imperial dialectics

 When I was a twenty five year old sprout in NOLA, I read a book by a popular Scottish historian, Angus Calder, about the foundation of the British Empire : Revolutionary Empire. It rocked my world.

What made this book different from the usual procession of imperial icons that storyboard the history of the empire, breaking it down to a series of adventures, was Calder's total grasp of the ebbs and flows of the imperial world. For Calder, the colonial models have to be seen in terms of their first instantiation in the British isles themselves –in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Raleigh, for instance, not only founded the first, shortlived colony on the Eastern seaboard, but he was also planning on colonizing Ireland. He drew up a frankly genocidal plan for getting rid of the Irish, which, while not unleashed (at least in that form) upon the Irish, certainly was unleashed, later, on the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Algonquin, etc. Calder's point is that imperialism and the history of England, and by extension the Western countries, is not such that one can segregate the forces at work in the colony from those at work in the mother country. Instead, there was a constant exchange of models between the periphery and the center – the periphery being forged in the center, and vice versa. The experience of the "factory" in Jamaica -- the way in which sugar cane was cultivated, harvested and milled by slaves -- was imported to the factory models in England. The clearing of the Highlands, that fight against a tenacious, clan based mountain people, preludes struggles in India.
It was once said that the British acquired their empire in a “fit of absent-mindedness”. The absent-mindedness is really about the historiography, not the empire-building.
This same logic applies to the American empire. Foreign policy is not one of those forgiveables, which we give to the “progressive” presidents so that we can have our sub-standard social insurance. Foreign policy is a pretty accurate way of understanding the thinking of those in power when they do not have a strong democratic curb.
This is why Biden’s supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide casts such a light on the way the establishment Democrats think. This is why Hilary Clinton’s bizarrely conspiratorial remarks at the Israel Hayom summit (aka the Likud is great! Festival) which blamed the “perception” of genocide on Tik Tok are not the mere ravings of a has been, but are the very rhetoric of insider Dem politicos who are even now wondering how to pull off a victory while maintaining the Biden-Trump world order – and will likely succeed, if the past is any prologue.