“Empireâ€?¹ is a watchword of the times and, in the corridors of Washington, D.C., “suddenly hot intellectual property.â€?² The assertion of temporal immediacy and of real-world value prompts questions about what new political interests make empire “hotâ€? today, what forms of knowledge are staked out as credible, what accrues to those with proprietary claims on how empires once operated, and how a subject of historical study once deemed too remote for political pragmatists “suddenlyâ€? becomes repositioned at conceptual center stage.³

Certainly empire is not “hotâ€? because it is new. Nor is it “hotâ€? because the United States doesn’t “do empireâ€? or because it has just acquired one. Scholars, politicians, and public intellectuals have vehemently disagreed about imperial practice and abuse, about imperial stretch and “overstretchâ€? of the U.S. polity since the mid – nineteenth century. Favored examples include Mark Twain’s 1867 anti-imperialist satire on government plans to buy the island of St. Thomas, his outrage at the U.S. initiative in 1884 to recognize the Congo Free State in the wake of King Leopold’s campaign of carnage in the name of progress, and his relentless condemnations at the turn of the twentieth century of the U.S.-Philippine War.⁴ Some point to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1915 appraisal that World War I was not a battle in Europe but a war over black bodies and imperial contests over Africa.⁵ William Appelman Williams’s insistent arguments in the 1950s against American exceptionalism and his tracing of U.S. imperial interventions back to the 1780s is familiar to all serious students of U.S. expansion.⁶ Similarly, students of U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have never hesitated to call the structured violence of occupation, annexation, scramble for access to ports and raw materials, capital expansion, and the dislocations that followed — despite the United States’s lack of “colonies properâ€? — by their imperial name.

What has changed, then, is not the declaration of empire but the force field in which it operates, the breadth of its metaphoric extensions, and the breadth of an American public for whom it has been readied for consumption. What has changed dramatically is not only the currency of empire as an evocation of the moment but the alternating density and absence of historical referents called upon; the cross section of, and crossover between, scholars and national policy advisors who (many for the first time) find themselves with both disparate and shared understandings of how a common language should be used.

For colonial studies — a field devoted to the nature of European empires, their rationales, technologies, and representations of rule — thinking critically about empire in the current context prompts pointed questions: Do the conventions colonial scholarship hinder or help an assessment of what constitutes contemporary imperial conditions and imperial effects? Do its analytic frames encourage or dissuade engagement with current debates? And not least, what does and should effective, rather than applied, knowledge about empire look like now?