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  • The Empire's New Clothes:From Empire to Federation, Yesterday and Today
  • Anthony Pagden (bio)

In the past decade or so, there has been a remarkable revival of interest in empires and imperialism. What has for long been relegated to the wastelands of the academy now seems to be on the point of capturing the center (or perhaps recapturing it: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperial history had been the dominant mode). Empires that once seemed to belong in one of history's many dustbins—an outmoded form of politics, to be studied only through traces left across the shattered landscapes of their former subject peoples—now seem contentious, interesting, highly topical, and perhaps, not all bad. Some of this revised interest is internal. The national historians of the various European imperial powers (and those of the United States) have for too long written as if their respective empires were either of no interest or simply did not exist. Now most historians would agree that modern Britain, modern Spain, modern France, modern Portugal, and the modern Netherlands have all been shaped by their imperial pasts. What was once obvious from a stroll through the centers of London, Paris, Madrid—or Washington—has now found a respectable, and increasingly popular, place on the academic curriculum. But it is of course the role of the United States and its most recent, seemingly imperial adventures in the Middle East that has dominated much of the more immediate concern. Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, books appear, it seems almost daily, with titles such as Incoherent Empire, The Sorrows of Empire, America's Inadvertent Empire, Resurrecting Empire, [End Page 36] The Obligation of Empire. Robert Kaplan has likened the United States to Rome in its struggle with Carthage—and a classicist from Fresno has compared the war in Iraq with the Peloponnesian War (a perhaps unfortunate analogy in view of the outcome of that war: the virtual extinction of both sides and the debilitation of Greek democracy, which paved the way for Alexander the Great).

We now have a concept of "Empire Lite"—to go with Marlboro or Coca-Cola Lite—a dusted off version of the older "informal empire" thesis but in a new tone of moral urgency. We have the claims, made stridently by Max Boot, with more historical nuance by Niall Ferguson and more mutedly still by Michael Ignatieff, that empires can be forces for good in the world—that peace, stability, and a civilized order can only be sustained by the imposition of massive and extensive state power.1 The "liberal imperialism" of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill is not only beginning to be thinkable once again, it is even, with a number of important qualifications, beginning to seem attractive—and not merely to the State Department.

But what links the empires of the ancient, early modern, modern, and contemporary worlds—what links Rome to London to Vienna to Washington or Moscow, beyond a high degree of mimeticism? Not that mimeticism is not a crucial, if largely overlooked, aspect of international politics. But while some people today believe America is an empire and strenuously advocate that it should face up to what it is and act accordingly, it is worth exploring what they understand an empire to be. For a state to claim to be an empire, or to deny that it is, are highly significant political statements. So when Boot and Ferguson and Ignatieff speak of America as an empire, we must ask to what particular historical form they are, whether they know it or not, alluding. In an attempt to answer that question, I want to sketch out a brief history. It is, of course, only one among many possible histories, but I do not think that the one I have in mind can ever entirely be discarded.

Empires have always assumed the existence of a polity with some kind of center and one or more dependencies. In this limited sense, a tribute-distribution system of the kind that flourished in Central and South America, and in what is today Nigeria, in the late fifteenth century; a union of semi-independent states held together...

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