ABSTRACT
Empire and imperial may be common epithets, but these terms are rarely discussed with conceptual clarity. In assessing the global political and economic power of states and nonstate actors today, the importance of history should be self-evident. “Empire, then, is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It is safe to say most people who deploy the words empire and imperial are not usually paying a compliment. Colonial empires allowed powerful European states to extract the resources at a low price, allowing for the cheap production of goods at home and thus domination of the export market. The continental empire of Jefferson’s dreams may have been based in pacific rhetoric, but its realization involved the employment of naked power and the subjugation of others that have characterized all imperial ventures.
