Temptations of empire: two new studies reveal the inherent instability of imperialism.

• Author: Payne, John
• Position: "The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall"; "Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900" - Book review

The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Pall, by Timothy H. Parsons, Oxford University Press, $29.95

Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900, by Stephen R. Bown, Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99

AFTER THE TERRORIST attacks of September 11, 2001 it became fashionable on the right, and among some hawkish liberals, to defend and even promote the idea of an American Empire to keep us safe from terrorists, hold rogue nations in check, and secure global commerce. It's true that PaxAmericana's chief boosters believed in empire long before "everything changed"; the neoconservative historian Robert Kagan wrote a 1998 article in Foreign Policy,1 for example, celebrating the United States as a "benevolent empire" But the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center provided new momentum for the imperial cause. A month after the attacks, Max Boot published "The Case for American Empire" in The Weekly Standard, arguing that 9/11 "was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation"

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In the middle years of the last decade, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grew steadily worse, this jingoism fell out of favor, leaving only a shrinking core of committed neoconservatives to champion the virtues of empire. Still, the questions posed by American global military dominance were far from settled in public opinion. In March, when President Barack Obama ordered the bombing of Libya and the enforcement of a nofly zone, introducing American military hardware into a contentious Arab Spring for the first time, disputes over Washington's proper global role were again thrust to the fore of public debate.

Relatively few Americans question the morality or utility of their country's power, even if there is substantial disagreement about how and when that power should be used. Advocates of empire sometimes acknowledge that ruling the world through military might requires a great deal of violence, but they argue that this is the price of security and prosperity. Two recent histories of previous great empires argue instead that the imperial project is inherently unstable.

The Rule of Empires, by the Washington

University historian Timothy Parsons, explores the fundamental contradictions of imperial rule, making the case that empires have become increasingly difficult to maintain as potential subjects' identities have become less fluid and more nationalistic. In Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900, the independent historian Stephen Bown takes a less systematic approach to the study of imperial power, but his book supplements Parsons' by filling in the biographical details of the men who built Europe's modern commercial empires. Both books demonstrate that while empire may seem a quick route to power and wealth, in the long run the idea is a military and financial loser.

Parsons studies seven empires, searching for the features they have in common. His selections seem designed to illustrate the point that the conquerors become the conquered and vice versa. Britain was once a remote outpost of the Roman Empire, but many centuries later Britain's might would far eclipse that of its former masters, covering a quarter of the world's people and lands as far-flung as India and Kenya. The Umayyad Muslims controlled parts of Spain for more than 700 years, but once Spain was united as a Christian kingdom its rulers wasted little time in seizing a...