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Magali Gravier publishes with Noel Parker an article in Journal of Political Power

30.11.2011

Imperial power and the organization of space in Europe and North America

Journal of Political Power

Empires seem never to disappear. When the last self-proclaimed empires dissolved in the wake of decolonization, the USSR seemed to be the last remaining empire. But when it dissolved in the early 1990s, it did not take long to proclaim that the US was an empire.
A few years later, the European Union (EU) started to be referred to as another empire. Individual empires come and go, but empire as a political form dies hard in the mind of observers, who seem able to discover new empires as soon as old ones collapse.
The fact that we continue to use the notion of ‘empire’ to describe very different polities and political orders explains most certainly the difficulty which scholars of empire – or what we may call ‘empirologists’ – face when trying to define the concept of empire.
The world of ‘empirologists’ is indeed populated with very different political realities not only over time, but also across space. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hintze (1962 [1907]) already contrasted ‘old type empires’ with ‘new types of empires’: in other words, ancient empires such as the Roman Empire which had contiguous territories (also called ‘empires by land’) and modern empires, created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which were ‘empires by sea’ or ‘colonial empires’.
Thus, it was already evident at that time that empires differed from one another; but Hintze was still dealing with empires that looked like empires, or at least called themselves empires. A century later, even if big polities do not really accept this label anymore, scholars continue to use it as a category in order to analyse them.
The concept may even have experienced a revival in the literature during the past 15 years. However, while there are four contemporary contenders for the signifier empire (Russia, China, the US and the EU), at first the revival of the recent literature on empire concentrated on the US, with the result that there emerged a singular tacit understanding of empire.
However, when empirologists started to focus on Europe and the EU, it became clear that a different, more nuanced, understanding of empire was called for.
 
Magali Gravier & Noel Parker: “ Imperial power and the organization of space in Europe and North America ” – Introduction by the Guest Editors to Journal of Political Power Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2011, 331–336 DOI:10.1080/2158379X.2011.628844





Last updated by Mette Grue Nielsen 07/12/2011