EMPIRE WITHOUT A NAME

This is a book about the United States as an empire: its territorial origins shortly after its birth as a nation-state, its consolidation as a semi-global project after the Second World War and its current retreat.

Victor Bulmer-Thomas, an internationally renowned scholar of America’s relations with the outside world, and ex-head of the renowned institute Chatham House, takes a friendly scalpel to the behaviour of the US since independence and shows how in every way it has behaved like other empires, gaining territory, intervening overseas and using soft power; but with different priorities and different declared principles.

He concludes with an optimistic view: over the next few decades the US will not be as important in and to the world as before, as powers like China catch up economically and militarily, but its new role will be more consistent with a majority of its citizens’ aspirations.
The process will not necessarily be comfortable – witness the Trump phenomenon – but like other empires the US will learn to live less aggressively with itself and more comfortably in the world.

Victor Bulmer-Thomas is an Associate Fellow in the US and the Americas Programme, Honorary Professor at the Institute of the Americas, University College London, and Emeritus Professor of Economics at London University. From 2001 to 2006 he was the Director of Chatham House and from 1992 to 1998 he was the Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at London University.