Social Science Research Council

It has become commonplace for scholars, journalists, and politicians alike—from both around the world and across the political spectrum—to suggest that the United States has assumed dominance over a global empire. The words empire and America are conjoined as never before. Now that the idea of an American empire has entered public discourse, however, it is important to ask whether this is a helpful conceptual category with which to understand the U.S. role and project in an evidently unipolar world. The question is significant in part because the word “empire” and its related concepts, “imperial” and “colonial,” carry the heavy weight of a much contested history in which colonizing Western powers, both European and American, dominated large portions of the world. What lessons can the history of these empires and colonial relations teach us about the world today?

The Social Science Research Council held a conference to bring concrete social science and historical knowledge of empires to bear on the contemporary understanding of U.S. global power. Participants in the conference wrote synthetic accounts of particular cases and particular issues, analytically framed as bases for understanding the current situation.

The SSRC collaborated with the New Press to publish a volume based on the conference. Lessons of Empire is edited by Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore.

Empire and Global Power

Much of the public debate has tended to use empire as a metaphor, either for unlimited power for a state to act arbitrarily or for the potential for an imperial state to act as an agent of reform and progress. But most of the best historical scholarship stresses the limits of imperial power, the compromises with local and regional systems of authority and commercial networks upon which imperial stability depends, the contradictions at the heart of efforts to use colonial power as an agent of reform. This suggests a possible disconnect between the lessons which participants in public debate are drawing from the concept of empire and the implications of cutting edge research on historical empires. We hope that the scholarship on empires and the quality of debate over contemporary affairs will both profit from the discussion that emerged at the conference.

In particular, we have drawn on case-based knowledge to expand our understanding of the current organization of American power in the world. Analogies and contrasts from studies of empire and similar arrangements of global power are central to our efforts, but we do not presume that any conception of empire—e.g. whether “formal” or “informal”—exhausts the relevant frame of comparative reference. We also engage questions of hegemony, nationalism, and related organizations of power as they have played out in the U.S. and in other “imperial” projects. In what ways, for example, is the current global power of the U.S. similar to or different from earlier empires: British, French, Hapsburg, Ottoman, Russian, Mughal, Persian, and Chinese, or indeed Roman and other premodern empires? Can the differences between power, force, and hegemony be sufficiently explained by the category of empire? Is the U.S. in fact pursuing a classically imperial project of rule over others, whether in pursuit of a “civilizing mission” or economic exploitation? If, in contrast, the U.S. today represents a new form of domination, what are the international/domestic implications of this? What kinds of relationships between “home” and “colony” are coming into being? Finally, if empire is not the best way to understand the current situation, what are the alternatives?

We apply the analytic insights that arise from the study of particular empires, or particular political/historical situations, to the United States’ role in the world today. But we also historicize the very idea of “American empire” and stress that questions of whether or not the United States is an empire are themselves not at all new. From its founding, the U.S. has been accused by critics and admirers alike of creating an empire, first internal (in the 18th and early 19th centuries) and later external (in the late 19th and 20th centuries).

In addition to scholars of empire, a number of noted international relations specialists help us address the relationship between traditional imperial systems of rule and other forms of global power. Did the post-WWII dismantling of the European colonial system in Africa and South Asia and the corresponding rise of nationalism in those parts of the world, for example, fundamentally change the manner in which western powers behave toward less powerful countries in the global South? Has the Bretton Woods system of international financial institutions dominated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund so altered economic and political relations between rich and poor countries that it no longer makes sense to speak of an “empire” in which one powerful country—the United States—can act unilaterally with respect to another? Or, alternatively, is the post-WWII system of multilateral western “hegemony” giving way to a unipolar world that forces us back to the old concepts of empire?

Contributors