On Empire: Americawarand Global Supremacy

"A small volume for igniting big discussions" (Booklist), the renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm's On Empire is a major new intellectual resource for anyone seeking to understand America's fate in the new millennium.

In four brief chapters encompassing a century of world history, Hobsbawm engages the key questions of our era with his characteristic wit, precision, and historical breadth of knowledge. A startling image of danger and instability emerges as On Empire sketches the tangled relationship between globalization, war, and the prospects for peace in a world that has witnessed uninterrupted military conflict since 1914.

It is against this somber backdrop that Hobsbawm offers his views about why America will never achieve the dominance of past empires--despite the overwhelming preponderance of U.S. military power in the world. And in a powerful series of historical observations about the war in Iraq, Hobsbawm dismantles every major assumption underlying American military strategy, demonstrating the utter futility of U.S. hopes for "victory" in the Middle East.

"Good grounds for heated discussion about America's role in the world" (Kirkus Reviews), On Empire is a brilliant new intellectual volley from "our greatest living historian" (The New York Review of Books).

Publisher: New Press
Published: 06/16/2009
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.3lbs
Size: 7.20h x 5.10w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781595584656

About the Author

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was born in Egypt in 1917 and educated in Austria, Germany, and England. He taught at Birkbeck College, the University of London, and the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes as well as On History, Uncommon People, Industry and Empire, Bandits, On the Edge of the New Century, Revolutionaries, On Empire, Fractured Times, and his memoir Interesting Times (The New Press).