Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

· Penguin UK
4.7
9 reviews
Ebook
416
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

Is America the new world empire? Presidents from Lincoln to Bush may have denied it but, as Niall Ferguson's brilliant and provocative book shows, the US is in many ways the greatest imperial power of all time. What's more, it always has been an empire, expanding westwards throughout the nineteenth century and rising to global dominance in the twentieth. But is today's American colossus really equipped to play Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on its shoulders? The United States, Ferguson reveals, is an empire running on empty, weakened by chronic defecits of money, manpower and political will. When the New Rome falls, he warns, its collapse may come from within.

'One of the timeliest and most topical books to have appeared in recent years' Literary Review

'Yet another tour de force from a writer who displays all his usual gifts of forceful polemic, unconventional intelligence and elegant prose ... guaranteed to spark fierce debate' Irish Times

'A bravura exploration of why Americans are not cut out to be imperialists but nonetheless have an empire. Vigorous, substantive, and worrying' Timothy Garton Ash

Ratings and reviews

4.7
9 reviews
Amit Mittal
June 1, 2018
Prof Ferguson has a disarming ability to put in perspective a lot of historical fact and allows him to get away with some atrocious figure of speech (he thinks) at times , a fortiori allowing him to speak to the reader. His works are required reading for Economics and Finance experts of the day before recovering a plan for the US Dollar or Europe or even China, if only for the history.
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Anil Das
December 26, 2023
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Fiq Qie
March 31, 2014
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About the author

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His many other prizes include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). He was named Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards.

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