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American Empire?

American Empire?. Problems of Conceptualization and Definition http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/cchampion/American%20Empire.ppt. “All Roads Lead to Rome”.

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American Empire?

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  1. American Empire? Problems of Conceptualization and Definition http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/cchampion/American%20Empire.ppt

  2. “All Roads Lead to Rome” • “European culture is in the main a new graft upon the old Graeco-Roman stock, and Rome was the principal channel through which the modern world has entered upon the heritage of the ancient. If ‘all roads lead to Rome’ they also lead out again from Rome. For those who have learnt to think beyond yesterday, Rome is the focusing point of the world’s history.” • M. Cary and H.H. Scullard, A History of Rome, 3rd ed., 558 • “The Roman parallel is in danger of becoming something of a cliché.” • N. Ferguson, Colossus, 14

  3. Two Lessons from Roman History • Non-Annexationist: Titus Quinctius Flamininus and the “Isthmian Proclamation” (196 BCE) • Retrenchment: Publius Quinctilius Varus, Arminius, and the Three Lost Legions (9 CE)

  4. Ways of Studying Empire • Reluctant Imperialism and “Invitations to Empire” (Isthmian Proclamation), and ongoing U.S. presence in Iraq? Commitment to Long-Term Imperial Responsibility (Ferguson) • “Decentralized,” elusive enemy (Germanic tribes), and the U.S. war on terror? Retrenchment and acceptance of ongoing potential threats • Shift of analytical focus from center to periphery and system (metrocentric, pericentric, systemic analyses of empire)

  5. Empire and Imperialism Search for Definitions

  6. Empire and Imperialism • Empire: Territorial or Non-Annexationist? • Empire or Hegemony? • Economic? Political? Cultural? • “Imperialism” a newly-coined word for Lord Carnarvon in 1878 • What would a “liberal empire” look like (Ferguson)?

  7. Imperialism According to J.A. Schumpeter “This…is our definition: imperialism is the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion.”

  8. Imperialism According to J.A. Hobson “It is the debasement of…genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant and unassimilable peoples, that marks the passage from nationalism to a spurious colonialism on the one hand, and Imperialism on the other.”

  9. Imperialism According to Karl Kautsky “Imperialism is a product of a highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control and to annex increasingly big agrarian regions irrespective of what nations inhabit those regions.”

  10. Lenin’s Essential Features of Imperialism • Concentration of production and capital leading to economic monopolies • Bank capital merges with industrial capital, leading to a “financial oligarchy” • Export of capital, as opposed to commodities • Formation of international capitalist monopolies sharing the world amongst themselves • Territorial division of the world among the greatest capitalistic powers

  11. Michael W. Doyle, Empires • Imperialism: “A relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.” (pg. 45)

  12. Twenty-First Century Empire? What is the relationship between multinational and transnational industrial and financial corporations and Empire?

  13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) • “Empire” in the twenty-first century = a “globalized biopolitical machine” (pg. 40) • “Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentralized and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers….The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.” (pp. xii, xiv)

  14. Challenge • What is Empire? • What is Imperialism?

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