[T]he nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13

Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.

Polanyi 2001, 147

Introduction

What might be the legacies of American imperium, now said to be in serious decline and, if some pundits are to be believed, soon to be flung into the dustbin of history? How will these legacies mark the world(s) to come and how long might they last? Will they resemble those left behind by previous empires, in the form of infrastructures, practices, borders, legal systems and class systems? Or will their mark come through the Anglo-American capitalism that has permeated every nook and cranny of twenty-first century life? As Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan have suggested in their introduction to this volume, empires in the dustbin do not simply go away, even when their capitals and armies vanish, leaving behind only ruins and recollections. In their dimly-remembered glory, empires are endlessly recreated in all sorts of places and forms, if only in the hope that some of that glory might rub off on their successors.

In this chapter, I argue that the primary legacy of American empire to those future world(s) is an ‘assemblage of imperium’. An ‘assemblage’ is an arrangement constituted by a ‘multiplicity of heterogeneous objects, whose unity comes solely from the fact that these items function together, that they “work” together as a functional entity’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000: 608, citing Patton 1994: 158).