Brandon Hammer
Columbia University
What kind of mark can a superpower leave on the world after its sun has set? Can it use its hegemony, power, and wealth to destroy something fundamentally wrong with the world?
In the first half of the 19th century, the British Empire did just that. In two bills in the first decade of the 19th century, Great Britain abolished the slave trade, despite the fact that it was a booming industry very beneficial for the British economy. According to Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, “British ships carried 52 percent of slaves transported between 1791 and 1805, and British colonies also produced 55 percent of the world’s sugar in 1805-6…At this time Britain’s West Indian trade was worth more than all of its other trade with the empire.” Yet, the British Empire abolished the slave trade in 1806.
This action had no strategic gain. In cutting itself off from the slave trade, Britain’s economy took a large hit: West Indian sugar production dropped almost 25 percent, “whereas production in competing slave economies rose by more than 210 percent.” Also, Britain upset strategic allies by forcing them to submit to searches. “Perhaps the only people in the entire empire who benefited” from abolition, write Kaufmann and Pope, “were the slaves themselves and East Indian and Egyptian agricultural produces.”
Despite such a huge costs, the British destroyed an oppression that had been accepted as natural from the time of Aristotle. Today the slave trade is only marginally existent. Britain, thus, despite the fact that it’s no longer a super-power and might not reemerge as one, left an extremely important mark on the world, a policy that freed millions and prevented the enslavement of millions more.
This begs the question of the United States: What can the United States do with its current power that could have a similar beneficial effect? The most obvious issue to take on (to me, at least) would be global warming. Although the United States should most definitely join the Kyoto Protocol, we have to ask ourselves whether it would be worth it to take a further step. Would it be worth it for the United States to use its hegemony, wealth, and power to end carbon emissions as we know it? Are there other bad things in the world that the United States could tackle?
(Here’s the article about Britain and the abolition of the slave trade: “http://www.jstor.org/view/00208183/di012157/01p00837/”
October 24, 2007 at 5:01 am |
It seems to me that the global warming idea wouldn’t work out because doesn’t have a large enough stranglehold over the world’s economy to unilaterally implement something further – we would need the support of both the EU and China for it to work, and China has no reason to curb its economic growth to appease a slowly deteriorating super power.