Yesterday, for the first time ever, I gathered up a bundle of books and sold them. To the Harvard Book Store. I looked around my room for the better part of an hour trying to come up with a suitable list; I found perhaps ten books. Some of them didn't clear consultation with the GF ('Galatea 2.2? I might read that...' And for all I know she will. But I won't...) but what remained went into the ol' Fashionable Courier Bag and over to the HBS, where I scored $20-something in credit. Of course, being a bookstore, the HBS had its revenge: I picked up three books for a total overage of like $5.
The whole thing felt symbolically overloaded but I'm glad I picked up the books I did. It was a good trade. Colossus by Niall Ferguson, one of the three new (used) books, is a riveting work: the doom'n'gloom talk is hard to refute and the vision of benevolent empire offers certain very familiar satisfactions. [N.B. I haven't read all of it, but I made it through a sizable chunk in a single fascinated sitting, in our backyard hammock - which is the way to read about imperialism, I'd say.] Its elisions are common and quite sizable (If America should be a colonial administrator, how should it deal with nations that want no part of its sojourns? If Social Security is a reasonable pledge and a huge unfunded liability, how can it be shored up without denying support to those who will survive on that money? How can anyone seriously make the claim that oil had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq?) and with the benefit of a couple years' hindsight Ferguson's optimism about Iraq is downright embarrassing - even without having the correct figures to hand, I found myself laughing aloud at his (two-year-old) oil-production projections for this year, 'from the author's calculations' indeed. Still, his vision of American diplomats and soldiers as itinerant governmental engineers, writing checks and holding elections and setting up in the institutions that favour self-regulating markets and participatory democracy, is a weirdly compelling one. I know on the one hand that I believe in self-determination, even in failure, but on the other hand...
The parts of the book dealing explicitly with Iraq make no mention of sectarian religious conflict, and do not treat the possibility of the U.S. ending up one of three or four factions in a civil war in that country; Ferguson is a historian of far-flung vision but obviously not a Middle Eastern specialist. One gets the sense that perhaps a team of area specialists might have strengthened the book by hedging on its grand, questionable claims that liberal democracy can be dropped from a plane onto grateful brown-skinned subjects. And Ferguson's thoughts on Africa - that basically the entire continent is too fucked up for democracy - are dark and unpleasant (and way beyond my ability to question or evaluate). But the book had the shocking effect of leaving me questioning, on the one hand, whether liberal empire is possible, and on the other, whether imperial rule is by definition any worse than anything else. I didn't think such thoughts were possible 24 hours ago. Which is not an endorsement of the book's arguments, but is in fact a pretty ringing recommendation for the book thus far.
