Architectures of informal empire

Recent efforts to understand the pervasiveness of empire and its legacies have done little to reorient and expand the geographic or theoretical focus of scholarship, often downplaying the broad range of political, commercial, and cultural relationships that empire was built upon. Yet to expand our understanding of how imperial power operates, we must analyse colonialism not as its inevitable outcome but as the high point of a longer process of influence which may not have been imperial at the outset, and which may have coexisted alongside multiple other thwarted or incomplete trajectories. This article introduces the concept of “informal imperialism” as a capacious concept that enables historians to account for pre-colonial, post-colonial, and un-colonial situations in all their messiness and contingency. It proposes three ways to interpret “informal imperialism” towards advancing a plural and multilayered understanding of the architecture of empire and its legacies.