WHEN WAS THE AGE OF EMPIRE?

"Thursday, September 13, 2018

Reflections on US Foreign Policy in the Age of Empire

During my childhood, the government of the United States assumed responsibility for the fate of the entire non-Communist world...." DK Professor Kaiser posted recently with this title and beginning, as if this time period, the 20Th Century, and or the Cold War, and beginning with his childhood, has been the age of empire.Traditionally, the Age of Empires, in the West, was considered to overlap the Age of Exploration, the 15th all the way to mid 19th Centuries, although the Imperial powers had had set backs both before and after 1776 through the Napoleonic period. There was the rise of the German empire late in the imperial period, and the pinnacle of the British empire amid its decline.WWI finished off several Empires, Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman, and frankly weakened the British to the point of irrelevance going into WWII.The role of the US, with very minor exceptions, in all this time was always anti Imperialist, from its beginning, in 1776, to the end, although Professor Kaiser's post somehow makes it seem like we were part of the so called white imperialist problem all along and up until now.