American Historical Review (December 2011)
WHEN U.S. HISTORIANS BEGIN TO TALK about empire, it usually registers the declining fortunes of others. The term’s use among historians in reference to the United States has crested during controversial wars, invasions, and occupations, and ebbed when projections of American power have receded from public view. This periodicity—this tethering of empire as a category of analysis to the vagaries of U.S. power and its exercise—is one of the striking aspects of empire’s strange historiographic career. When it comes to U.S. imperial history, one might say, the owl of Minerva flies primarily when it is blasted from its perc.1
Yet despite recurring claims to the contrary, the imperial has long been a useful concept in work that attempts to situate the United States in global history, and it continues to be so, as demonstrated by a wealth of emerging scholarship. To be sure, its use has varied from the superficial and invocatory to the substantive and analytical. In the latter category, two broad clusters of research stand out. First was the “New Left” school of U.S. foreign relations history, which dramatically critiqued inherited interpretations, identifying the United States’ role in the world as imperial, and defined primarily by the global pursuit of export markets. A second, later body of work on the “cultures of United States imperialism,” based in American studies and literary criticism, treated imperial meaning-making, particularly with respect to the politics of racialized and gendered difference. The pathbreaking research carried out under each of these banners has made possible a new and exciting imperial historiography that overcomes some of its limitations.
Here the imperial refers to a dimension of power in which asymmetries in the scale of political action, regimes of spatial ordering, and modes of exceptionalizing difference enable and produce relations of hierarchy, discipline, dispossession, extraction, and exploitation.3 Five components of this definition are worth highlighting. First, it emphasizes what can be called scalar power, whether exercised in military, economic, political, or cultural terms.4 Second, it hinges on the material, institutional, and discursive organization of space; where traditional definitions often narrow the imperial to the state control of territory, this definition remains open to non-territorial, networked forms of spatial order.5 Third, it stresses the importance of exceptionalizing difference: imperial power promotes and is generated through distinctions among populations that lend shape to its vertical gradations of sovereignty. Not for nothing are race and gender among the most well-used analytic categories when it comes to empire; the process of building and defending imperial projects has involved enlisting and transforming divisions that possess naturalizing and hierarchizing power, such as those that work through protean notions of physical or cultural essence or constructions of the feminine and masculine.6 Fourth, the imperial is defined by its effects: where conventional measures of the imperial often fall back on the motivations of historical actors or a set of formal characteristics, this definition comprehends the imperial in part through its consequences, intended or not.7
A fifth and overarching feature of this definition is that it names a category of analysis, not a kind of entity, something to think with more than think about: to draw an analogy, it is gender rather than patriarchy.8 A language of the “imperial” rather than “empire” can help avoid connotations of unity and coherence—thingness—that tend to adhere to the latter term, and move to the side the mostly unproductive question of whether the United States is or has “an empire”—and if so, what type it is, and whether or not it measures up to the rubrics built to account for other empires. Far more is to be gained by exploring the imperial as a way of seeing than by arguing for or against the existence of a “U.S. empire”; the question of whether or not the United States is or has “an empire” has nothing to do with the question of whether it needs an imperial historiography.
Most importantly, thinking with the imperial facilitates inquiries about three key historical themes: the way that power resides in and operates through long-distance connections; the mutual and uneven transformation of societies through these connections; and comparisons between large-scale systems of power and their histories. It is not that imperial history holds a monopoly on these avenues of inquiry, but it does aid their pursuit. It is this particular set of questions—about power, connection, and comparison—that makes imperial history an indispensable tool in the kit of any historian of the United States.9
First, there is the matter of power. Both a strength and a weakness of the imperial as historical concept derive from its Latin root word, imperium: “command.” The imperial has long connoted the exercise of extreme power: commands issued, enforced, and obeyed. At this point, suffice it to say that the imperial expresses not only power but the political: there was no empire in history that was not also a polity, a structured but indeterminate system of domination and consent. Given entrenched post-sovereignty discourses of redemptive flows and technocratic discourses of rational, apolitical management, the capacity of the imperial to foreground the political is a significant advantage.
Second, imperial histories can be connecting histories that narratively and analytically enmesh the societies that imperial forces bring into interaction. This connecting ability is, ultimately, what has drawn many historians to the “transnational,” and rightly so: it is by now a commonplace that the nation-state as historical “container” was and is both a function of and a participant in nation-building programs, and insufficient for tracking and resolving the threads that bind a tangled world. Imperial histories have not always been especially connective; traditionally, scholars restricted their attention to metropolitan actors, dynamics, and decisions. And even when imperial histories bridge metropole and colony, they can easily fall prey to the illusion of one-way streets: of force and change moving outward without refluxes, intended or otherwise. That said, one of the cognitive advantages of thinking with the imperial is that it represents a large-scale, non-national space of historical investigation that frames questions about long-distance connection and interaction. Specific accounts may err in charting its vectors, but the imperial invites the charting enterprise. It is not alone in this. But, paradoxically, the transnational reified and reinforced the nation-state by rendering it the chief historical (and historiographic) obstacle to be overcome.
Third, the concept of the imperial facilitates comparison. One of the principal costs (and, indeed, the functions) of exceptionalist terms for describing the United States’ role in the world has been its derailing of symmetrical comparison. This is not to say that the United States’ imperial history is any less unique than any other nation’s. Nor is it to say that all comparisons are equally valid: exceptionalisms are skewed and homogenizing exercises in comparison, after all.10 But the imperial offers potentially fruitful lines of comparative inquiry. Most promising may be comparisons not between imperial systems taken as “wholes,” but between carefully selected dimensions of multiple systems, the choice of dimension dictating the comparison. Questions of Protestant ideology, corporate-capitalist modes and ends, or the realization of global scales of power make comparison between U.S. and British imperial histories appealing.11 A discussion of republican empire suggests comparisons between the United States and France. An exploration of world-historic timing situates the United States alongside Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, all in different ways self-conscious late arrivals to global empire. The best results may be achieved by more tightly focused comparative histories of the discursive, practical, and institutional technologies of empire, such as state-building projects, labor and migration controls, and organized violence.
In advancing these comparisons, historians need to beware the forceful undertow of prior comparisons, especially those generated by historical actors. Throughout history, empire-builders have been acutely preoccupied with other empire-builders: networks of modern empire bound rivals together in competitive and cooperative exchange, emulation, and adaptation. These exchanges could occur only where actors perceived a degree of commonality, but they should also be seen as highly charged sites in which ideological accounts of national-imperial difference were born. Indeed, it was often at precisely the places where imperial situations converged and overlapped that actors felt compelled to shore up exceptionalist comparisons that emphasized decreasingly perceptible differences between themselves and others.12
While drawing attention to power, connection, and comparison, the imperial also has at least four other distinct benefits: it helps scholars avoid the traps of postsovereignty and technocracy, while facilitating new approaches to temporality and spatiality in history. Transnational scholarship often unconsciously partakes in a language of post-sovereignty—of flows, exchanges, connections, and interactions—that closely resembles social-scientific, journalistic, and corporate narratives of capitalist globalization since the early 1990s. In the space left by the imploded Soviet sphere, this ideological language of emancipatory capitalist borderlessness was launched against the critics of universal neoliberalism. Adapting nineteenth-century ideologies of civilizing, laissez-faire commercial intercourse and mid-twentieth-century theories of modernization, the heralds of post-sovereignty represented the birth of a “globalized” world as inevitable and apolitical. The only obstacles were nation-states themselves, imagined to be locked in an antagonistic contest with the global.
It was a sign of this language’s enormous drawing power that it attracted historians with varying commitments to capitalist globalization itself, who imported many of its metaphors into their calls for transnational history. They mapped the obstructionist nation-states of globalization discourse onto ideologies of American exceptionalism, which were contrasted with accounts of liberated and liberating flows of peoples, goods, discourses, practices, and institutions. There was a strong and not-coincidental affinity between talk of unblocked capital flows and talk of unbounded histories.13 Whatever else it is, and whatever its limitations, the imperial is not a language of post-sovereignty: it comprehends the interconnected world as wrought in hierarchy and power, even as that power is bounded and contested. Rather than contrasting emancipatory flows and oppressing borders, it includes among its subjects flows of violence and coercion, and borders that exercise power by permitting, regulating, and directing rather than merely blocking global flows.
The imperial also helps historians steer clear of technocratic thinking, in this case the measurement of U.S. global power against an ahistorical standard of expertise, efficiency, management, effectiveness, and yield. This hazard can be found most commonly in the fields of international relations, political science, and foreign relations history, where the boundary between analyst and practitioner is traditionally loose. In such settings, actors’ categories—forged in State Department talking points, for example—spill easily into the academic realm, carrying with them the glow and authority of state power. Historical subjects are permitted to define, and constrain, historical interpretation.14
The imperial is not immune from technocracy, as shown by the early twenty-first century’s normative critiques of U.S. imperial management.15 But foregrounding power and politics makes it more difficult to think of imperial formations as governed by technical, apolitical, and unchanging rules. Ideally, scholars will be able to historicize imperial technocracy itself: one of the most telling dimensions of any imperial formation may be the way that its agents measure their instruments’ functioning, success, and failure, a question that cannot be asked when universalizing, ahistorical criteria are in play.16