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© Fractal Past

FractalPast:
​A Blog about American
​Empire, History, and Culture

Empires and Their Public Goods

2/22/2025

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Public goods and services are in the news these days, as President Trump and Elon Musk continue their efforts to dismantle American civil society. The administration’s strangulation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) shines a light on the connection between public goods and empire. What do public goods have to do with empire? A LOT, it turns out. 

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The Political Economy of Empire

2/13/2025

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The relationship of capitalism to modern empire is of paramount importance, but unclear significance. For some, like Hobson and Lenin, empire is the apotheosis of capitalism, its logical and inevitable product and endpoint. For others, like the economist Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism is antithetical to empire, its free markets a solvent of empire’s inherent tyranny. Capitalism is undoubtedly a crucial component of early modern empires, including the Spanish, Dutch, French, and British empires. But vital and dynamic empires existed long before capitalism as we know it. We will continue to explore in detail the relationship between capital and empire, especially in the modern context. For now, let’s register a few broad points about the political economy of empire.

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Privatizing Empire: An Appreciation of Emily S. Rosenberg

1/12/2025

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​Any short list of my favorite diplomatic historians has to include Emily Rosenberg. Rosenberg is a pioneering scholar in multiple dimensions, including her Spreading the American Dream (Hill & Wang, 1982), one of the important early depictions of “Americanization” (more on that later); in her work on gender and diplomacy, helping to center gender even in-–especially in--the mighty halls of international power; and, most germane to one of our current conversations, her scholarship on the privatization of American power.
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Empires and Their Ideologies

1/7/2025

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Historians of empire tend to stress political, social, and economic motivations, both at the metropole and in the periphery, as the mainsprings of empire. These are important considerations that will all receive treatment in due course. Rather newer to the historians' toolbox is the subject of ideology. Ideology seems to be a part of every empire, though its importance has undoubtedly intensified in the modern period as democratic mass society has emerged as an important authorizing context for imperial policy. Imperial ideology, of greater or lesser intensity, is characteristic of all empires and, while it may not constitute one of the purposes of empire as outlined by Professor Colás (expansion, hierarchy, order), it is nevertheless essential.

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Empire as a Way of Life: Introducing William Appleman Williams

12/28/2024

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My current book project on American empire lacks a title (suggestions welcome!) But it has a number of sources of inspiration which I’ll be featuring here in the coming months. One significant muse has been the work of William Appleman Williams, and in particular, Williams’s final, quirky book, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative.
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American Power in the Netherlands

12/6/2024

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My current book project, American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1945-1959, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic and will be published in 2025. This book tells for the first time the story of American economic, political, and cultural influence within the post-WWII Netherlands. The book advances two intertwined stories: 1) The recovery of Dutch politics, international relations, and socio-economy after World War II, and 2) The role of American power in facilitating and advancing that Dutch modernization. ​

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    I am an editor and historian of US history, diplomacy, and international relations.

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    Why empire?

    This blog presents new scholarship on American empire, places the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, explores imperial habits throughout American society and culture, uncovers the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and develops “empire” as a critical perspective.
    At least two features in the American experience are clarified through the lens of American empire: First, we better understand persistent social inequities in a nation professing a fundamental commitment to equality. Second, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of US foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war--including often with itself--with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof.

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