Selling, buying and consuming are central components of the American experience at home and abroad, not the quest for empire. ''Hegemony'' tells the story of the drive to create consumer capitalism abroad through political pressure and the promise of goods for mass consumption. In contrast to the recent literature on America as an empire, it explains that the primary goal of the foreign and economic policies of the United States is a world which increasingly reflects the American way of doing business and not the formation or management of an empire. Contextualizing both the Iraq war and recent plant closings, noted-author John Agnew shows how this drive for global hegemony is now backfiring as production and service jobs move abroad and a new geography of power portends a world in which global hegemony is decreasingly American in either provenance or reward.