Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire By Niall Ferguson, Penguin, $29.95

If the government of the United States of America were to create a position of “official apologist for Empire”, Niall Ferguson ought to be the unmatched front runner for the position. Most historians who think of the American identity as essentially imperial do so in order to indict America. On the other hand, those who defend the application of American power around the world defend it by calling it something other than imperialism. Ferguson is among the handful of scholars who argue for all the following propositions together. The American identity is, and always has been, essentially imperial. America is an empire more global in its reach than any other. It has done, and can do, more good for the world than any other empire in history. The only impediment to carrying out its imperial mission properly is the self-knowledge Americans lack about their historical destiny and opportunity.

The appellation, “empire”, still causes Americans to get embarrassed. The only consequence of this is that while American power is prodigiously applied, its application is always cut short by the lack of nerve to carry it through. Had America been less squeamish, it probably would have defeated communist China during the Cold War; having gone into Vietnam it would have stayed on, and at the present conjuncture it should be in no hurry to leave Iraq. Americans can build free institutions, create an open world for trade, provide peace and security, and generally make sure mankind gets a better deal. The threat to the world is not the use of American power, it is its reluctance to use it and its temptation to withdraw before its job is done. Colossus is a sort of “address to the American nation”. It is the plea of an Anglo-Saxon Fichte saying to the Americans, “Become who you are.”

Few contemporary historians can match Ferguson’s verve, skill, the capacity to marshal interesting facts, sense of argument, energetic prose and presumptuousness. He has the ability to make economic history more riveting than a thriller, scholarly argument more full of punches than boxing, and to weave through the complex shoals of bond markets, state intrigues, personality disorders, strategic scenarios — all with consummate ease. He followed up his brilliant history of the House of Rothschild, a provocative book on World War I, and the deeply informative The Cash Nexus on the intersection between politics and economic power, with two books on empire. Empire defended the British imperial project; Colossus builds on an argument first suggested in The Cash Nexus, that the problem for America and the world is not imperial overstretch but American reluctance to use power.

The argument is simple. Wherever American power was used, notably in Germany and Japan, it has produced stable democracies. When it has not been used, it has left in its wake, genocide, failed states, authoritarian regimes and religious conflict. Imperialism is, on the whole, a good thing. Most of the world, as the experience of decolonization has shown, cannot do without it. This argument is delivered with great panache and compelling incidental details, and is well worth reading. But it is a 19th-century argument, not just in its unabashed defence of Empire, but also in its ability to make most of the world invisible.

Colossus rests on the breathtaking assumption that the decolonization of the world was, by and large, a failure. As evidence, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East are trotted out. But coming from a talented historian, the argument has a strangely unhistorical feel. We all know that post-colonial societies have a lot to answer for. But decolonization as a failure is a myth Ferguson is propounding, not an established fact. It writes off almost all of Asia, as if to suggest that this part of the world has not produced something like functioning societies. It fails to acknowledge that functioning societies were laid waste by being in the unfortunate position of becoming frontline states during the Cold War, as we know from Afghanistan to Angola. In a sentence, it brushes aside the ways in which American power has shorted-circuited the emergence of political processes, from El Salvador to Pakistan. And it rests on the bizarre assumption that the process of forming nations from post-colonial societies is somehow peculiarly more bloody than Europe’s was in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ferguson is so adept at marshalling interesting statistics that one has to be reminded that a lot of it is clever sleight of hand. He often relies on what might be called a technique of willfully framing comparisons. If you want to show that a country did well under imperial rule, compare it with another that did worse. For instance, Ferguson argues that India did well economically under the British because Indian incomes rose by 17 per cent between 1870 and 1950, while China’s fell. He then goes on to point out that India had slow rates of economic growth after independence. Read this way, the argument for the good the British did economically might seem persuasive. But if you remember that even at its worst, the India economy grew at least thrice as fast after independence as it did under colonial rule, Ferguson’s comparison looks meaningless.

No power other than America is in a position to manage a liberal empire on a global scale; Europe is still in its post-historical stupor. Colossus argues that the danger to Pax Americana will not be an external challenge, but an internal one: a weakness of will and an occasional stinginess to pay for Empire. If you unpack the causal argument of Colossus, character plays an important part. Almost all the key events of modern history are explained by elusive references to the character of important personages or people, their weakness or insouciance. In a way these reference are welcome; they remind us that Empire is fundamentally a political enterprise.

But the pity is that Ferguson does not follow up on his own argument. As Burke rightly saw, the character of Empire cannot be judged independently of the character of those who govern it. And Ferguson has almost nothing to say of the character of those who will preside over Pax Americana — their peculiar combination of messianism, historical amnesia and venality. Yes, the threat to America is internal, but I doubt if it will come from the weakness of the American people. It really is a pity that the most gifted historian of his generation is lending his considerable skills to what, in the end, amounts to a call for a vicarious machismo, not prudential judgment. Colossus is more about the game of Empire than an analysis of it in all its complexity.