Chua isn't a historian, and spends too much time apologizing for that fact. But she does have a keen eye for the telling detail in these truncated, scattershot accounts. If the Romans viewed nearly all foreigners as barbarians in need of civilizing, there is no evidence that they viewed skin color -- what we would today call race -- as important in any way. (Why would they? The light-skinned people they encountered in northern Europe were probably more primitive, on the whole, than the dark-skinned people they met in southern countries.) At least one emperor, Septimius Severus, was born in North Africa, and the son of a Berber tribesman from modern-day Algeria grew up to become Quintius Lollius Urbicus, governor of Britain and finally city prefect of Rome.
She also notes that the English-Scottish union of 1707 helped launch the British Empire's global reach, by enabling the Crown to divert the formidable entrepreneurial, intellectual and warlike energies of the impoverished people on England's northern frontier to new projects all over the world. And Chua is absolutely right that Britain's failure to successfully absorb another neighboring people (the Irish) presaged the "racial and ethnic arrogance" that fatally undermined British rule in India, proverbial jewel in the imperial crown. In what I'm afraid is probably a typical overcondensation, however, she boils the Anglo-Irish relationship down to a single issue (religious bigotry), when the truth -- if there's any truth to be found in 800 tormented and incestuous years of history -- is quite a bit more complicated.
I was excited to read Chua's bite-size accounts of other imperial civilizations about which I know next to nothing. She acerbically discusses the Tang Dynasty, which presided over the most prosperous, powerful and accomplished age of the world's most xenophobic major nation -- and was founded in the 7th century by Taizong, a northern warlord of mixed Chinese and Turkish ancestry. Once the religious and ethnic tolerance epitomized by Taizong and the later Ming Huang were abandoned in subsequent centuries, Chua argues, imperial China slipped into a long, slow, inward-looking decline that left it culturally and technologically far behind the West.
She's also fascinating on the subject of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the "cosmopolitan barbarians" who thrived on adopting the best elements of every culture they came across, and who, despite lacking any science, engineering, agriculture or written language of their own, conquered Baghdad, Belgrade, Moscow and Damascus. For that matter, Chua does a nice job of summarizing the story of the Dutch Republic, which became a commercial (but never military) superpower almost overnight by welcoming Jews and Protestants who had been driven out of many other European countries by religious persecution -- along with their money.
But how far do you have to twist the definition before the Netherlands, a tiny European country that as late as 1579 was ruled directly by the Spanish crown, becomes an imperial "hyperpower"? Without question, the 17th century Dutch Republic played an enormous role in spreading capitalism to every available corner of the globe. It was probably the richest nation in the world -- shopkeepers were said to clothe their wives in silk, satin and jewels -- and because of that also the best educated and the most liberal. Women had extraordinary freedom. Clerical strictures on vice and pleasure were widely ignored. Amsterdam became a center of artistic and intellectual life; if Rembrandt and Vermeer were Dutch by birth, Descartes, Spinoza and John Locke all settled there.
One could add that Holland enjoyed all this prosperity precisely because it perfected the art of buying and selling, and never tried to conquer the world militarily. Indeed, the principal Dutch military venture of this period brought an end to whatever superpower status it briefly held. In 1688, the Dutch nobleman William of Orange invaded England and usurped the British throne from King James II, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law. By transplanting the Dutch navy, its Sephardic Jewish financiers and a talent pool of skilled workers to London -- along with, as Chua puts it, the Dutch "business model" of welcoming immigrants and religious minorities -- William laid the foundation for the rise of a genuine hyperpower.
What's wrong with "Day of Empire" isn't so much that Chua gets the details wrong sometimes, makes dubious arguments or oversimplifies her case studies, although I bet that happens more times than I've been able to identify. It's something more ambiguous, something harder to pin down. It seems to me that her ideas about history -- what it is, what it does and the kinds of lessons it can offer us -- are themselves a little simplistic.
In her introduction, she discusses the potential risks of "selection bias," the tendency in social science to choose only examples that support one's existing thesis, but her entire book is about selecting data points from wildly different times and places and cramming them into a one-size-fits-all interpretation. It isn't that she's wrong in observing that the Achaemenids, Romans, Tang Chinese and British built long-lasting empires by accommodating diversity in various ways and to various degrees, while the opposite approach (viz., Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) has proven strikingly unsuccessful. But that observation doesn't tell you anything except that empires, like polar bears and elephants, tend to be large and dangerous things.
Any graduate of a third-rate business school can draw up a PowerPoint display to convince you that organizations will be judged on how they manage complexity. On the other side of Chua's coin, anybody who wasn't stoned during high-school physics can tell you that all systems of energy eventually decay into entropy. It's only half facetious to say that she assembles a miscellaneous mass of more or less intriguing evidence to support those two ideas, on the way toward a brief and interesting chapter that sways from optimism to fatalism and back again while discussing the U.S. and its current dilemma.
As Chua reluctantly admits, the examples of high imperial history -- the Romans, the British, the Tang -- have little to do with the present case. Pluralistic to its core yet perennially plagued by nativist hatred, the United States has become a combination of the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled by military force but made no effort to "Persianize" its subjects, and the Dutch Republic, which employed internal policies of immigration and toleration to build a commercial powerhouse that bought chocolate low and sold it high. Presumably, the U.S. could defeat any other nation in open military conflict -- something America's opponents are now savvy enough to avoid -- and despite mounting national debt and a massive trade imbalance, it remains the world's largest economic power.
Unlike the Roman and British empires, the American imperium so ardently desired by Ferguson, Boot and others has little to offer the rest of the world beyond a cultural and ideological bill of goods that is viewed with increasing suspicion. It's a new kind of empire facing an old problem: not enough glue. Pax-Americana advocates may be eager to invade all kinds of vastly smaller nations, but the last thing they want is to extend U.S. citizenship to Iraqis or Iranians or North Koreans or Venezuelans. Inviting the best students from those countries here to study might have been acceptable in the flush years after World War II, but something tells me that wouldn't go over big right now.
Instead, our decrepit colossus lumbers around the world feeling unloved, bearing freedom's cup in one hand and an M16 rifle in the other. But the cup is made of plastic and came free with a BK Double. The American promise of a blend of democracy and capitalism that could make the whole world America-like is hardly taken seriously by anyone anymore, and it's only Americans, cosseted by a soft 'n' squishy mountain of consumer debt and buffeted by wall-to-wall media coverage of Britney's latest indiscretion, who don't know it.
Do we seriously believe the world hasn't noticed that American democracy has been eaten out from within, like a cotton boll infested with weevils, and that American consumer capitalism, cruel as it can be, bears almost no resemblance to the "free markets" inflicted on the developing world? After surveying the global wave of anti-Americanism that flowed from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the xenophobic post-9/11 backlash within the U.S., Chua concludes that transforming the country into "an aggressively militaristic hyperpower" would be massively costly both in human and financial terms, "without any of the benefits that accrued to empires of the past."
That's a fine conclusion as far as it goes. Chua's mistake, I believe, is to assume -- naively, after all the reading she's done -- that political leaders in 21st century America still possess the will, the ability or even the power to stop the inexorable process of imperial decay.
About the writer
Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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