Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline

Notes

McCoy / Fatal Florescence This essay benefited from thoughtful readings by my coeditors Stephen Jacobson and Josep Maria Fradera, research by Wisconsin students Samuel Finesurrey and Brett Reilly, and a critical reading by my old friend Peter Kinder. 1. At its completion in , the Washington statue’s classical allusions aroused mixed reactions, both complementary and critical. An editorial in a Washington, D.C., newspaper described it approvingly as a “domestic Jupiter,” while a letter writer to a New York paper criticized the sculptor Horace Greenough for “distrusting alike the American character and the American taste” and rendering “the father of our country, like some Roman despot,” calling ancient Rome the “most arrogant, presumptuous, and miserable empire of barbarians that ever existed.” Daily National Intelligencer, October , ; New York Herald, December , . For other sources on this statue see, Oliver Larkin, “The Great Stone Paradox ,” American Quarterly , no.  (): –; Nathalia Wright, Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –; “George Washington sculpture by Horatio Greenough, ,” Legacies, Smithsonian Institution Press, http://www.smithsonianlegacies.si.edu/objectdescription.cfm?ID=; “Landmark Object: George Washington Statue, ,” National Museum of American History, http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/factsheet.cfm?key=&newskey=. Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, ),  (:–). 2. Alan P. Wallach, “Cole, Byron, and the Course of Empire,” The Art Bulletin , no.  (): –. 3. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address,” January , , http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ remarks-president-state-union-address. 4. E. J. Dionne Jr., “Off-Message Biden Recasts the Obama Agenda,” Washington Post, February , . 5. Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), –; Vaclav Smil, Why America Is Not a New Rome (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), ix–xii. 6. Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Preface,” in Mr. Y, A National Strategic Narrative (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, ), , http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/A NationalStrategicNarrative.pdf; Robert Kagan, “Not Fade Away: The Myth of notes  American Decline,” The New Republic, February , , http://www.tnr.com/article/poli tics/magazine//america-world-power-declinism; Schuyler Null, “New Security Narrative : The National Conversation Series Launches at the Wilson Center,” New Security Beat, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, April , , http://www.new securitybeat.org///in-search-of-new-security-narrative.html. 7. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, – (New York: Bloomsbury, ), –. 8. Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (New York: Vintage Books, ), . 9. Charles Maier, “The End of Empire and the Transformations of the International System ,” in Sarvepalli Gopal and Sergei L. Tikhvinsky, eds., History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development, vol. , The Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, ), . 10. Alfred W. McCoy, Francisco A. Scarano, and Courtney Johnson, “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of a Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –. 11. Fred T. Jane, Jane’s Fighting Ships: All the World’s Fighting Ships (London: William Clowes and Sons, ), –; Clark G. Reynolds, Navies in History (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, ), –. 12. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, ), –; Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, –. The figure of , soldiers includes only those units serving in the regular British Army that were funded by Great Britain’s defense budget. The British Empire had other forces, imperial and British, paid for by local colonial governments. In , the total regular force of the British Army was ,. But, as of , , of these British troops were serving in the Indian Army, which also had , Indian troops—and both of these colonial contingents were sustained by Indian taxes. In sum, the British Empire had a standing army of some , men, but Britain paid for less than third of its total cost. T. A. Heathcote , “The Army of British India,” in David Chandler, ed., The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ; The World Almanac and Encyclopedia,  (New York: Press Publishing, ), ; e-mail from John Darwin, August , . 13. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Everyman Library, ), :–. 14. Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. 15. Paul Kennedy...