Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  1. See Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 15.

  2. Israel Zangwill, “The Melting Pot: Drama in Four Acts” (1908), in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's Jewish Plays, Edna Nahshon, ed. (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 288.

  3. On the approach to religion taken by the “planting fathers,” see Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chaps. 1-3, especially pp. 75-77, 101, 111-13, 121, 129; the quotes in the text are from pp. 69, 76, 96. See also Sydney E. Ahlstrom's classic, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 198-99, chaps. 9-11. On the Salem witch trials, see Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), and Peter Charles Hoffer, The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).

  4. My discussion of the Great Awakening relies heavily on Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, pp. 128-29, 136-40, 143,145, 151, 153-58. The quote from Chancellor Hardwicke can be found on p. 133. See also W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  5. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 160.

  6. Adam Smith's quote can be found in Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, p. 9; John Adams's quote is on p. 219. See also pp. 8-10, 160-62, 178-79, 205-7, 236, 238.

  7. Ibid., pp. 239-40, 257-58, 260-61, 265-66.

  8. On the large number of slaves from West Africa who originally practiced Islam, see Michael A. Gomez, “Muslims in Early America,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 60, no. 4 (Nov. 1994), pp. 671, 685-86, 694; see generally Michael A. Koszegi and J. Gordon Melton, eds., Islam in North America: A Sourcebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).

  9. On Franklin's transformation, see the erudite and very readable book by Doron S. Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 58-61, 229-30n.24. Two excellent recent biographies are Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), and Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

  10. This section draws heavily on Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets, especially pp. 10, 12, 29-32, 52-53, 104-6, 115-18, 146. Jefferson is quoted on p. 37.

  11. Ibid., pp. 159-66, 186, 197-98, 201-4.

  12. Ibid., pp. xxi, 52-53, 152-53; Charles R. Geisst, The Last Partnerships: Inside the Great Wall Street Money Dynasties (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), pp. 283-85; John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), pp. 24219; Cecyle S. Neidle, The New Americans (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967), p. 62; Barry E. Supple, “A Business Elite: German-Jewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Business History Review, vol. 31 (Summer 1957), pp. 143-50.

  13. See Sean P. Carney, “Irish Race in America,” and Curtis B. Solberg, “The Scandinavians: Blueprint for Americanization,” in Joseph M. Collier, ed., American Ethnics and Minorities (Los Alamitos, Calif.: Hwong Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 143, 219. Lincoln's quote can be found in Bill Ong Hing, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 21.

  14. See Kristofer Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses: American Immigration and The Treaty of Versailles (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2006), pp. 16-17; Roger Daniels and Otis L. Graham, Debating American Immigration, 1882- Present (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), p. 93; Carney, “Irish Race in America,” and Bernard Eisenberg, “The German Americans,” in American Ethnics and Minorities, pp. 183, 219; Lance E. Davis et al., American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 126, 173; Gordon, An Empire of Wealth, p. 243; Hing, Defining America Through Immigration Policy, pp. 25, 52; Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980), pp. 481-85; Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy, 6th ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), pp. 373-75; Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879-1940,” The American Economic Review, vol. 80, no. 4 (Sept. 1990), pp. 651, 662. On the United States’ territorial expansion and military successes against Mexico and France, see Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 181, 224-26, 234, 301-4.

  15. Roger Daniels, Noi Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890-1924 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1997), p. ix; Daniels and Graham, Debating American Immigration, pp. 12-18; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 241-60; Neidle, The New Americans, p. 26. The population estimates are from Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, pp. 564-65; and Kristofer Allerfeldt, Race, Radicalism, Religion, and Restriction: Immigration in the Pacific Northwest, 1890-1924 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), pp. 33-34.

  16. There is a large literature on the subject of party bosses and urban politics. My discussion draws principally on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Irish of New York,” in Laurence H. Fuchs, ed., American Ethnic Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 77-83; Tyler Anbinder, “ ‘Boss’ Tweed: Nativist,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 109-16; Elmer E. Cornwall, Jr., “Bosses, Machines, and Ethnic Groups,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 353 (May 1964), pp. 27-39; Humbert S. Nelli, “John Powers and the Italians: Politics in a Chicago Ward: 1896-1921,” The Journal of American History, vol. 57, no. 1 (June 1970), pp. 67-84. See also Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000).

  17. See Kristofer Allerfeldt, Race, Radicalism, Religion, and Restriction, pp. 33-34. On America's “homegrown” religions, see Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, pp. 387, 501-9, 805-24, 1020-26. For a general history of America's indigenous peoples, see Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970); Edward Lazarus, Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

  18. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 39, 62, 129; Kagan, Dangerous Nation, pp. 3021; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change andMilitary Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 248.

  19. See Gordon, An Empire of Wealth, pp. 294, 310-11; William Pfaff, “Mani- fest Destiny: A New Direction for America,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 15, 2007, pp. 54-55.

  20. Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses, pp. 17, 21, 23, 109; Daniels and Graham, Debating American Immigration, pp. 12-18, 23-25, 27-28, 77, 129.

  21. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 178-80, 198-202, 2423, 277, 357-60.

  22. See Ronald W. Clark, The Birth of the Bomb (New York: Horizon Press, 1961), pp. 1-3, 8-13; Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. 49-50; C. P. Snow, The Physicists (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1981), pp. 79-80.

  23. On the Soviet Union's deeply contradictory “nationalities” policy, see Valéry Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict In and After the Soviet Onion: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 27, 29-31; Francine Hirsch, “The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses,” Slavic Review, vol. 56, no. 2 (1997), pp. 256, 264, 276; Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 2 (1994), pp. 416-21.


  24. On Soviet attacks on American racism and the U.S. response, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 29-41.

  25. Ibid., pp. 179-80.

  26. Geoffrey Kabaservice, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), pp. 65, 156, 174, 176, 259-60, 264, 267; Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden Story of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005), pp. 364-67, 379, 392; Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 183-84, 272. On college graduation rates, see Nicole S. Stoops, A Half-Century of Learning: Historical Census Statistics on Educational Attainment in the United States, 1940 to 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Education and Social Stratification Branch, 2006), p. 9, table 12a.

  27. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 196, 223-25.

  28. Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), pp. 318-22, 329. The quote is from Gen. Michael Dugan, cited on p. 321.

  29. My discussion of American economic dominance draws on Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, pp. 18-19; Gordon, An Empire of Wealth, pp. 416-18. George Soros's quote can be found in Joseph Kahn, “Losing Faith: Globalization Proves Disappointing,” New York Times, Mar. 21, 2002, p. A8.

  30. My discussion of Eugene Kleiner draws on Rhonda Abrams, “Remembering Eugene Kleiner,” USA Today, Nov. 26, 2003; “Eugene Kleiner: Obituary,” The Economist, Dec. 6, 2003; and personal exchanges with Eugene Kleiner's sister-in-law, Dr. Sylvia Smoller. On Andrew Grove, see Tim Jackson, Inside Intel: Andy Grove and the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Chip Company (New York: Dutton, 1997), pp. 18-35, 69-76; Walter Isaacson, “The Microchip is the Dynamo of a New Economy…Driven by the Passion of Intel's Andrew Grove,” Time, Dec. 29, 1997/Jan. 5, 1998, pp. 46-51.

  31. Gordon, An Empire of Wealth, p. 418; Vivek Wadhwa, Anna Lee Saxenian, Ben Rissing, and Gary Gereffi, “America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” (Masters of Engineering Management Program, Duke University, and School of Information, U.C. Berkeley, Jan. 4, 2007), pp. 4-5.

  32. Boot, War Made New, pp. 421-26.

  TEN: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AXIS POWERS: NAZI GERMANY AND IMPERIAL JAPAN

  1. Klaus P. Fischer, Nazi Germany: A New History (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 459; William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 741-46; Anne O'Hare McCormick, “Europe: Hitler at Compiegne Opens Third Act of War,” New York Times, June 22, 1940, p. 14.

  2. Fischer, Nazi Germany, pp. 419, 431-34, 452-54; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 5, 625, 742.

  3. Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 30-32; Fischer, Nazi Germany, pp. 42-43, 62, 64-65; Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 424-27; Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 76, 87, 94, 118; Michael Stürmer, The German Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), pp. 102-4.

  4. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945, pp. 450-55, 543, 550-51, 585, 637; Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 86-87; Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, pp. 158-60, 345-46, 354-55; Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle, eds., The Nazi Germany Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 129.

  5. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945, pp. 550, 633-34; Stackelberg and Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, p. 92.

  6. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945, pp. 635-36; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 943-47, 973-74.

  7. See Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 14013; Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), pp. 37, 40; Michael Thad Allen, “The Devil in the Details: The Gas Chambers of Birkenau, October 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 16 (Fall 2002), p. 208. On the vast bureaucracy devoted to the identification, classification, and ultimately extermination of “inferior” peoples, see generally Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).

  8. George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosser & Dunlap, 1968), pp. 198-200; Fischer, Nazi Germany, pp. 541-45.

  9. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, p. 142; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 93910; “Timeline: Ukraine,” BBC News, available at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/l107869.stm.

  10. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 937-39; Stackelberg and Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, pp. xxvi, 46, 214-15; Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-36 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 6-7, 12-13.

  11. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, p. 142; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 937; Stackelberg and Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, pp. 294-95; Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany, pp. 6, 13.

  12. Fischer, Nazi Germany, p. 446; Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 718-20, 738-46. On the Nazis’ fueling resistance in France, see Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 13-35, 39-41, 60-61; Oliver Wieviorka, “France,” in Bob Moore, ed., Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 2000), pp. 125-28, 132-34, 145.

  13. John W Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 7-9, 272-81; Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 124-25.

  14. See Dower, War Without Mercy, pp. 203-5, 217.

  15. Ibid., pp. 208-10.

  16. Mark R. Peattie, Nan'Yö: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), pp. 113-14, 116.

  17. Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 397-98 (quoting Arakawa Gorö).

  18. Duus, The Abacus and the Sword, pp. 402-7.

  19. Dower, War Without Mercy, pp. 211-17.

  20. Ibid., pp. 25, 36, 278-79; Mikiso Hane, Japan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972), p. 453.

  21. Dower, War Without Mercy, pp. 277-78; Naitou Hisako, “Korean Forced Labor in Japan's Wartime Empire,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire (Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), pp. 90, 95; Andrew C. Nahm, Korea: Tradition and Transformation (Elizabeth, N.J.: Hollym International Corporation, 1988), pp. 239, 250, 255-56.

  22. Dower, War Without Mercy, pp. 6-7, 46; Ken'ichi Goto, Tensions of Empire, Paul Kratoska, ed. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 9, 44, 78; Gregory Clancey, “The Japanese Imperium and South-East Asia,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Southeast Asian Minorities in the Wartime Japanese Empire (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), pp. 7, 10; R. Murray Thomas, “Educational Remnants of Military Occupation,” in Wolf Mendl, ed., Japan and Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 372-78.

  23. Dower, War Without Mercy, pp. 43-48, 296; Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire, pp. 12916, 197. On the Japanese occupation of Singapore, see C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819-1988, 2nd ed. (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 183-201; Shimizu Hiroshi and Hirakawa Hiroshi, Japan and Singapore in the World Economy (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 7-11, 52-53, 71, 113-30; Yoji Akashi, “Japanese Policy Towards the Malayan Chinese 1941-1945,” Journal of Southeast Asia
n Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (Sept. 1970), pp. 66-89.

  24. See, e.g., Anton Lucas, “Local Opposition and Underground Resistance to the Japanese in Java, 1942-1945,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 60, no. 3 (Autumn 1987), pp. 542-43.

  25. Joseph W. Ballantine, Formosa (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1952), pp. 25, 33, 36-37; Myers and Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, pp. 30-41,279-89.

  26. Gary Marvin Davison, A Short History of Taiwan: The Case for Independence (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003), pp. 52, 54, 61-65, 67, 70; Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 32-45.

  ELEVEN: THE CHALLENGERS: CHINA, THE EUROPEAN UNION, AND INDIA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  Epigraphs: The Shanghainese optimist is quoted in Clyde Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 225. The Leonard quote is from Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), pp. 3-4.

  1. See, for example, “U.S. Image Up Slightly, But Still Negative,” Pew Global Attitudes Project, released June 23, 2005, available at pewglobal.org/reports/ display.php?ReportID=247; “U.S. Draws Negative Ratings in Poll,” Associated Press, Mar. 5, 2007, available at news.yahoo.com.

  2. Michael Elliott, “The Chinese Century,” Time, Jan. 22, 2007, pp. 33-42.

  3. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World (New York: Scribner, 2005), pp. 1-2; Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists, pp. 19, 26, 61; Oded Shenkar, The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Wharton School Publishing, 2005), pp. 3, 20, 59, 114; Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050,” Global Economics Paper No. 99 (Goldman Sachs Group, Oct. 1, 2003), p. 6; Lester R. Brown, “China Replacing the United States as World's Leading Consumer,” Earth Policy Institute Eco-Economy Update, Feb. 16,2005, available at www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update45.htm.