A Review of: “Bearing Witness: The Global Spigot, American Empire and The Colonial Present”

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Notes

1. In Agamben's discussion, Homo Sacer (‘Sacred man’) “was a position conferred by Roman law upon those who could not be sacrificed according to ritual (because they were outside divine law: their deaths were of no value to the gods) but who could still be killed with impunity (because they were also outside judicial law: their lives were of no value to their contemporaries)” (Gregory, 2004, p. 62, summarising Agamben, 1998 [1995]).

2. Not all of them, of course. Gregory and Harvey rightly take issue with Niall Ferguson's recent defense of British imperialism (2004) and with his advocacy of forms of direct American colonial rule that would move beyond the ‘nation-building lite’ described by Michael Ignatieff (2002). Ferguson began his academic career with well-crafted and stimulating books on the House of Rothschild (1999) and the Pity of War (2000); more recently, he seems to have made a Faustian bargain with parts of the American Right and their boosters in the media.

3. The other book is by David Anderson (2004); Neal Ascherson (2005) is the reviewer in the NYRB. The LRB review is by Bernard Porter (2005).

4. Bayly and Harper (2005). I draw here, too, on the review of the Bayly-Harper volume by Benjamin Schwarz in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday 17th April, 2005, p. 30.

5. On the rise of Bush's War Cabinet (the ‘Vulcans’), see James Mann (2004); on Rumsfeld's aggressive role within it, see Richard A. Clarke (2004). For a considered review of the possible influences of Leo Strauss (and, rather differently, Carl Schmitt) on Bush and the protagonists of a New American Century, see Anne Norton (2004).

6. The Web site of the Washington-based think tank is: www.newamericancentury.org.

7. Just as I was finishing this essay I read the scorching account of ‘Blood for oil’ written by Michael Watts and his colleagues (Iain Boal, T. J. Clark and Joseph Matthews) for the London Review of Books: Retort, 2005.

8. Judt (2004).

9. Kennedy (1990).

10. This would be a conventional axiom of ‘Realist’ international relations, a body of work that overlaps strongly at times with some Marxist accounts of geopolitical-economy.

11. Monk (1996, 2000).

12. For chapter and verse, see for example Smith, pp. 97–110 (on the suppression of scientific evidence about Peary's ‘discovery’ of the North Pole), pp. 267–68 (on Bowman's bullying of colleagues at Johns Hopkins), and pp. 308–311 (on Bowman's racial thinking).

13. Smith refers to The Bowman Corollary at pp. 229–234, largely in relation to Turner's frontier thesis. The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 warned Europe that the US would zealously police its interests in ‘the Western Hemisphere’ (Latin America). It added to the earlier Monroe Doctrine.

14. Smith (1987).

15. Said (1979, 1993, 1995), Chomsky (2003), Morris (2001), Halliday (2003), Hiro (2002) and Abu El-Haj (2001).

16. Shapiro (1997), Huntington (1996), Lewis (2002).

17. Hare (2003).

18. I am grateful to Sharad Chari and Gerry Kearns for some pressing observations on a first draft of this review article. Sharad is right to insist that streams of postcolonial thought which are indebted to writers like C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon are insightful precisely because their efforts to “decolonise pseudo-universalisms” are raised alongside questions of political economy. My criticism here is aimed at versions of postcolonialism that seem to refuse this dual engagement.

19. Keegan (2001).

20. Raban (2003), Rosen (2002).

21. Agnew and Corbridge (1995). I do not implicate John in this view!

22. See the Appendix of Harvey (2000).

23. See Bruce Ackerman (2001) and Paul Krugman (2003) for powerful critiques of the legitimacy of the first Bush Presidency.