"Colossus" by Niall Ferguson

A brilliant British scholar argues that America should embrace its destiny as a global power and create a new, more enlightened kind of empire.

By Ted Widmer

May 20, 2004 | The word "empire" has assumed a remarkable forward presence lately, to borrow from the war planners' vocabulary. It's everywhere one looks -- in bookstores, where tables groan under the weight of new foreign policy titles; on Op-Ed pages, where we struggle every day to define who we are vis-à-vis the world; and even in Major League Baseball, where the Yankees are now universally known as the "evil empire," after a quip last season by Red Sox executive Larry Lucchino. Whether he was thinking about Ronald Reagan or "Star Wars," it's funny either way. Early this season, a demented Red Sox fan -- but I repeat myself -- dressed up as Darth Vader and taunted Alex Rodriguez with a placard that read: "Alex, I am your father."

Moments of linguistic and political confusion are always clarified by the historical record, and few historians have taken better advantage of the current mess than Niall Ferguson, whose latest offering is "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire." The peripatetic Ferguson is a little hard to classify. He's an economist, but with a political bent and a flair for the well-turned phrase. He's a shrewd observer of current events, but deeply informed by the past. Armed with impressive credentials -- professor at NYU, research fellow at Oxford -- but conveniently young and photogenic, he is emerging as the Nigella Lawson of international affairs.

After a couple of well-regarded works on financial history for the wonk crowd, Ferguson broke through in 2002 with "Empire," a highly readable and daringly un-p.c. history of the British colonial realm. The moment was ripe for such a book, and he seized it with panache, filling his volume with lavish illustrations, covering an enormous amount of territory with grace and dispatch and teasing the American audience with wry similitudes between England's overseas adventures and our own. His conclusion called on the United States to embrace "a new imperialism," and used a few teary-eyed Rudyard Kipling quotations to goad Americans into claiming their global destiny. That message is not exactly popular on American campuses and flew in the face of other recent works on the British Empire (such as David Cannadine's "Ornamentalism," which penetratingly examined the darker side of imperialism). But Ferguson's energy was impressive and went down well in the dizzy exuberance that followed the effortless victory America achieved in Afghanistan, the fabled graveyard of empires. Anything seemed possible in 2002, and for Americans leafing through J. Peterman catalogs, it was nice to know that we at last had some justification for walking around with jodhpurs and riding crops.

"Colossus" continues the conversation Ferguson started in the final pages of "Empire," switching the foreground actor (Britain) to the giant understudy lurking in the background. And so this book signals the arrival of Ferguson the Americanist. Living in New York, he is well placed to join the growing British cadre of Yank watchers, including Tina Brown, Harold Evans, Tony Judt and Andrew Sullivan, who have washed up on the shores of the colonies with notebooks full of anthropological observations about the natives, which publishers are more than happy to distribute. Some of the ground Ferguson covers is familiar to newspaper readers (many of his arguments entered the world as Op-Ed pieces). In a nutshell, his argument is that the United States commands a vast empire, whether it wants to admit it or not (not, usually). But Americans lack the courage of their convictions and will probably abort the current thrust at imperial greatness because they lack the toughness of mind that ought to accompany the nation's military and economic supremacy. Specifically, the United States cannot handle the long-term responsibility of global administration; it's paradoxically good at the difficult parts, like crushing enemies on the battlefield, but bad at the paper pushing that empires thrive on.

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