Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall
Author: Amy Chua
In this sweeping history, bestselling author Amy Chua explains how globally dominant empires—or hyperpowers—rise and why they fall. In a series of brilliant chapter-length studies, she examines the most powerful cultures in history—from the ancient empires of Persia and China to the recent global empires of England and the United States—and reveals the reasons behind their success, as well as the roots of their ultimate demise.
Chua's analysis uncovers a fascinating historical pattern: while policies of tolerance and assimilation toward conquered peoples are essential for an empire to succeed, the multicultural society that results introduces new tensions and instabilities, threatening to pull the empire apart from within. What this means for the United States' uncertain future is the subject of Chua's provocative and surprising conclusion.
The New York Times - Lance Morrow
Chua, the John Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School, unfolds an agreeably plausible case with clarity and insistent simplification, like a lawyer pacing before the jury box, hitting the same points (tolerance, diversity, inclusion) for emphasis as she clicks off centuries and civilizations. Always in the back of her mind is the drama of America.
The Washington Post - James F. Hoge Jr.
One might argue that Chua relies too heavily on "strategic tolerance" to explain the rise and fall of hyperpowers. Military and administrative excellence are key to the complex processes of creation and destruction, as is the growth over time of corruption. So, too, are the ambitions of those conquered—not all of which are generated by the behavior of their rulers. But the thesis of Day of Empire, like the thrust of her previous book, is provocative. Chua's lively writing makes her case studies interesting in themselves. And her convincing presentation of their relevance to the contemporary scene adds meaning to this timely warning.
Publishers Weekly
Chua (World on Fire), a Yale law professor and daughter of immigrants, examines a number of "world-dominant" powers-a none too rigorously defined group that lumps together the Persian, Roman, Mongol and British empires with the contemporary United States-and argues that tolerance and multiculturalism are indispensable features of global economic and military success. Such "hyperpowers" rise, Chua argues, because their tolerance of minority cultures and religions, their receptivity to foreign ideas and their willingness to absorb and empower talented provincials and immigrants lets them harness the world's "human capital." Conversely, hyperpowers decline when their assimilative capacities falter and they lapse into intolerance and exclusion. The sexy concept of a world-dominant hyperpower, in addition to being somewhat erratic-the smallish Dutch Republic makes the cut, while the far-flung (but inconveniently intolerant) Spanish empire doesn't-is doubtful when examining an America that can hardly dominate Baghdad and not much more convincing when applied to earlier hegemons. Chua does offer an illuminating survey of the benefits of tolerance and pluralism, often as a tacit brief for maintaining America's generous immigration policies. (Nov.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationRichard Fraser - Library Journal
Yale law professor Chua (World on Fire) argues that hyperpowers-those states that possess what Chua calls world-dominant power economically, militarily, and culturally-achieve dominance pursuing policies that do not alienate their subject peoples. Put positively, such hyperpowers practice tolerance. As far as it goes, this is hardly an original observation, and while Chua attempts to offer solid examples from history of how tolerance helps build empires and how intolerance leads to their downfall, she is ultimately unsuccessful. She assures us that she will do her best to resist cherry-picking her facts and then spends the rest of the book doing exactly that. Still, the reader cannot help but admire her honesty: for instance, her reference to British tolerance for Indian religious and cultural diversity is also an example of exploiting ethnic differences in an effort to divide and rule, and Chua does not hesitate to note this. Other instances of evidence offered and then mitigated abound, and Chua's constant qualification of her examples undermines her premise. In the end, the picture Chua presents of the symbiosis between empires and their constituent peoples does not support her argument. A marginal purchase for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/07.]
Kirkus Reviews
This analysis of world-dominant powers from ancient Persia to the modern United States yields an intriguing set of common traits and progressions. Chua's bestselling World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2002) led the pack in sizing up the backlash against global free-marketers. Now she examines hegemony and the handful of entities worthy of the title "hyperpower," which extends to the earliest civilizations: Persia, at its peak under Darius, the Macedonia of Alexander the Great and, of course, imperial Rome. There are also some surprises: Ghenghis Khan's 13th-century Mongolian domain, for instance, eventually extended from Vienna to the Sea of Japan, far exceeding any before or since in contiguous territory. And the Mongols did it without original technology or literacy, absorbing both from cultures that came under their dominion. Likewise, the Dutch Republic of the late 17th century, a midget among Europe's giants, became so dominant in world commerce that it eventually exported a king, William of Orange, to England. The commonality among these empires, says Chua, was tolerance. They were diverse societies, harboring-and exploiting-a wide range of ethnicities and unrestricted religions. The enduring model is Rome, which handed its adversaries a bloody defeat and proffered full citizenship the next day. The author notes that even China in its day of empire, the eighth-century Tang Dynasty, was a far more open society than it would be 1,000 years later. Tolerance alone won't create a hyperpower, though, says the author; the United States needed the collapse of the Soviet Union to achieve its status. Chua concludes that hyperpowersultimately tend to come "unglued" as a result of resistance to their own diversity. She cautions that the global rise of anti-Americanism today, which stems from attempts to export democracy in the service of self-interest, could be a negative sign. The author gives short shrift to forces introduced by petro-politics or the nuclear threat, but still an illuminating exploration of what makes a superpower. Agent: Glen Hartley/Writers' Representatives LLC
Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
Author: Gary J Bass
Why do we sometimes let evil happen to others and sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed in this important and perceptive study of the largely forgotten nineteenth-century “atrocitarians”—some of the world’s first human rights activists. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated, and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about the human rights crises of today.
Gary Bass shatters the myth that the history of humanitarian intervention began with Bill Clinton, or even Woodrow Wilson, and shows, instead, that there is a tangled international tradition, reaching back more than two hundred years, of confronting the suffering of innocent foreigners. Bass describes the political and cultural landscapes out of which these activists arose, as an emergent free press exposed Europeans and Americans to atrocities taking place beyond their shores and galvanized them to act. He brings alive a century of passionate advocacy in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States: the fight the British waged against the oppression of the Greeks in the 1820s, the huge uproar against a notorious massacre in Bulgaria in the 1870s, and the American campaign to stop the Armenian genocide in 1915. He tells the gripping stories of the activists themselves: Byron, Bentham, Madison, Gladstone, Dostoevsky, and Theodore Roosevelt among them.
Military missions in the name of human rights have always been dangerous undertakings. There has invariably been the risk of radical destabilization and the threatening blurringof imperial and humanitarian intentions. Yet Bass demonstrates that even in the imperialistic heyday of the nineteenth century, humanitarian ideals could play a significant role in shaping world politics. He argues that the failure of today’s leading democracies to shoulder such responsibilities has led to catastrophes such as those in Rwanda and Darfur—catastrophes that he maintains are neither inevitable nor traditional.
Timely and illuminating, Freedom’s Battle challenges our assumptions about the history of morally motivated foreign policy and sets out a path for reclaiming that inheritance with greater modesty and wisdom.
The Washington Post - Robert D. Kaplan
The more physically secure a Western nation feels, the more likely it is to intervene abroad for humanitarian reasons. This was certainly the case in the 1990s, when, with the Cold War behind us and no obvious threat yet in front of us, the United States intervened in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. At the time, a host of commentators branded such interventions a new phenomenon in international relations. But the 19th century in Europe, thanks to the Congress of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic Wars…was also a time of relative peace, and in the atmosphere of security that followed came a series of humanitarian interventions on behalf of Greeks, Syrian Christians and Bulgarians. In Freedom's Battle, Princeton professor Gary J. Bass recounts them in a lively, subtle and comprehensive manner that sheds a penetrating light on current policy debates…Bass's sense of nuance constitutes the strength of this book, which has the force of a polemic without descending to one.
Publishers Weekly
Bass, associate professor of international affairs at Princeton (Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals), makes the case with delightful wit, insight and scholarship that humanitarian military intervention arose not with genocide in Bosnia or Rwanda, but in Victorian times in parallel with democracy and the mass media. When Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, Turkish troops committed atrocities viewed by reporters and letter writers whose accounts produced a torrent of outrage. Reluctantly, British leaders began pressuring the sultan, but the failure of this effort led to Britain's great naval victory at Navarino that assured Greek independence. Bass moves on to two other half-forgotten but ghastly crises: the 1860s Syrian upheaval in which Maronite Christians and Druze slaughtered each other, and the 1870s mass murders of Bulgarians by the Ottomans. Bass ends with the Armenian genocide during WWI. Readers may squirm at the slowness with which nations acted to oppose gruesome cruelties, but they will relish Bass's gripping account of bloodthirsty characters, bitter political infighting and cynical leaders, forced by public opinion into moral actions that did not serve their own national interest. (Aug. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Rachel Bridgewater - Library Journal
Kosovo. Rwanda. Darfur. The Congo. Just the names of these places conjure the struggle that other nations face when trying to end the slaughter and abuse of people in far-off lands. Though we may think of this concern for human rights as being relatively recent, possibly starting with the Wilson administration, Bass (international affairs, Princeton Univ.) here places the tradition of humanitarian intervention into its 19th-century context in a timely, enlightening, and gripping book. In describing a rich history of morally motivated intervention, largely by the British and the French, Bass challenges the belief that such involvement in the affairs of other nations must, at its core, have imperialistic motivations. The work explores the political and cultural milieus in which humanitarian responses to atrocities in Greece, Syria, Bulgaria, and Armenia arose, especially the role of increasingly free presses in rallying public sentiment. The very best kind of historical writing, Bass's work is lively, moving, deep, and full of insight for today's challenges. Highly recommended for both scholars and history buffs in all libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Cogent, reasoned analysis of 19th-century humanitarian intervention, especially as practiced in Victorian Britain. In this tightly restricted academic study, Bass (Politics and International Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, 2000) skillfully demonstrates that the interventions demanded by outraged governments, their citizens and press during recent crises in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo and Darfur evolved from human-rights activism developed in 19th-century England, America and France. The author looks carefully at the connections (and disjunctions) between humanitarianism and imperialism, liberalism and realism. He discusses cases in which governments actually did make decisions based on morality, such as Britain's abolition of the slave trade. He analyzes four conflicts in detail. First is the movement sparked by the vicious Ottoman retaliation against the Greek nationalist insurgency of the 1820s, championed by Lord Byron in defiance of realpolitik. French attempts under Napoleon III to protect the Syrian Christians after a series of Druze massacres in 1860 are characterized by Bass as "a triumph in the management of the tangled international politics surrounding a humanitarian military intervention." Atrocities committed by the Ottomans against the Bulgarians in 1876 fed the pan-Slavism crusade and fired the heated rhetoric of British Prime Minister William Gladstone. President Wilson's commitment to neutrality rendered ineffectual the American response to the Turks' genocidal 1915 assault against the Armenians. Bass examines the rise of a free press as instrumental in arousing public indignation and looks at cases in whichChristian sympathies or Muslim bigotry diluted humanitarian responses. Considering the sticky issues of national sovereignty and despotism, he debates the recent calls for a benevolent U.S. imperialism in the wake of 9/11. "There are terrifying hazards involved in meddling in other peoples' conflicts," notes Bass, but international responsibilities are also urgent and undeniable. Historical precedents shed timely light on ways "to keep a bright line between empire and humanity."
Table of Contents:
Pt. 1 Introduction 1
Ch. 1 Humanitarianism or Imperialism? 11
Ch. 2 Media and Solidarity 25
Ch. 3 The Diplomacy of Humanitarian Intervention 39
Pt. 2 Greeks 45
Ch. 4 The Greek Revolution 51
Ch. 5 The Scio Massacre 67
Ch. 6 The London Greek Committee 76
Ch. 7 Americans and Greeks 88
Ch. 8 Lord Byron's War 100
Ch. 9 Canning 111
Ch. 10 The Holy Alliance 117
Ch. 11 A Rumor of Slaughter 123
Ch. 12 Navarino 137
Pt. 3 Syrians 153
Ch. 13 Napoleon the Little 159
Ch. 14 The Massacres 163
Ch. 15 Public Opinion 182
Ch. 16 Occupying Syria 190
Ch. 17 Mission Creep 213
Pt. 4 Bulgarians 233
Ch. 18 The Eastern Question 239
Ch. 19 Pan-Slavism 242
Ch. 20 Bosnia and Serbia 248
Ch. 21 Bulgarian Horrors 256
Ch. 22 Gladstone vs. Disraeli 266
Ch. 23 The Russo-Turkish War 297
Ch. 24 The Midlothian Campaign 305
Pt. 5 Conclusion 313
Ch. 25 Armenians 315
Ch. 26 The Uses of History 341
Ch. 27 The International Politics of Humanitarian Intervention 352
Ch. 28 The Domestic Politics of Humanitarian Intervention 367
Ch. 29 A New Imperialism? 376
Notes 383
Index 487
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