The Empire Trap Noel Maurer torrent

The Empire Trap: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Intervention to Protect American Property Overseas 1893-2013 by Noel Maurer


Format: mobi/epub/azw3
Length: 558 pages
Genre: History
Date: 25 August 2013

Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. government willingly deployed power, hard and soft, to protect American investments all around the globe. Why did the United States get into the business of defending its citizens' property rights abroad?

Noel Maurer examines the ways that American investors initially influenced their government to intercede to protect investments in locations such as Central America and the Caribbean. Costs were small--at least at the outset--but with each incremental step, American policy became increasingly entangled with the goals of those they were backing, making disengagement more difficult.

Maurer discusses how, all the way through the 1970s, the United States not only failed to resist pressure to defend American investments, but also remained unsuccessful at altering internal institutions of other countries in order to make property rights secure in the absence of active American involvement.

Foreign nations expropriated American investments, but in almost every case the U.S. government's employment of economic sanctions or covert action obtained market value or more in compensation--despite the growing strategic risks. The advent of institutions focusing on international arbitration finally gave the executive branch a credible political excuse not to act. Maurer cautions that these institutions are now under strain and that a collapse might open the empire trap once more.

With shrewd and timely analysis, this book considers American patterns of foreign intervention and the nation's changing role as an imperial power.

Author:

Noel Maurer is associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is the author of "The Power and the Money" and coauthor of "The Politics of Property Rights, Mexico since 1980", and "The Big Ditch" (Princeton).