For all the sustained discussion about the inclusion of bodies other than states
(Ruggie 1993, 1998; Ferguson and Mansbach 1996, 2007; Nancy 2007; Walker
1993, 2010) the object of analysis of international politics, the ‘IR system
as such’, remains largely focused (as the name suggests) upon the totality of
relations between independent sovereign states. So the ‘question of empires’ and
international relations can be formulated as: what role might empires have in the
context of international order that has been widely understood to comprise first
and foremost autonomous states? Hence my title.
Is it, for example, adequate to imagine a world of states with occasional
interference from one or more empires to cover anomalies or exceptions where
standard models of international order do not seem to work? That still leaves the
idea of empires on the sidelines, an intrusion, a sticking plaster for the occasional
lesions in the model of the international system ‘as such’. It does not think through
the implications of their historical presence: empires’ role in the past, present and
possible future of the international system or systems. The purpose of this chapter
is to reconsider how empires, with their proclivity for expanding their (version of) order, have frequently
been the biggest figures in the formation of international relations. One or more
empires has had that role, at the given time, in relation to whatever may be called
at the time ‘international order’.