Why "empire"?

Does it matter if we understand the United States as an empire? Republic, democracy, empire--these are simply labels, are they not? Calling the US an empire is simply a matter of nomenclature, no? What does the label "empire" help us to see about ourselves that we might otherwise miss?

Here are a few of my preliminary answers to the question:

First, as I hope to make clear in the next several blog posts, American history is a history of expansion. This much we know. But Americans often forget that westward expansion meant expansion into foreign lands. For much of U.S. history, that expansion was nakedly territorial; in later ages expansion took place in commercial, cultural, and political realms. We simply fundamentally misperceive our history--all of our history--if we don't understand it as the history of empire. One is tempted to leave the argument there, but more is at stake.

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Americans have made equality a fundamental dogma of an alleged national consensus. And yet obvious social inequalities persist. How do we explain this discrepancy, between what we profess to believe and what we plainly are? As we will discover, empires are fundamentally committed to the extension and maintenance of social and political hierarchies. This was as true in the class-conscious British empire as it is in the racially stratified American empire. Social hierarchies abroad are necessary to produce the wealth that is then sifted through a no-less socially-stratified hierarchy at home. Much about the American experience only makes sense when viewed as a more or less typical model of imperial stratification. 

Third, though most Americans profess themselves lovers of peace, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of U.S. foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody (if not always sustained) military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war, including often with itself, with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: Theorists and historians of empire have made clear the ways in which empire solves fundamental social, cultural, and economic dilemmas back home. The extraction of resources abroad for redistribution back home is meant, allegedly, to alleviate the economic scarcity that drives economic, and hence, political conflict at home. Empire dissipates domestic discord, in other words. U.S. history gives us ready examples of this process: The appeal to "Go West, young man," famously elaborated by Horace Greeley in the 19th century, was a call to siphon off excess (male) labor from eastern cities into the infinite West, thereby ridding congested urban areas of the zeal and energy that might otherwise go into radical and malevolent political unrest in the teeming East. Empire is a means of eliding conflict, of ignoring challenging problems today in the hopes that they will dissipate tomorrow. We do not understand that we have made empire a way of life, and thereby put off the hard choices that living requires, until we understand that we are, in fact, an empire.  

Careful readers may be noticing a paradox here: Our pursuit of empire is creating social divisions which the pursuit of empire is designed to alleviate. We cannot understand this paradox until we center empire in how we perceive ourselves.

What have I left out? This blog is dedicated to presenting new scholarship on American empire, placing the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, exploring imperial discourse and habits throughout American society and culture, uncovering the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and developing “empire” as a critical perspective. I welcome your comments on blog posts and your emails at [email protected]. 

-- David J. Snyder, fractalpast.com
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