Is America an Empire? Few Americans would say so. Yet never before in the history of the world has one nation been so far ahead of all others in its military, economic, cultural and political power. In warfare the United States is close to "full spectrum dominance" all over the globe. Its free market model has left the alternatives for dead. Its popular culture, too, has a universal appeal. And its foreign policy now explicitly aims at changing other peoples' regimes and rebuilding their nations. If this isn't an empire, what is it?

It certainly is an empire, Niall Ferguson argues, but of a uniquely American brand. Call it the imperialism of anti-imperialism or the dominion that dare not speak its name; ever since the Revolutionary generation, which embarked on the annexation of half a vast continent, Americans have preferred talking about spreading the blessings of liberty to using the e word.

That attitude itself, Ferguson suggests, is perhaps the most fateful aspect of America's empire. To be an empire without admitting it is to be a very particular kind of empire: one with a chronic attention deficit disorder. On the rare occasions when American occupations have been sustained -- as in Germany and Japan after World War II -- the results have been spectacular. But more often America meddles in haste, on the cheap and through proxies. This is why, despite all its vast resources and firepower, the United States is a relatively unsuccessful empire.

In Colossus, Niall Ferguson ranges across the entire history of America's foreign entanglements, examining all the different dimensions -- military, economic, cultural and political -- of American power and fusing them into a single coherent vision. Along the way, he confronts the challenges America faces from its principal rivals for hegemony, the European Union and China. Perhaps most important, he offers a compelling and original analysis of the profound interconnection between this country's domestic economic health and its foreign affairs -- the bottom line of imperialism, American style. At once a work of history and contemporary political economy, Niall Ferguson's Colossus is by any measure a major achievement -- a peerless reckoning with American power that will need to be read by any thinking citizen of this unspoken empire.

Introduction

Part I Rise

1 The limits of the American empire
2 The imperialism of anti-imperialism
3 The civilization of clashes
4 Splendid multilateralism

Part II Fall?

5 The case for liberal empire
6 Going home or organizing hypocrisy
7 "Impire" : Europe between Brussels and Byzantium
8 The closing door

Conclusion: looking homeward

Statistical appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index