is America the new Rman Empire?

[DanaC]

Urbane.....how many countries and islands, has America built military bases on?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Urbane.....how many countries and islands, has America built military bases on?

Come now: how many countries and islands do we get imperial tribute from, eh? How many of these do we colonize these days? I'm listening for the tramping of hordes of settlers and it's so nice and quiet I'm about to go to sleep...:p

How many countries do we lock up their economies into a mercantilist "sell your raw materials only to us, buy manufactured goods of these materials only from us" deal?

Imperialism in large measure springs from a mercantilist economic paradigm. Mercantilism is something we've never really practiced, having gotten too much of a taste of it in the Colonial era, which led directly to the American Revolution -- which in its turn had a great influence on the form and behavior of the British Empire -- rather better, I think, than the behavior of other empires of the last two centuries. Parliament and nation learned something about what not to do by the American example, and it worked rather well -- see Canada, the "pine" part of the "Dominion of palm and pine."

Full-on capitalism in our manner (okay, it's how most humans do capitalism if they at all can) does not encourage imperialism, and is why we're the one non-imperialist great power and superpower.