Introduction: Empires and the International – in History or throughout History

Noel Parker

The Case for Learning from Empires

In January 2012, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, two of the widest-ranging historians of empires of the present time, presented a telling case to the readers of Le Monde Diplomatique: ‘The nation-state is an ideal of recent origin and uncertain future and, for many, devastating consequences’, they argued. It is from the history of empires that we can gain most insight into ‘the organisation of political power in the past, the present and even the future’ (Burbank and Cooper 2012). This book brings together scholars from different places (literally and figuratively) who, like Burbank and Cooper from the history discipline, feel that ‘international’ politics has more to gain from analysing empire as a powerful factor in any international order.

For a century and more, in polemic and even in academic literature, the concept of empire has had pejorative import. Whoever spoke of empires suggested in the same breath that they were simply political forms of the past (Doyle 1986; Snyder 1991 – together with a vast literature on colonialism and post-colonialism). In other cases, empires that might come about in the future, deserve to be consigned to the past (Khanna 2008). Defenders of American foreign policy – since the United States is the most obvious candidate for the status of an empire – have normally spoken not of ‘empire’, but of US ‘hegemony’ as the benign exception in a world formerly dominated by empires (Brzezinski 1997, 2005). In the worst case, accounts of the United States that refer to any imperial tendencies have been critical, as if this is an unwelcome throw-back (for example, Bacevich 2002; Ikenberry 2002; Fox Piven 2004).

However, recently we have seen historians and students of politics who are either free of prejudices about the failings of empire or even positively disposed to the possibilities of the form – as Burbank and Cooper (2010) are. See the above citation. The international affairs journal, International Studies Perspectives, 2008, volume 9, issue 3 (which included three contributors to this volume: Yale Ferguson, Dan Nexon and Hendrik Spruyt) was typical of the trend. If, across the length of historical time, empires have been a dominant ‘figure’ in any geopolitical