Afterword: From Empire to Federation

Abstract

“Empire” and “Imperialism,” which since the end of the First World War have been topics in steady decline, are back. What had been portrayed in the work of such global theorists as Schumpeter and Hobson, not to mention several generations of historians of the various national empires, as an important but now superceded phase in the history of the evolution of the peoples of Europe, their overseas settler population, and of some parts of Asia, has returned—often thinly disguised as other kinds of international politics but recognizably part of a long historical legacy. The diverse essays in this book are all attempts to describe parts of that legacy. Much of this interest, which has reached well beyond the Academy, has been triggered by recent events: the latest Afghan war and the invasion of Iraq and their continuing, deleterious consequences. 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 Niall Ferguson and more mutedly by Michael Ignatieff that empires can be forces for good in the world, that peace stability and a civilized order could only be sustained by the imposition of massive and extensive state power.