New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

132 The New Imperialists
14. Philip Bobbit, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. xxi.
15. Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order
(London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 3.
16. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New
York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), p. 27.
17. Ibid., p. 102.
18. Ibid., p. 152.
19. Kagan, Paradise and Power, p. 154; Bobbit, Shield of Achilles, p. 639; Robert D. Kaplan,
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House,
2002), p. 83. Niall Ferguson praises Zakaria’s “brave and ambitious book” for pointing
out “that the power of the masses has grown at the expense of the elites who once
ruled the United States.” Ferguson, “Overdoing Democracy,” New York Times Book
Review, 13 April 2003, p. 9. He reprises essentially the same argument in his latest
book, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004),
pp. 179–180.
20. Quoted in Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 329.
21. Vivek Chibber, “The Good Empire,” Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/br30.1/
chibber.html, p. 1.
22. Kaplan, Warrior Politics, p. 149. Kaplan enlists the “warrior virtues” of Hobbes,
Machiavelli, and Malthus against the “utopian” cosmopolitanism of the Kantian
tradition. For the policy-makers of the American empire “projecting power comes
first; values come second” (p. 61).
23. Fukuyama writes that the most notably successful historical examples of
state-building come from the history of European colonialism: “The British above all
succeeded in creating durable institutions in a number of their colonies, such as the
Indian civil service and legal systems in Singapore and Hong Kong that are widely
credited as laying the basis for post-independence democracy in the first case and
economic growth in the latter two.” This is a familiar refrain among the defenders of
the historical legacy of empire. As will be argued at length below, it never seems to
occur to them that the postcolonial democratic institutions (however limited) forged
by postcolonial states such as India were achieved not because of but in spite of the
legacy of imperial rule.
24. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons
for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 310.
25. Max Boot, “Imperial Ambitions: How Britain Won and Lost the World,” Weekly
Standard, 24 February 2003.
26. The Economist, 22 March 2003.
27. Atlantic Monthly, April, 2003.
28. Margaret MacMillan, “Queen Victoria’s Secret,” New York Times Book Review, 20 April
2003, p. 12.