Empire Falls

Do past empires hold lessons for U.S. foreign policy today? Many people evidently think so, as the recent flood of books and articles purporting to explain what those lessons are attests. These two latest examples of the genre come from authors with impeccable scholarly credentials. But like so much of this literature, their efforts yield little payoff.

The distinguished contributors whose writings are assembled by the Social Science Research Council (ssrc) in Lessons of Empire disagree on what an empire is, whether the United States is one, whether scholars have anything to say to policymakers, and even whether history