A History of Empire Without Empire

The essay takes the form of the review of a book by a British historian, but it ends up being far more. It's a compelling challenge to widely held and often unexamined beliefs about the inevitability of Europe and the vulgarization of the concept of "imperialism."

-Roderic Day · Jul 28, 2021

There's a lot of good discussion ongoing about the meaning of the word "imperialism" and why it only serves the West to water down its historical meaning into "any large country affecting smaller countries."

-Roderic Day · Feb 26, 2022

Having turned empire into a neutral concept, imperialism becomes "the attempt to impose one state’s predominance over other societies," so that "it was not just a European phenomenon, although Europeans had tended to carry it furthest.

The framing of “U.S.-China relations” or “U.S.-China competition” that is so commonplace today, premised on the concept of sovereign states, is actually deceptive and misleading. It is deceptive and misleading to portray China and the United States as two equal sovereign states, ignoring the three faces of modern Western imperialism, and the fact that the imperial system of the United States is even more complex than the British Empire’s ever was. The United States operates an imperial arrangement within its continental territory, followed by a second imperial core in the form of the Five Eyes alliance, followed by a system of vassal states in the guise of allies such as the military domination systems of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, operates Latin America as a “backyard,” and, of course, it also has control over other supplementary “world-systems” such as the Internet, finance, and trade. Thus, the U.S.-China relationship is better characterized as China, a rising sovereign state, facing the U.S.-dominated world empire or world system. It’s not a question of managing a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China faces the U.S.-dominated world empire.