The goal of this special section is to outline new, off-center perspectives on empire and imperial formations. We highlight moments and places in which the historical contours of empire become thinner, contrasting with the world they ostensibly speak of. Our common guiding principle is to heighten the discrepancy of such offsets and sharpen the haze beneath (Carabelli et al.). As we argue, doing so necessitates moving beyond the methodological center of historical scholarship. Putting history in conversation with sociology, theories of space, political economy, settler colonial studies, and anthropology, the essays in this special section explore theoretically and empirically how empire is constituted both within and outside other historical processes. We see the imperial longue durée as constitutive not only of the past, but of our broader social reality. A history that can address our imperial present, we contend, must take contemporary questions as its starting point.
Today more than...
