AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the position of the United States in world affairs has no equivalent in history. Indeed, one has to look to the apogee of the Roman Empire, almost two millennia ago, to find even a remotely comparable situation.
Rome conquered the known world by force of arms. Its power arose from its military machine, epitomized by the legions. And every Great Power since has exercised formal political hegemony over alien peoples to advance its own interests. A century ago, the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe’s land area, while a third of the world’s people were subjects of King Edward VII. But only a small minority of those people spoke English or regarded themselves as British.
The United States, however, has always been, at most, a reluctant imperialist. In the twentieth century it was the only Great Power that did not add to its sovereign territory as a result of war, although it was also the only one to emerge stronger than ever from each of that century’s three Great Power conflicts. Today the United States possesses only 6 percent of the world’s land area and 6 percent of its people—virtually all of whom regard themselves as Americans and speak English. And yet its influence in the world is far greater than Britain’s was at the height of its relative power in the mid-nineteenth century.
The reason is the American economy. For while the United States has only 6 percent of the land and the people, it has close to 30 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, more than three times that of any other country. In virtually every field of economic endeavor, from mining to telecommunications, and by almost every measure, from agricultural production per capita to annual number of books published to number of Nobel Prizes won (more than 42 percent of them), the United States leads the world.
Its economy, however, is not only the largest in the world, it is the most dynamic and innovative as well. Virtually every major development in technology in the twentieth century—which was far and away the most important century in the history of technology—originated in the United States or was principally industrialized and turned into consumer products here. Its culture, therefore, from blue jeans to Hollywood movies to Coca-Cola to rock and roll to SUVs to computer chat rooms, pervades the rest of the planet. As the new technologies spread around the world, they inescapably brought with them American ways and an American perspective.
English has ever increasingly become the world’s unifying language, as Latin was Europe’s for centuries. Sixty percent of the students who are studying foreign languages in the world today are studying English, which is increasingly a required subject in school systems everywhere. Partly this is because, thanks to the British Empire, so many countries use English as a first or second language, but equally it is because the United States dominates the world in communications and entertainment. The Internet, the most powerful means of communication ever devised, is largely an American invention, and English is the language of more than 80 percent of the four billion Web sites now in existence.
The ultimate power of the United States, then, lies not in its military—potent as that military is, to be sure—but in its wealth, the wide distribution of that wealth among its population, its capacity to create still more wealth, and its seemingly bottomless imagination in developing new ways to use that wealth productively.
If the world is becoming rapidly Americanized as once it became Romanized, the reason lies not in our weapons, but in the fact that others want what we have and are willing, often eager, to adopt our ways in order to have them too. The relentless spread of democracy and capitalism in recent decades, to a large extent in the light of the American example, is a peaceful and largely welcomed conquest—at least by the people, if often not by the elites who have seen their own power slipping away. It is a conquest more subtle, more positive, more pervasive, and, in all likelihood, more permanent than any known before.
Thus America’s is an empire of wealth, an empire of economic success and of the ideas and practices that fostered that success. Like many successes, that of the American economy is often seen, in retrospect, as inevitable, even foreordained. After all, the country has always had a vast, varied, and fecund national territory, abundant natural resources, and a large and well-educated population. But Argentina had all these assets as well, and hasn’t fought a protracted war since 1870. Yet it struggles just to maintain its status as a developed nation. Its GDP is less than a third that of the United States per capita.
Much of the reason for the difference lies in politics, for Argentine politics, inherited from Spain’s control-from-the-top imperial system, has all too often destroyed wealth or, even more often, prevented rather than fostered its creation. But American politics had the great good fortune to be grounded in English traditions, especially the idea that the law, not the state, is supreme. The uniquely English concept of liberty—the idea that individuals have inherent rights, including property rights, that may not be arbitrarily abrogated—was also crucial.
That England was able to develop these concepts, incorporate them into its politics, and pass them on to its children was due in large part to the most consequential geographic fact in Europe, perhaps the world: the twenty-three miles of often treacherous water that separates the island of Great Britain from the European mainland. The English Channel is narrow enough that England was in close and continuous contact with the mainland and yet broad enough to make invasion, at best, a chancy proposition. It has succeeded only once in the last thousand years.
With no need to maintain a large and expensive army, England was a low-tax state for much of its history, able to put its economic resources into developing more resources. Further, it could afford the luxury of decentralized government; the running of local affairs was left in the hands of local people with little interference from the king. And England had the most fluid social structure of any major nation in Europe. While it had an aristocracy—indeed one legendary for its wealth and influence—it had no closed noble class. Marriage alliances between successful bourgeois families and landed families have always been far more common in Britain than on the Continent, and talent could thus rise much more easily to the top. Napoleon’s description of England as a nation of shopkeepers was meant as an insult. It was taken as a compliment.
Englishmen became used to this state of affairs and deeply antagonistic to any attempts to change it. The English who began to settle in America in the early seventeenth century brought these ideas with them and applied them to the new situation in which they found themselves.
Geopolitically, that situation resembled England’s, only on a much grander scale. Until the second half of the twentieth century, North America was largely immune from foreign attack, and the hand of government (and thus the tax man) lay very lightly indeed upon it for most of that time. And just as Great Britain was perfectly situated on the map to dominate the trade routes of northern Europe as that area began to dominate European and world affairs, the United States was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the emergence of a fully globalized economy. The United States is the only Great Power to front on both the Atlantic and the Pacific and the only one whose national territory sprawls across arctic, temperate, and tropical climate zones. It is at once both effectively an island, with all of an island’s military security, and a continent, with all of a continent’s resources.
Further, most of the people who came to what is now the United States—by no means all of them English, of course—came here precisely to be able to run their own affairs as they saw fit, both to worship their God and to better their economic situation in what has been seen for centuries as a land of opportunity. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the United States is both the most religious nation on earth and the most secular, the most devout and the most commercial.
And there can be no doubt that if the United States is famous for its get-up-and-go, that is because Americans are descended from those who got up and came. Those who chose to leave all they had ever known and come to a strange and distant land came to pursue their own ideas of happiness. Here, the great majority found conditions that allowed them to do so with less interference than anywhere else and thus gave them a better chance to find it. Even those who came as captives, rather than of their own free will, had each somehow survived an ordeal beyond modern imagination and passed that strength to their descendants. And because a national economy is nothing more than the collective economic accomplishments of the citizenry, the American economy has become, over the nearly four centuries of its existence, one the greatest wonders of the modern world and, indeed, a prime creator of that modern world.
That is not to say that the history of the American economy has been one of triumph following triumph. That would make a very dull book. At numerous points in the history of the United States, the economy was in deep, deep trouble, and that trouble could easily have spiraled out of control if the political leadership had failed, as Argentina’s leadership has failed that country so often.
After the Revolution, the American economy was in profound recession. The country’s products were largely excluded from the British Empire, where most of its traditional markets had lain. Its currency, to the extent that it even amounted to a currency, was nearly worthless; its government’s debts were unpaid and unpayable. In 1932 the disaster of the Great Depression was so all-pervasive that the future not only of the economy but of the Republic itself was in doubt to many.
In both cases the country managed to weather the storm and emerge stronger than ever thanks to extraordinary leadership, in the first case by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, in the latter by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the country’s politicians have also made grave errors, including those that produced the Great Depression itself. The destruction of the Second Bank of the United States at the hands of Andrew Jackson meant that the country had no central bank for nearly eighty years. As a result, the recurrent financial panics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were far worse, and the ensuing depressions far deeper, than they otherwise might have been.
Like most stories of empire, the story of the empire of wealth is an epic one, full of triumph and disaster, daring and timidity, new ideas and old prejudices, great men and utter fools. But most of all it is an epic powered by uncountable millions pursuing their self-interests within the rule of law, which is the essence of liberty. And as with all epics, it is at its heart a window into what makes us human, for I can think of no more overwhelming a refutation of William Wordsworth’s notion that in “getting and spending we lay waste our powers” than the story of the American economy.