Proconsuls
Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today

The first systematic analysis of American proconsular leadership from the Spanish-American War to the present.

Carnes Lord (Author)

9781107009615, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 June 2012

255 pages
24.2 x 16 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

'Lord sensitively and skilfully outlines a detailed blueprint for how such newly organized Defense Department proconsulships might avoid any resemblance to a colonial office or German general staff.' Victor Davis Hanson, Claremont Review of Books

This book is a study of proconsulship, a form of delegated political-military leadership historically associated with the governance of large empires. Opening with a conceptual and historical analysis of proconsulship as an aspect of imperial or quasi-imperial rule generally, it surveys its origins and development in the late Roman Republic and its manifestations in the British Empire. The main focus is proconsulship in American history. Beginning with the occupation of Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, it discusses the role of General Douglas MacArthur in East Asia during and after World War II, the occupation of Germany (focusing on General Lucius Clay), and proconsular leadership during the Vietnam War and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan at the turn of the twenty-first century. An additional chapter provides an assessment of the evolution of American political-military command and control and decision making after the end of the Cold War.

1. On proconsular leadership
2. Roman origins
3. Wood in Cuba
4. The Philippines
5. MacArthur in the Far East
6. Clay in Germany
7. Vietnam
8. Clark in the Balkans
9. Bremer in Iraq
10. Petraeus in the Middle East
11. American lessons.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], General & world history [HBG]