ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the cost and benefits to workers of the iron. It focuses on the relationship between US military power, the stability of oil prices and US workers. Stanley Lebergott focused on imperialism at the turn of the century; Robert Zevin covers a larger sweep of history. Imperialism is the process of establishing and maintaining an empire. The US has used both of these types of imperialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Illiberal imperialism is that aspect of US foreign economic policy most directly connected to US foreign military action, both threatened and actual. The impacts of illiberal imperialism are difficult to measure, and the 'imperial accounting' for neoliberal imperialism may be even more difficult. The role of oil in US military strategy as far back as the early twentieth century and during the Second World War, up to the present time has been well documented.
