Empire

Empire is a mode of governing where one state or society has political sovereignty over another. Empire can be achieved through blunt instruments such as brute military force, or more subtle means, such as legal procedures, “benevolent” social colonizing missions, or economic threat or pressure. At its heart, however, empire is a structure and process that is characterized by yearning for and exerting control on populations and territories that are not one’s own. As a nation-defining endeavor, empire is primarily understood and theorized to be a project by political or economic needs, drawing from both liberal and Marxist traditions. Vladimir Lenin, for instance, regarded imperialism as the ineluctable outcome of capitalism.¹ Scholarly work on American empire draws from this tradition, and focuses on the modern codependence of U.S. foreign policy and military power.² Yet much of this trenchant critique relies on the assumption that American empire is an aberration, a detour from the republican ideal that has uniquely shaped its identity as a democratic nation. In other words, American empire as an identifiable modern category of political analysis persists because of a continued investment in a liberal ideal of an American republic. From the point of view of the colonized, such an approach ignores the historical and brutal fact that imperialism is the original founding ethos of the United States, an ethos that has profoundly informed its character over time. Even before its emergence as a nation, the United States was defined by an appetite for empire. European imperial desire drove the exploratory voyages that led to the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Such a foundational moment informed the subsequent rebellion of those European colonies against the metropole’s dictates, the subsequent westward invasion by these former colonial outposts in a massive land seizure, and eventually, a nation’s forays beyond the geographic borders of the continent.