Empire Imagined: The Personality of American Power

Examines the deep roots of the American way of war.

The origins of the United States' distinct approach to war and military power are found in the colonial experience. Long before 1776 or 1619, Englishmen understood themselves to be a part of a larger, lost "British" empire that might disappear forever in the globe-girdling shadow of the Spanish Hapsburgs and their drive to extirpate Protestantism. A combination of geopolitical ambition and fear of Philip II propelled Elizabethan expansion into North America. During the queen's five decades on the throne, the British imperial impulse jelled into a distinct and widely shared strategic culture, anchored in a deeply held faith and political ideology that legitimized Tudor rule; increasingly centralized Tudor power across England, Scotland, and Ireland; forced attention to the continental European balance of power; and drew adventurers to explore the world and claim a toehold in North America. In Empire Imagined, Giselle Frances Donnelly traces the development of these enduring habits through a series of vignettes that reveal the interaction of a maturing strategic consensus and the contingencies inevitable in international politics and offers a unique perspective for understanding the current debate about America's role in the world.