Colossus: the rise and fall of the American empire Niall Ferguson Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 384pp, £20 ISBN 0713997702

With the pomposity of an elder statesman who quotes himself as an authority, Niall Ferguson observes in his latest book:

Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I concluded - somewhat heatedly - that "the greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it". Little did I imagine that within nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of 11 September, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated.

Ferguson, who was recently made a fellow of the right-wing Hoover Institution, could hardly have chosen a more inappropriate time to volunteer to act as court historian of the American neo-cons. Of Iraq, he writes that the US's "colossal economic and military superiority was swift and cost few American lives: just 91 combat-related fatalities between the start of the war and President Bush's declaration of victory". Yet the US death toll is nearing 800, and most Americans now think the war was a mistake. Ferguson continues: "The war against Iraq therefore ended up being much more a war of humanitarian intent than anyone had anticipated." In the light of revelations of the systematic use of torture by American interrogators, such a conclusion looks ridiculous.

Ferguson raises, only to dismiss it, the view that the US is not an empire but a giant nation state that plays a hegemonic role in world politics. He cites Thomas Jefferson's description of the US as an "empire of liberty". But "the most brilliant British historian of his generation" (the Times) should be aware that, in Jefferson's era, "empire" had not acquired its modern connotation of one people ruling coercively over another, and merely meant "state", "domain" or "realm". Ferguson claims that the American annexation of Texas and California from Mexico demonstrates the imperial (as opposed to merely expansionist) nature of the US. However, all US states have entered the Union with privileges identical to those of the older states; the American south-west is not a colony or protectorate.

In the Orwellian newspeak of Ferguson, words and concepts mean whatever he wants. Thus, America's cold war alliance system in Europe and east Asia was an "empire", while 19th-century Britain's dirigiste colonial economic schemes were examples of "economic globalisation". Indeed, Ferguson uses "free trade" and its cognates to describe three very different things: free trade proper (voluntary trade among independent polities); coerced trade (like that imposed on 19th-century China and Latin America by the British empire); and statist imperial schemes (as were carried out in directly administered British colonies). You wonder how he can keep a straight face when describing the inhuman British coolie trade - which, he concedes, "lay somewhere between free and unfree labour" - as an example of the "international mobility of labour" fostered by a benevolent imperial Britain.

In the aftermath of the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq, Ferguson's often-expressed fear that the US will not be tough enough on the subjects of its "empire" seems particularly shocking. But he goes still further, suggesting that US prisons be emptied to supply cannon fodder for the neo-British empire he proposes:

If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army . . . One of the mainsprings of British colonisation was the policy of transportation that emptied the prison hulks of 18th-century England into ships bound for Australia.

Who forms the audience for this evil nonsense? Ferguson admits that "mainstream conservatives" in the US join American liberals and radicals in rejecting his brand of nostalgic imperialism. However, he notes that neoconservatives "have begun to use the term American empire less pejoratively, if still ambivalently, and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm".

All but two (Max Boot and Robert Kap-lan) of the pro-empire neo-cons whom Ferguson quotes in one long paragraph are citizens of the British Commonwealth or naturalised immigrants from it: Charles Krauthammer and Michael Ignatieff (Canadian), Dinesh D'Souza (India) and Sebastian Mallaby (British). To this list one could add many more British and Canadian expats and naturalised citizens in Washington and New York eager to fight to the last man to recreate the Pax Britannica in the name of the "Anglosphere".

I will conclude this review with an appeal on behalf of my countrymen to Queen Elizabeth II. Please, Your Majesty, do more to prevent advocates of empire in your Commonwealth from infiltrating our republic in the form of columnists and professors. We Americans have nuts enough of our own without being over-run by British imperialists such as your subject Niall Ferguson.

Michael Lind is the author of Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern takeover of American politics (Basic Books)

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