The Empire's New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained

Empire and imperialism have returned with a vengeance—not as a set of ideas and practices to be exhumed by the historians, but as paradigms for twenty-first-century living. Harry Harootunian turns his unrelenting gaze to signs of the new imperialism in the world—from the United States’ occupation of Iraq to other supposed terrorist enclaves around the globe.

The arguments being made today for imperialism’s historical and contemporary value echo earlier rationales for modernization theory and...