What’s This, Then? “Romanes Eunt Domus”?¹

Abstract

This article cautions against a number of errors endemic to recent attempts to derive ''lessons of empire'' for United States foreign policy and grand strategy: (1) justifying the comparison between the United States and past imperial polities based on shared characteristics unrelated to the analytic category of empire, (2) failing to offer recommendations specific to imperial dynamics, (3) assuming that ''empire'' serves as an ''analytic box'' composed of otherwise indistinguishable entities, and (4) assessing the question of American Empire in categorical, rather than relational, terms. I next offer an ideal-typical account of the structure and dynamics of empires and discuss how such attention to patterns of domination and resistance-which I term the ''micropolitics of hierarchy''-might provide better analytic leverage over key contemporary challenges than the traditional states-under-anarchy framework.

Global governance vs empire: Why world order moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy

“…It makes no sense to argue that, in a globalising world, weaker states and regions would have little exchange between each other and would mostly communicate and trade with the United States. It comes as no surprise that those participants in the empire debate who share this more demanding and more structural understanding of 'empire' have usually dismissed the thesis that the US had adopted an imperial role (Nexon and Wright 2007;Ferguson 2008;Nexon 2008).…”

New Imperialism: Toward a Holistic Approach

“…Furthermore, while these comparisons identify diversity, they also emphasize continuity in the history of empire and imperialism: asserting that the empires that we see today have a great deal in common with the empires of the past. While modern scholars as diverse as Burbank and Cooper (), Johnson (), Nexon (), and Parker () have all argued that the historical development of imperialism is not only synonymous with the historical development of human civilization, but that its scholarly analysis still remains pertinent and revealing, so too did the earliest scholars writing on the subject. As Smith ([1776] :393) remarked, “the interest which occasioned the first settlement of the different European colonies in America and the West Indies was not altogether so plain and distinct as that which directed the establishment of those of ancient Greece and Rome.” However, one distinction between these earlier scholars, such as Locke, Smith, James and JS Mill, and Marx, and the later scholars beginning with Hobson, is that between colonialism and imperialism.…”

The stability and breakdown of empire: European informal empire in China, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt

“…Others have focused on the relationship between peripheries and meso-level characteristics of empire to explain stability or lack of resistance (Barkey, 2008; Nexon, 2008; Nexon and Wright, 2007). The power advantages that divide and conquer strategies provide the core explain differences in imperial stability and accommodation or resistance.…”

“…Authority relations extend potentially into all issue areas (Abernathy, 2000: 22–25). Under informal empire, imperial intermediaries possess greater autonomy than in formal colonial settings and the authority relationships between the core and periphery only concern a limited set of relations (Nexon, 2008: 306).…”