edward Doheny (1856–1935), who brought in Texas oilmen and Standard Oil, and the British oil magnate Weetman Pearson (1856–1927). Mexico's primary export industry, mining, by the early twentieth century was in the hands of American and British investors. Americans held over 80 percent of the capital in the mining industry and owned outright seventeen of the thirty-one largest mining enterprises in the country. British investors held nearly 15 percent of the total capital and operated ten of the largest mines. "By 1910 more than 40,000 Americans resided in Mexico" (Hart 2002, p. 272). By 1913 total U.S. investment in Latin America had reached $1.6 billion, which was still far below total British investment in the region at $5 billion.

In 1898—America's "imperial moment"—the administration of President William McKinley (1843–1901) responded to a bloody crisis in Cuba, went to war with Spain, and seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Spanish Philippines. A great debate immediately ensued between "imperialists" and "anti-imperialists" in Congress, the press, and across the United States regarding what course the country should take. The imperialists argued that history had determined that all great nations were imperial states and needed colonies like Cuba for resources, markets, the outward thrust of power, and so on. The anti-imperialists claimed that overseas colonization was anti-American, and on the key issue, Cuba, they won. The U.S. Congress voted to give the Cuban people their independence after a short military occupation. Congress in 1898 also annexed the Hawaiian Islands, and President McKinley determined that the Philippine people were not ready for self-government. In 1903 the United States obtained the rights to build and defend a canal across the new nation-state of Panama, which became the most important strategic point in the defense of the United States.

Over the next thirty years the United States intervened repeatedly in the internal affairs of Caribbean and Central American nations in an attempt to maintain peace and order, collect international debts, prevent European intervention, protect American business interests, promote democracy and good government, and—incidentally—improve public health and sanitation. Several countries, such as Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, became protectorates, were occupied by the U.S. Marines for years at a time, and had their armies and national guards trained and created by the United States from which, in some cases, presidents and dictators often arose.

These "Yanqui [Yankee] Years" (1898–1933) have often been pointed to as America's "imperial detour." By the 1920s, with Latin American governments increasingly critical and angry, and the Republican governments of the decade coming to realize that military interventions were expensive but did not really create any kind of long term stability, the U.S. State Department issued the Clark Memorandum in 1930. This statement, prepared by Undersecretary of State Joshua Reuben Clark Jr. (1871–1961), repudiated the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1905, which declared that only the United States could enforce the collection of debts owed to foreigners in the Western Hemisphere. At the same time, the Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) administration began to withdraw troops from Nicaragua and Haiti. When Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) was inaugurated president in 1933, he called for a "good neighbor policy," which, at the next Pan-American Conference, meant that the United States supported the nonintervention resolution of the Latin American members.

For a considerable number of historians, theorists, and political activists, the Yanqui Years have no significance. For most progressives and radicals, whether they are Marxists, dependency theorists, postcolonialists, Indian rights activists, antiglobalization activists, or international Zapatistas, the United States has been an empire from its very founding. As Gilbert Joseph points out, to argue that the United States briefly had an empire "is to perpetuate false notions of 'American exceptionalism' and to engage psychologically in denial and projection. Such arguments also ignore structures, practices, and discourses of domination and possession that run throughout U.S. history" (Joseph et al. 1998, pp. 5-6). The United States was born, the historian Howard Zinn (2003) reminds us, of an invasion of America, massacres of Indians, and a powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. This empire, from Jamestown to Baghdad, has no justification and no good deeds on its record.

The idea of an American imperium became an increasingly important subject of serious debate and writing in the decades following World War II and again in the decades following the end of the Cold War. In both eras, the idea of an American empire was fueled by unparalleled military and economic strength, seemingly unbounded cultural influence, and the more than occasional American covert and overt interventions overseas to remake the world in the image of itself. In both eras, domestic and international discussion of an American empire focused on the good it did (using its power to maintain a liberal global order) and the bad (supporting unpopular dictatorships, undermining populist regimes, and fighting the wrong wars in Vietnam and Iraq). The contributors to these debates extended beyond the radical left to include establishment liberal politicians, conservative and neoconservative intellectuals, foreign policy experts, diplomatic historians, and government officials.

By the end of the 1960s, Americans, and much of the rest of the world, had had enough of American imperium. The Richard Nixon (1913–1994) administration began withdrawing U.S. combat forces from South Vietnam, negotiated an "honorable peace" with the North in 1973, and removed all American forces from the county that same year. Two years later, Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to the Khmer Rouge, a repressive Communist organization, and Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to the North Vietnamese army. During the 1970s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of petroleum while Americans waited in line to fill up their gas tanks, North Korea captured an American spy ship, the United States returned the Panama Canal to Panama, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and radical students in Iran took American embassy officials hostage. By 1980 Americans, at any rate, did not see themselves in any imperial manner.

At the end of the Cold War, however, the age of the unipolar hyperpower was at hand. Although the United States cut its defense expenditures during the 1990s, its military budget was still greater than all of the military budgets of the next fifteen most powerful states combined. By 2000 the U.S. military budget reached nearly $300 billion, a figure that paid for ten active army divisions, three active marine divisions, nine thousand M1 Abrams tanks, thirty active and reserve air wings, eleven aircraft carriers deployed in nine carrier battle groups, a garrison of some 100,000 troops in Europe, and about the same number of troops in South Korea and Japan. To begin to put some of these numbers in comparison, the U.S. Marine Corps had more troops and combat power than the entire army of Great Britain, France, or Italy.

The end of the Cold War nuclear standoff favored democratization and economic liberalization, but it also brought unscrupulous nationalism, ethnic cleansing, related wars, and a new wave of terrorism. In an increasingly disorderly world, some historians, public intellectuals and even government officials offer the suggestion that the United States, following the example of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, needs to accept its place in history, assume its imperial burden, and "export its capital, its people and its culture to those backward regions which need them most urgently and which, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security" (Niall Ferguson, quoted in Urquhart 2003, pp. 8-9).

Radicals and neoconservatives who deplore or welcome the idea of an American empire mistake "the politics of primacy for those of empire," according to Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2003, p. 70). In the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, the United States could not obtain the votes of Mexico and Chile for a second Security Council resolution at the United Nations. When the time came for the invasion of Iraq, the parliament of Turkey refused to allow its territory to be used as a second front for the Fourth Infantry Division of the U.S Army, severely disrupting the Pentagon's battle plan.

The United States has been largely unsuccessful in sharing the postwar burden of funding reconstruction and bringing in European or other allies to assist in training Iraqi troops and police. When these limits to Washington's power are highlighted, the debate often returns to definitions. In this day and age, "empire," we are reminded, is a metaphor. All empires, historian Anthony Pagden argues, involve the exercise of imperium or sovereign authority, usually acquired by force. Had there been an American imperium, the parliamentarians of Turkey would not have had any choice but to agree to the request of the Pentagon. Pagden also notes that in order to survive for very long, all empires have to win over their conquered populations. "An Empire," he writes, quoting the Roman historian Livy (ca. 59 b.c.e.-17 c.e.), "remains powerful so long as its subjects rejoice in it" (Pagden 2005, p. 48). The parliamentarians of Turkey not only refused the Pentagon's request because they could, they did so because they considered American policy in the second Gulf War illegitimate.

In the postcolonial and post-Cold War era, American army and marine divisions, air wings, and carrier battle groups can deliver unbelievable lethal force. American loans, trade concessions, and military assistance can be very tempting. In the final analysis, however, Washington, D.C., is not Rome or London. When a powerful state called upon a weaker allied state to provide a favor, the concept of neocolonialism (or the metaphor of "empire") would predict that Chile would vote with the United States in the United Nations and that Turkey would allow the Fourth Infantry Division to enter Iraq from the north. These predictions would have been wrong.

see also Boxer Uprising; Capitulations, Middle East; China, Foreign Trade; Chinese, Imperial Maritime Customs; Egypt; Empire, British; Empire, United States; Extraterritoriality; Hegemon and Hegemony; Imperialism, Cultural; Imperialism, Free Trade; Imperialism, Liberal Theories of; Imperialism, Marxist Theories of; Modern World-System Analysis; Nkrumah, Kwame; Open-Door Policy; Postcolonialism; Treaty Port System.

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