From the September/October issue of Foreign Policy: Niall Ferguson, of the Hoover Institute and Harvard University, argues that imperialism is not dead, it’s not just not as easy as it once was. 20th century empires didn’t last nearly as long as those of centuries past, but that doesn’t mean that if the strategic and economic equations balance in favor of the powerful, new empires won’t arise. (“Empires with Expiration Dates”)
From the historian’s perspective, Ferguson’s take on the fate of recent empires is worth noting:
“Why did the new empires of the 20th century prove so ephemeral? The answer lies partly in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control, and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
The new empires that arose in the wake of the First World War were not content with the successful but haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old empires, including the messy mixtures of imperial and local law and the delegation of powers and status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the 19th-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; these were more like “empire states” than traditional empires. The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force.