The Archbishop of Canterbury is the most recent public figure to decry American “imperialism” around the world. The London Times reports (“US is‘worst’ imperialist: archbishop”) on his interview on the topic. Interestingly he compares American foreign policy with British imperial policy and makes the claim that the United States is far “worse” than Britain was during its imperial heyday.

Leaving aside the politics or the political implications it seems really problematic to use a historical comparison to make a qualitative judgment. It’s one thing to argue that United States policies are or are not imperialist based upon similarities to historical precedents (like British policies that were at their time uncompromisingly imperialist), but it’s quite another to say that that makes one country “better” or “worse.”

Particularly strange (I think) is his comparison between current United States activities (Iraq, Afghanistan although he never mentions them specifically) and British rule in India.

Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: “We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.”

He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed India. “It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example.

I’m not a specialist in the history of British India but it strikes me that there are several huge problems with his shorthand assessment of its history. For one thing I find it hard to believe that the net input of “energy and resources” the British put into India for its benefit over several centuries would be more than the wealth and resources that they extracted from it (not to mention “energy,” labor, and lives). I also cringe at the word “normalising” because it suggests that the British / European way of governing or of economic development is the only correct path for a nation. Related to this is the fact that the British imperial administration of India was hardly democratic at the time.

Finally, on the general point of American and British imperialisms, the Archbishop’s comparison fails to take into account the continuity between the British Empire and the American “empire” (if there is such a thing). In some senses the United States shares common culture and history with Britain. It might be that “imperial” activities of the United States are continuations of some British policies and the former global role of Britain rather than something radically new and different.

Several months ago Professor Laqueur wrote a book review of Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known in the London Review of Books. I hadn’t read the book and I have only the most cursory knowledge of intellectual debates among twentieth century German scholars. I enjoyed the review primarily because I love the way that Laqueur writes. Although the review was somewhat critical, it seemed balanced to me.

The September 20, 2007 issues of the London Review of Books includes a letter from the scholar Tony Judt who attacks Laqueur’s review as well as him personally. Judt takes issue with the observations Laqueur made about the importance of fame and recognition to Stern and his contemporaries. He writes:

This ad hominem assault would be distasteful from any quarter. But it is pretty ripe coming from an academic whose own website (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/) lists every bauble he has received, every important lecture he has ever given, and even takes the trouble to inform visitors that Thomas Laqueur was once a ‘Guest of the Rektor, Wissenschafts Kolleg zu Berlin’. In matters of aspiration, apparently, the professor knows whereof he writes.

As the guy who manages the Berkeley History Department’s website I know for a fact that there are quite a few things wrong with Judt’s use of this example to criticize Professor Laqueur. For one thing, Judt’s framing of that address (http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Laqueur/) as Laqueur’s “own” is a little misleading. It is not, after all, something like thomaslaqueur.com. Instead it is something more analagous to a directory listing. Professor Laqueur does not update that web page himself, nor do any of the faculty in the department update their own directly. If they have more information to add they tell tell me or another staff person. Many of them simply email me a copy of their CV whenever they make changes to it and I format the updated version for posting on the web. All of the faculty pages are simply pages on the History Department’s site, not their own entities.

Moreover, the content of Laqueur’s web page is fairly extensive because of an administrative request that faculty pages be up-to-date and as extensive as possible. One of the many criteria that the National Research Council uses to evaluate graduate programs is information found on department websites, including faculty profiles. As part of the NRC evaluation process the university encouraged departments to make pages as thorough as possible. I can attest to the fact that not every faculty member in the History Department sent me a complete CV to post, but the vast majority of the department who did (like Laqueur) were acting in the interest of and at the request of their university.

Apart from that there is the issue of prospective graduate students and how they get information about the department’s faculty. I know from talking with my peers in their first few years of graduate school that most of them before they came to Berkeley looked at the web pages of faculty whose work interested them. Tony Judt probably would argue there is no need for a prospective student to know every honor that a professor received, but it seems to me that there is a benefit to posting a complete or nearly-complete CV.

The larger point is that a web site or web page is not about self-aggrandizement. Certainly not when it follows a standard department format and sits on a university server. But, even in a general sense, web pages have become so commonplace that they are often the first place we turn for information about someone. Even Tony Judt in fashioning his critique must have done a Google search for “Thomas Laqueur” (if, instead, he went to the Department’s main page and found Laqueur through navigating our site that would prove the point about the institutional nature of Laqueur’s web page).