Author: Marcus Power, Rob Kitchin, Nigel Thrift.

Despite the fact that empires both past and present have profoundly shaped the contemporary world, the conceptualization of ‘empire’ has a complicated history and has been fiercely contested. In producing imperial imaginaries and in formulating visions of empire, geography both as a discipline and as a discourse has occupied a central position. From the fifteenth-century explorers of Spain and Portugal through to the ‘scramble for Africa’ at the end of the nineteenth century and the climax of imperialism in the early twentieth century, the construction of empires has followed intrinsically geographical dynamics involving extensions of sovereignty in one nation-state over the land and lives of distant ‘others’. As European colonial empires began to dissolve in the latter half of the twentieth century, the term has acquired other connotations, being used to describe the global economic influence of the USA, the power of transnational corporations, the geopolitical spheres of influence maintained by the USSR during the Cold War, and the management of the so-called Third World by Western countries and institutions. These more recent uses of the concept of empire imply historical resonances which are seen to afford purchase upon, and thus deeper understandings of, contemporary world politics. The specificity of contemporary empire is often noted by arguing that the new imperialism is a nonterritorial, globalizing regime of governance, in which the traditional imperial separation between core and periphery, colonizer and colonized, is rendered indistinct.