Loretta Young (1913-2000)

[Glenn Anders]

Born this day, 1913, two years older than Orson Welles, died in 2000, fifteen years after Welles. Loretta Young's Birthday notice in the IMDb lists THE STRANGER as the film she is remembered for now, though she had been a motion picture leading lady and star for nearly twenty years when she made the film, would win an Academy Award for THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER two years later, and would remain a star for another fifteen. The professional relationship of Welles with Miss Young, her sister, Sally Blane, and her brother-in-law, Norman Foster, has never been adequately explored, in my opinion.

Any thoughts?

Glenn

[DexyMan]

To me it just shows how funny history is. I have to imagine in 1950 The Stranger was not the project most synonymous with Loretta Young. 60 years later, though, her movie with Orson Welles is more well known because there will always be an audience for Orson's movies. I'm a perfect example of this as The Stranger is the only movie of her's I've seen. Farmer's Daughter and Come to the Stable may be better movies or performances but they don't have the cast or director to call the average moviegoer.

[Le Chiffre]

It surprises me a bit, as I've always thought she was a fairly big star in Hollywood. I wonder what she would have thought of THE STRANGER being considered as her most significant film. She'd probably be pretty surprised too. I guess some film careers are rich in minor classics or films popular in their time, but short on "pantheon pictures" that stand the test of time. One film of hers that I liked was THE CALL OF THE WILD from 1935, where she co-starred with Clark Gable. Based on the book by Jack London, whose grim novel MARTIN EDEN Welles considered as a followup to CITIZEN KANE.

It reminds me for some reason of watching the AFI 100 greatest American films program from 1997, probably the most significant attempt to create a pantheon of American films. One thing that struck at the time was that, although James Cagney is considered one of the all-time great film stars, he wouldn't have even been mentioned on the program if YANKEE DOODLE DANDY hadn't barely snuck on to the list at #100. I don't think Loretta Young had any films on the list. Orson Welles was mentioned only twice (KANE, THIRD MAN), but of course KANE did get the #1 slot.

[Glenn Anders]

I'm sure, DexyMan, that Loretta Young has fans for vehicles besides THE STRANGER. She was a star for 60 years, a Big Star for 40, appearing opposite Lon Chaney, Sr, in LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH, in 1927 (age 14), Oscar winner in the 1940's, one of the first great female TV stars in the late 1950's, and ending up starring in a couple of Made-for-TV movies in the 1980's. TMC featured a number of her many films yesterday, in honor of her birthday, I suppose. Still, it was satisfying to see her honored by the IMDb for THE STRANGER.

Yes, Mike, the AFI 100 List has been controversial, but CITIZEN KANE hangs onto the Top Spot. [I was not surprised that YANKEE DOODLE DANDY was included. Cagney received an Oscar for his portrayal of George M. Cohan, I believe, another largely forgotten great star of his day. But I was surprised that WHITE HEAT, a really significant gangster picture, and Cagney's most amazing performance, was not included.] If you examine the Tenth Anniversary List (2007), you will notice, however, that THE THIRD MAN has been dropped, leaving only CITIZEN KANE to represent Welles.

Also, in the 2007 List, VERTIGO moves up into the Top Ten, as it should, but to my mind, a few truly flawed films like TITANIC are added, and I don't see mention of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, which has suddenly been noticed elsewhere as the masterpiece it has always been. A Wellsian-influenced picture there, I should think.

Glenn

[DexyMan]

I've no doubt that there are plenty of fans for her other movies, I'm just talking about the general movie going public particularly those like me who came along well after her career and watch classic movies based off of lists just like the AFI one. I never see her other movies on those kind of lists since they are "minor classics". The interesting thing is, The Stranger certainly can't be described as more than a "minor classic" but since it was directed by a "major director" history has kept it a bit more in the spotlight. I'll have to add a couple of her movies to my lengthy list of films to see, reading about her certainly shows that she was quite a star in her time.

[Glenn Anders]

I see what you're saying, DexyMan. I'll be interested in your conclusions. Loretta Young, you will notice, had a great range of roles, and considerable elegance. She projected a kind of hurt purity in whatever she did. That was particularly evident in THE STRANGER. Welles apparently thought highly of her as an actress among "the old guard" of established Hollywood Stars, whom he usually tended to keep out of his pictures. Miss Young and Edward G. Robinson became the rare early exceptions.

I still wonder about that "professional relationship of Welles with Miss Young, her sister, Sally Blane, and her brother-in-law, Norman Foster" with which I started this thread.

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

Maybe that's how Welles came to work with Loretta Young, seeing as Norman Foster had just directed Journey a couple of years prior. Foster would later direct Young in the amusing western romance RACHEL AND THE STRANGER from 1948, which was just on TCM a couple of days ago. BTW, there was also on TCM recently a good 1932 film called SKYSCRAPER SOULS, which stars Foster opposite Maureen O'Sullivan in the story of a ruthless stock market manipulator. Foster's voice was easily recognizable from his screening room scene in TOSOTW.

That’s an ominous sign about KANE being the only mention of Welles on the more recent AFI list, although it could be because THE THIRD MAN is arguably more of a British film then an American one. Of course, one could say the same thing as well about LAURENCE OF ARABIA, which made the top 10 in both the ’97 and ’07 shows. It wouldn’t surprise me if the much-more-popular THE GODFATHER dethroned KANE in the next AFI show, if there is one. It might even do so in the next Sight and Sound poll, where Kane has reigned for 50 years.

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A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.

“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”

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How empire ruled the world
Compared with the six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire and two millennia of (intermittent) Chinese imperial rule, the nation-state is a blip on the historical horizon. The transition from empire has lessons for the present, and maybe the future
by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper
Why, in 2011, think about empires? We live in a world of nation-states — over 200 of them, each with their seat in the UN, their flag, postage stamps and governmental institutions. Yet the nation-state is an ideal of recent origin and uncertain future and, for many, devastating consequences.

Empire did not give way to a secure world of nations with the end of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Romanov or German rule after the first world war or, in the 1940s-1970s, with decolonisation (by the French, British, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese). Many recent conflicts — Rwanda, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, ex-Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, the Congo, the Caucasus, Libya, etc — emerged from failures to find viable alternatives to imperial regimes, after 1918, 1945 and 1989.

It is not a question of sinking into imperial nostalgia: sentimental evocations of the British Raj or French Indochina have nothing to offer to our present political thinking. Similarly, imperial name-calling — invoking “empire” or “colonialism” to discredit US, French or other interventions — cannot help us analyse or improve today’s world. But an exploration of the histories of empires, old and new, can expand our understanding of how the world came to be what it is, and the organisation of political power in the past, the present and even the future.

Over a very long time, the practices and interactions of empires configured the contexts in which people acted and thought. Examining the trajectories of empires — their creations, conflicts, rivalries, successes and failures — reminds us of something we have forgotten: that sovereignty in the past, and in many areas today, is complex, divided, layered and configured on a variety of founding principles and practices.

What gave empires their world-shaping force? Partly it was their durability (1). As large political units, expansionist or with a memory of expansion, empires maintained distinctions and hierarchy among people even as they forcefully incorporated them. They recognised and had to manage diversity among their subjects. Their multiple governing strategies gave them adaptability and the ability to control resources over long distances and times. Compared with the longevity of the Ottoman Empire (600 years), and more than two millennia of imperial rule by a succession of Chinese dynasties, the nation-state is a blip on the historical horizon.

Some of the imperial strategies were learned from predecessors or rivals. The Ottoman Empire managed to blend Turkic, Byzantine, Arab, Mongol and Persian traditions; to administer their multi-confessional realm, the Ottomans counted on the elites of each religious community without trying to assimilate or destroy them. The British Empire over time encompassed dominions, colonies and protectorates, with India governed by a separate civil service, a disguised protectorate over Egypt and “zones of influence” where the British engaged in what has been called the “imperialism of free trade”. An empire with a varied repertoire of rule could shift its tactics selectively, without having to face the problem of assimilating and governing all its parts according to a single model.

Politics of difference

We can observe basic, and contrasting, patterns in the way empires managed their diverse populations. In some empires the “politics of difference” meant recognising the multiplicity of peoples and their varied customs as a fact of life; in others it meant drawing a strict boundary between insiders and “barbarian” outsiders. For rulers of the Mongol empires of the 13th and 14th centuries, difference was both normal and useful. Mongol empires sheltered Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Daoism and Islam and fostered arts and sciences produced by Arab, Persian and Chinese civilisations. The Roman Empire tended toward homogenisation, based on a syncretic but identifiably Roman culture, the attractive notion of Roman citizenship and, eventually, Christianity as a state religion.

Empires developed variants on these two ideal types; some, like the Ottoman and the Russian empires, combined them. European empires in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries hesitated between a tendency to assimilation — motivated by their confidence in the superiority of western civilisation — and a tendency to indirect rule, to govern through the elites of conquered communities.

The “civilising missions” of the Europeans were sometimes in contradiction with racial theories of the day. No matter how imperial rulers conceived of “others” and their cultures, they could not administer empires by themselves; they needed “intermediaries”. Often they used the skills, knowledge and authority of people from the societies they conquered: local elites who could gain from cooperation, or people who had been marginal and now saw advantages in serving the victorious power, or else a settler or functionary from the colonising power. Both strategies relied on the intermediaries’ own social connections to ensure effective collaboration.

Sometimes they did the opposite: put in positions of authority slaves or people detached from their communities of origin, and depended for their welfare and survival solely on their imperial masters. This strategy was used effectively by the Abbassid caliphate and later the Ottomans, whose highest administrators and commanders had been extracted from their families as boys and brought up in the sultan’s household.

In theory, European empires should have replaced such personal methods of delegation with bureaucracies. In reality, in the vast spaces of Africa, administrators saw themselves as “kings of the jungle”. Local officials needed chiefs, guards, translators, who were all trying to find an advantage for themselves. Throughout history, intermediaries were essential but dangerous: settlers, indigenous elites and groups of subordinate officials might all want to run their own show.

Focusing on intermediaries emphasises the vertical connections between rulers, their agents and subjects — a political relationship that is now often overlooked in favour of horizontal affinities based on class, race or ethnicity.

One empire, one God

Neither limited to one idea nor infinite, the political imagination of empire builders and their local elites was critical to their empires’ practices and impact. In turn, the Roman emperor Constantine and later Muhammad adopted monotheism, which gave them the powerful idea of “one empire, one God, one emperor”. The idea also led to schism — the argument that the current emperor was not the proper guardian of the true faith.

Empires tried to associate themselves with ideas of justice and morality, though such claims could rebound against them. Think of Bartolomé de las Casas in the 16th century, the anti-slavery movement of the British Empire in the early 19th century, or those Asians and Africans who turned European assertions of a “civilising mission” into the claim that democracy could not be quarantined inside one continent.

The concept of “trajectory” applied to empires can help us analyse their transformations and interactions, avoiding the tautological explanation of history as a succession of distinct epochs. What is sometimes called the “expansion of Europe”, from the 15th century onward, was not the product of an inherently expansionist instinct among European peoples, but rather one effect of a particular conjuncture. Wealth created in the powerful Chinese Empire and Southeast Asia offered incentives to distant merchants, but the Ottoman Empire — bigger, stronger, and more securely ruled than the fragmented political units of western Europe — stood in between Europe and China. The kings of Spain and Portugal, and later the Netherlands and England, sought overseas connections as a way around the Ottomans and their own dependence on local magnates. An unexpected outcome was connecting people on two sides of the Atlantic, after Columbus sailed west to Asia and ran into what would become America.

Another critical conjuncture in world history, the European and American revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries, looks different seen in terms of relations among empires. The revolutions in French Saint-Domingue, British North America, and Spanish South America were conflicts within empire before they became efforts to get out of it.

The world torn apart

If we turn to the shifting fortunes of imperial regimes in the 19th to mid-20th century, we find the world torn apart by new empire-building projects — Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union — against which imperial powers mobilised people and resources. In the mid-20th century, the supposed transition from empire to nation-state was not self-evident. The mixed populations in southern and central Europe who had lived under multiple empires, including the Ottoman and the Habsburg, had suffered waves of ethnic cleansing, each supposed to ensure that every nation would have its state. That was the case in the Balkan wars of the 1870s and 1912-13, and after the first world war when the victors dismantled the losing empires; and again after the second world war, when ethnic Germans were expelled from some places, Ukrainians and Poles from others.

Even so, state did not correspond to nation, and more ethnic cleansing followed in the Balkans in the 1990s. In Africa, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 should also be seen as a post-imperial attempt to produce a singular people who would govern themselves. In the Middle East, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the first world war has still not been digested: opposed nationalisms claim the same territory in Israel-Palestine, and different groups vie for power in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere.

The trajectories of empires have shaped today’s most powerful states. Take China, whose eclipse from the early 19th to late 20th centuries by more dynamic imperial powers turned out to be only an interregnum, shorter than others in 2000 years of Chinese imperial dynasties. During the Republican and Communist periods, aspirants for power took for granted the borders established earlier, by the Yuan (13th century) and Qing (17th-20th centuries). Today’s Chinese leaders evoke these dynasties and their imperial traditions as the country turned the tables on the West, exporting industrial goods beside its silks and porcelain, running an enormous trade balance, becoming the creditor of the US. The desires of Tibetans for independence and secessionist politics in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang pose classic problems for Chinese empire (2): as earlier, China’s rulers must control economic barons and monitor diverse populations. But the regime can draw on its accumulated imperial statecraft to meet these challenges and resume its place in the shifting geography of power.

Deciphering the Soviet Union

The formation and the breakup of the Soviet Union can also be understood in imperial terms. Its strategy of fostering national republics, led by Communist intermediaries with native credentials, provided a road map for disaggregation as well as a common language for negotiating new sovereignties. The largest of the successor states, the Russian Federation, is explicitly multi-ethnic: the 1993 constitution offered Russia’s constituent republics the right to establish their own official languages, while defining Russian as the “state language of the Russian Federation as a whole”.

After a short unruly interlude Vladimir Putin revived the traditions of patrimonial empire. He and his protégés reconnected magnates to the state, tightened control over religious institutions, brought the media to heel, transformed electoral process into a “sovereign democracy” supported by a single party, compelled loyalty from the federation’s governors, flirted with nationalism in Russian areas, re-entered the competition for Russia’s borderlands and effectively wielded Russia’s prime weapon — energy — in the international arena. As the country was doing all this, its empire reappeared in yet another form in its old Eurasian space.

The European Union is today the most innovative of the large powers. Europe was riven from the 5th to the 20th century by the aspirations of some of its elites to create a new Rome, and the determination of others to prevent such an outcome. Fights for and against European empire run from Charlemagne through Charles V and Napoleon to Hitler. It was only after the mutual destruction of the second world war and the inability of Europeans to hold onto their overseas colonies that the deadly competition among European empires was definitively ended. European powers nevertheless tried after the war to reconfigure their empires to make them more productive and legitimate, and Britain and France only gave up such attempts at the end of the 1950s. Germany, like Japan, was freed from the empire game; and both countries flourished as nation-states where they had failed as empires.

Between the 1950s and 1990s European states, freed from empire, formed alliances among themselves. This structure has functioned most effectively when limiting its ambitions to administration and regulation. But anyone who passes abandoned customs houses along frontiers where millions of people have died in repeated wars can appreciate the remarkable achievement of the Schengen states: one of the most basic attributes of sovereignty, control of who crosses a border, has been pushed up to a European level. Europe’s transit, from conflicting empire-building projects to national states (shorn of colonies) to a confederation of nations, underlines the complexity of sovereign arrangements over time. It also makes clear that national conceptions of the state had only recently detached themselves from imperial ones.

After 2001 it became fashionable to call the US an “empire”, to denounce the arrogance of its actions abroad or celebrate its efforts to police and democratise the world. But what is worthwhile is to examine the US repertoire of power based on selective use of imperial strategies. In the 20th century, the US repeatedly used force in violation of other states’ sovereignty; it did occupations, but has rarely sustained colonies. But even the US’s national sense of self emerged from an imperial trajectory: Thomas Jefferson had proclaimed in 1780 that the rebellious provinces of the British Empire would create an “Empire of Liberty”. The new polity emerged on what we could call Roman “politics of difference” — on the basis of equal rights and private property for people considered citizens and the exclusion of Native Americans and slaves. Extension over a continent eventually put great resources in the hands of Euro-Americans, and after nearly foundering on the rock of slavery, American leaders gained the strength to choose the time and terms of their interventions in the rest of the world.

Empire has existed in relation to — and often in tension with — other forms of connection over space; empires facilitated and obstructed movements of goods, capital, people and ideas. Empire building was almost always a violent process, and conquest was often followed by exploitation, if not forced acculturation and humiliation. Empires constructed powerful political formations, and also left trails of human suffering. However, the national idea, developed in imperial contexts, has not proved effective, to judge by the unresolved conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.

We live with the consequences of these uneven and broken paths out of empire, the fiction of sovereign equivalence and the reality of inequality within and among states.

Thinking about empire does not mean resurrecting vanished worlds. It allows us rather to consider the multiplicity of forms in which power is exercised across space. If we can avoid thinking of history as an inexorable transition from empire to nation-state, perhaps we can think about the future more expansively. Can we imagine forms of sovereignty that are better able to address a world marked by inequality and diversity?