LONDON: In 1774, a British journalist wrote a sketch about American tourists in London 200 years in the future. These imaginary visitors, he anticipated, would find the capital a rubble-strewn ruin, stripped of much of its wealth, and robbed of its most enterprising traders and manufacturers. And why? Because by 1974, this writer predicted, Britain would have fallen to a similar decay and ruin as ancient Rome. The torch of economic and global power would have passed to the empire of America.

This was not an isolated piece of futurology. In the era of the American revolution, predictions that dominion would shift from one side of the Atlantic to the other were commonplace. If Americans continued to double and double in number, wrote the Englishman Samuel Johnson on the eve of the revolution, their own hemisphere would not contain them. Nor were the colonists themselves diffident about their aspirations. One of the reasons they rebelled was that Great Britain had tried to restrict their expansion westwards. (Not for nothing did most Native Americans fight in the revolution on the British side.) And one of the very first episodes of the War of Independence was the revolutionaries invasion of Canada to make it part of the American empire.

The current excitement about the United States posturing as the new Rome is therefore, at one level, almost touchingly a historical. From the very beginning, Americans have exhibited a taste for expansion, an appetite for empire. One of the fundamental reasons for this is very clear. Like every other western empire that has ever existed, Americans may claim to have inherited the mantle of ancient Rome. And they have certainly provided themselves with a Senate, a Capitol, and an eagle for an emblem. But the real model for their imperialism lies elsewhere. Before they became Americans, most white inhabitants of the 13 colonies considered themselves British. It was predictable, therefore, that they would lust after empire, because this was exactly what their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic also did.

America’s attitude towards empire has consequently always been schizoid. On the one hand, its roots as an independent power lie in an armed struggle against the imperial armies of George III. Yet, even as they triumphed over the empire, white Americans’ British roots ensured that many were eager to emulate and surpass it.

America, declared Alexander Hamilton (who fought against the British), would be an empire, in many respects the most interesting. The parallells between the British and American forms of imperialism are not hard to detect. Both were nurtured by Protestant ideology, the conviction that Great Britain, on the one hand, and the US, on the other, was God Land, as Conor Cruise O’Brien calls it. Just as Victorian Britons felt confident that the God who made them mighty would make them mightier still, so Americans have always believed, in Ronald Reagan’s words, that theirs is the promised land.

This sense that they were the city on the hill’s chosen could, at times, foster aloofness from contaminating foreign entanglements. In both British and American history, fervent imperialism has always coexisted with bouts of fierce isolationism. But the belief that they are in God Land has also supplied Britons and Americans with a powerful legitimation for expansion and intervention, because it has encouraged them to conflate and confuse their own foreign policy objectives with the global good. In both cases, such arrogance has been made easier by the fact that, in part, it has seemed justified. In its imperial heyday, Great Britain was in some respects a freer, more prosperous, and better governed society than many of the lands it invaded. By the same token, American conceit and ambition today rests on the secure base of its democratic culture, matchless wealth and egalitarianism, and undoubted generosity.

Yet there is a sense in which the real qualities of first Great Britain and now America have actually made their respective imperialisms even more insidious. Since both countries have viewed themselves uniquely blessed and free, both have found it hard to accept that they are capable of malign imperialism. Those exposed to their respective attentions have naturally taken a rather different view.

In the past, Britons were scathing about the cruelties of the old Roman empire and the excesses of Catholic empire builders such as the Spanish and the French. They convinced themselves that their empire was different and benign because it rested on sea power and trade rather than on armies. In much the same way, Americans have always been critical of the old European empires, and played a major part in dismantling them. And they, too, have convinced themselves that their brand of empire is unique and good because it rests not on colonization, but on the dollar and the export of democracy and consumerism. In both the British and the American case, imperialism has actually been facilitated by the comforting belief that empire is a practice characteristic of other cultures not theirs.

There are other parallells, too. Both Great Britain and the US have been fiercely maritime cultures. The British empire was made possible by a paramount navy that for two centuries allowed it a unique mobility of power. By the same token, once America, by means of internal colonization, had extended from sea to shining sea, its rulers quickly became aware of what the naval pundit AT Mahan called, in 1886, the “influence of power upon history”.

Today, the US navy dwarfs all other navies in firepower and oceanic spread, and this is for the same reasons that the Royal Navy once ruled the waves. For America in 2002, as for Britain in 1902, naval supremacy provides mobility of power and safeguards a global system of capitalism. In many respects, then, current American empire is old British empire writ large, but this is also the point of crucial difference. The British empire was, for a brief period, the biggest in global history, but it was also always constrained and made vulnerable by the smallness at its core. The roots of American empire are far more substantial and it is therefore likely to last very much longer.

Great Britain and Ireland together make up only 125,000 square miles; the US, by contrast, is 3,000 miles across and covers more than 3.5 million square miles. In the 19th century, imperial Britain’s own army rarely contained more than 150,000 men; today, the Pentagon routinely stations far more men than that overseas, with tens of thousands more troops at home to spare. At its peak, the British empire had military bases in 35 different countries and colonies, whereas there are American bases now in at least 60 countries. But America’s brand of empire is more secure than Britain’s for reasons other than its vastly greater size and military muscle.

America also has cultural and technological means of influence at its disposal that Pax Britannica never dreamt of. Unlike the British, it does not have to occupy countries to keep them under surveillance. Its spy satellites can do that. And when its politicians, TV channels, and Hollywood want to communicate the American point of view to the globe, they can do so knowing that 30 per cent of the world’s inhabitants understand English. By contrast, in the past, the British capacity for soft empire was always hobbled by the degree to which English remained a minority language. Even in 1947, only two per cent of Indians spoke English with proficiency, because Britons in the subcontinent had been too sparse in number and too technologically ill-equipped to impose their culture.

The lessons of all this history are many and various. Postwar Europeans have been too ready to believe that, because their own empires have collapsed, the future necessarily belongs to nation states. Yet, not only is America an empire of a kind: so, too, in their own fashion are China, Russia, Indonesia, and even India. We may live in a post-colonial world. We do not yet live in a post-imperial world; and it remains unclear whether Europe will be able to hold its own against these massive power blocs unless the European Union, too, becomes an empire of a kind.

And there is a more specific point. Tony Blair may genuinely believe that Saddam Hussein is a danger to world peace. He may even be right. But the reasons why he is moved so docilely to back American global adventures go much deeper than this.

American empire has always mirrored British empire while in the end exceeding it. And in clambering on the head of the American eagle like a small but determined mouse, successive postwar British leaders have sought and found a final, vicarious share of imperial experience. The torch of empire has indeed been passed across the Atlantic, but the British still seek to bask in its glow.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service