My apologies that it got a little incoherent there toward the end, though I think it is instructive that no draft has been declared. The primary political actors of the day– strategists and elected officials– seem to have grasped Hobsbawm’s fundamental insight that the nation-state has lost some of its legitimacy, which is to say some of its power to elicit support for its policies from many citizens. That phenomena seems to encompass not only the reluctance of citizens to fight wars (of choice rather than necessity) but, among a plurality, to submit to taxation in the interests of the larger society. The US takes this antipathy to “big government” (a masterful use of political rhetoric courtesy of the Reagan Revolution) to unheard of lengths, though the virus is spreading, notably to the UK, where the political scene now features factions whose raison d’etre is the elimination of “redistributive” economic policies.

We did well in attempting a summation of Hobsbawm’s arguments. One thing, however, we didn’t discuss: his belief that a truly global empire functioning at the behest of a single nation-state is an impossibility– the world being simply too variegated and complex.

Having passed rapidly through some substantive arguments for the contemporary relevance of Empire as a geopolitical category we can now reach back to the era of Decolonization, in many ways the root-structure of the present. Empire continues to manifest a presence in this earlier period as the origin of a colonial structure in Africa which began to unravel with national independence movements (inaugurated by Ghana and extending through the following decades to Guinea-Bissau). Even better: we’ll immerse ourselves in that epoch via the readerly pleasures of a thoughtful and humane novel, Nervous Conditions.