When and why do social, political and cultural theorists speak of Empires today?
Book: Münkler, H. 2005, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States, Cambridge: Polity.
“The self-dissolution of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1991 brought the age of empire to an end. For three thousand years world politics was shaped by world empires. Now that is over” “It was better to remain a hegemon than to strive for empire” is the post imperial attitude to empire due to the risk of losing hegemony if you lost empire. Herfried Münkler book Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States discusses these ideas of hegemony and empire and the reasons for, distinctions within and implications of empire. His work is a history of all the major empires that have occurred in the past 2500 years. It is a comparative work that looks at the life cycles of empires and the circumstances in which they occur. The analytical approach of this work reveals the ways in which each empire goes through similar phases of accession, consolidation (crossing the Augustan Threshold) and decline. Münkler looks at the
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Therefore this book was written for an audience who were aware to the growth of the American Empire. At the time of its publication 2005 was the year that George Bush was inaugurated into his second term as president and Tony Blair was re-elected as Prime Minister. This was the year that the scandal over the reasons why the US and the UK went into the Iraq war. The US was fully engulfed in its War on Terror after the bombing of the World Trade Centre on 9th of September 2001. Global intervention from America almost seems like a common occurrence – Gulf War, Iraq War, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Libya, ISIS – and I almost see this publication as a response to the growth of American