ABSTRACT

The world has seen many empires – indeed the recorded history of the world can fairly be said to be a history of empires. But imperialism, as an ideology and calculated policy, is relatively recent, not much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century. The relation between empire and imperialism must therefore be one principal strand of our inquiry. The other must be to trace the career of the concept of imperialism, as it worked its way out in the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Have we reached the “end of empire”, or are we witnessing novel forms, imperial in character if not in name?