Portal empire: plastic power and thalassic imagination

Abstract

This paper looks at American democracy from its relatively small scale origins with strong localised and hierarchical social foundations through its development into a medium-sized, continental scale structure based on planar and procedural notions of power through to its global stage. The paper points to the crucial role that navalism, sea regions and portal cities played in the emergence of American globalism. The paper discusses the conjunction of a collective American sense of destiny with the architectonic, rhythmic and plastic power of portals, and how the exceptional capacity of nodal thalassic regions to produce intellectual capital shaped the peculiar and distinctive nature of American empire.