ABSTRACT
‘People are now coming out of the closet on the word “empire”’, wrote the right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer early in 2002. For that to have happened in Iraq (or Afghanistan) in the early 2000s would have been, as Anatol Lieven put it, ‘contrary to historical precedent’. The Iraq War seemed to show that imperialism was alive and well still in the twenty-first century, in ways that its nineteenth-century practitioners would certainly have recognised. Quite apart from all this, as a general rule, empires are not inherited or passed on from one power to another in this way. They arise out of circumstances, both domestic and international, peculiar to each in its time. It is easy to see the circumstances that gave rise to the modern American empire, without needing to resort to this idea of a ‘continuation’ from the British.
