The Desertion of Empire
In advance of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, I will be publishing a series of dispatches that re-articulate some of the histories, theories, and proposals discussed over the course of our first series of gatherings.
The dispatch below digs deep into the crucial distinction between empires and Empire that was drawn in several sessions but never fully explicated in any single session. Drawing together threads from a number of earlier dispatches, this text puts this distinction in historical context and remarks upon its significance to the journey ahead.
To grasp the global system of domination we inhabit today, it is essential to distinguish between empires (with a little ‘e’) and Empire (with a capital ‘E’).
Individual empires, such as those of Rome, Britain, or the United States, are discrete historical entities—political, military, and economic instruments that wield power at particular times and places.
By contrast, Empire is the underlying system—a transhistorical logic of domination, exploitation, and control that transcends any single empire. Empire evolves by adapting to changing conditions, integrating regional systems of governance and intensifying patriarchal, racial, and capitalist hierarchies to sustain its authority.
Empire is not static. It has grown from pre-modern patriarchal structures that were often localized and relatively “low-intensity,” into a global, systemic force that wields the unspeakable brutalities of capitalist war and racializing rule as accelerants of conquest and exploitation. This transformation—from fragmented patriarchies to the integrated global machinery of Empire—defines the long centuries of domination that have shaped our world.
The Long Sixteenth Century: The Genoese-Iberian Crucible
The foundations of modern Empire were forged in the sixteenth century through the partnership between Genoese financiers and the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Genoese elites operated as the financial architects of a system that externalized nearly all costs—military protection, administration, and production—onto their Iberian allies. In return, Spain and Portugal extracted wealth and labor from colonized territories through enslavement, indenture, and dispossession, creating a machinery of extraction as brutal as it was systematic.
This collaboration was sanctified by dynastic alliances and the authority of the Catholic Church. The Genoese supplied the capital, Iberian aristocrats enforced extraction, and the Church provided spiritual justification. Together, they laid the foundation for modern Empire, introducing two defining fractures: the racial stratification of humanity into “superior” and “inferior” breeds, and the reduction of nature to a reservoir of exploitable resources. These fractures became the backbone of a global system of domination.
Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans bore the brunt of this new order. Their communities were shattered, their kinship networks severed, and their lives reorganized to serve imperial extraction. Once-thriving cultures, rooted in reciprocal relationships with the land, were fragmented into what Empire renders as “flesh”—bodies stripped of autonomy and relationality, reduced to instruments of labor.
Empire’s domination extended beyond physical violence. Indigenous systems of kinship, consensus, and warfare were co-opted and weaponized. Rivalries among communities were exploited, and divisions were exacerbated to weaken resistance. Even leaders who sought to protect their people were often co-opted, forced to act as intermediaries within the colonial apparatus. This redirection of resistance fractured opposition, embedding exploitation into the social fabric of colonized populations.
The Genoese-Iberian phase revealed the core logic of Empire: fragmenting life—social, cultural, and ecological—into extractable parts. By disassembling societies and reorganizing them into reservoirs of wealth and labor, Empire established a system of extractive and racializing rule that thrived on severed relationships, erased autonomy, and institutionalized inequality. This model, refined in the sixteenth century, became the template for the imperial expansion and capitalist domination that followed.
Diego Rivera, The Arrival of Cortés (1951)
The Long Seventeenth Century: Dutch Innovation
The seventeenth century brought a critical transformation with the rise of Dutch hegemony and the innovations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Unlike the Genoese, who depended on aristocratic militaries, the VOC internalized protection costs, maintaining its own armed forces and merging financial and military power into a single corporate entity. This shift made protection a capital asset, extending the reach and efficiency of Empire.
This period also institutionalized state sovereignty through the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which formalized a system of competing empires. While ostensibly designed to manage conflicts, the treaty preserved the overarching structure of Empire, integrating corporate executives and state administrators in a fusion of private profit and public power. The VOC’s innovations demonstrated how costs previously externalized could be repurposed to strengthen imperial domination.
In colonized societies, the VOC’s approach was one of calculated disassembly. Communities were reorganized into coerced labor forces, stripped of autonomy and communal bonds, and transformed into production units for global markets. The VOC refined Empire’s logic of fragmentation, further reducing people to commodified “flesh,” their vitality extracted to sustain imperial operations.
Traditional governance systems, alliances, and militias were dismantled or absorbed into the VOC’s private military. Indigenous rivalries were manipulated to fracture resistance, turning opposition into self-destruction. Land was seized and converted into plantations, uprooting Indigenous populations and severing their ties to ancestral territories. Enslavement, indenture, and forced cultivation produced commodities like spices and sugar for European consumption.
The VOC institutionalized exploitation with brutal efficiency. Colonized bodies were dehumanized, landscapes were reorganized, and wealth was funneled to the imperial core. By merging financial, military, and administrative power, the Dutch innovations deepened Empire’s parasitic dynamic, creating a model of domination that would shape global capitalism for centuries.
The Long Nineteenth Century: British Industrial Consolidation
The nineteenth century marked a decisive evolution in Empire as Britain internalized production costs during the industrial revolution. Colonies were transformed into extraction zones, supplying raw materials for British factories and consuming finished industrial goods. This global supply chain entrenched racial and environmental hierarchies, with colonized peoples enduring exploitation while their lands were stripped of resources to fuel industrial expansion.
The Concert of Europe (1814–1914) stabilized this system, maintaining a balance of power among European empires while ensuring their collective dominance over colonized territories. British imperialists institutionalized wage labor, colonial governance, scientific racism, and national finance, consolidating a global capitalist order centered on Britain’s factories and banks.
To sustain industrial capitalism, Empire restructured the metabolic systems of colonized societies. Traditional agriculture, which had nourished local populations and maintained ecological balance, was replaced by export-oriented monocultures. Subsistence crops gave way to commodities like sugarcane, tea, cotton, and rubber, leaving communities malnourished and dependent on imported food. Fertile soils were depleted, forests razed for plantations, and water systems diverted to irrigate industrial agriculture. These metabolic flows were forcibly redirected, channeling sustenance into Britain’s factories and markets, leaving devastated lands and impoverished populations in their wake.
Empire thrived on fragmentation. Colonized bodies were reduced to laboring flesh even further, severed from kinship networks and reconstituted as tools of production. Their lands, drained of life, became extensions of Britain’s industrial machinery. This fragmentation mirrored the exploitation of British workers, who toiled under similar systems of extraction and control. Domestic exploitation reinforced colonial domination, creating a symbiotic relationship that cemented Britain’s industrial supremacy.
By reorganizing human and ecological systems, the industrial phase institutionalized extraction as a global norm. It severed regenerative and relational ties in favor of a system that thrived on dispossession and dependency.
Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads (1933)
The Long Twentieth Century: The United States and the Formal Institution of Empire
The twentieth century marked the rise of the United States as the dominant force within Empire, introducing a transformative innovation: the internalization of transaction costs. U.S. hegemony restructured global capitalism around logistics, financial services, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure. Institutions like the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and SWIFT formalized this system, weaponizing global interdependence. By converting transaction liabilities into capital assets, multinational corporations gained unprecedented control over economic flows, consolidating Empire’s global dominance.
At the heart of U.S. hegemony was consumerism, which stabilized domestic populations by channeling dissent into the pursuit of goods and credit. Mass consumption paired with financialization optimized societies for productivity and consumption while reinforcing global racial hierarchies and accelerating ecological destruction. These dynamics entrenched the regime of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide that defines the present era, where systemic inequality and ecological collapse are intertwined.
Empire’s infrastructure expanded to uphold its extractive systems, especially across the post- and neo-colonies of the Global South. Seaports, airports, pipelines, railways, and telecommunications networks were designed not to meet local needs but to expedite the flow of resources to the imperial core. This infrastructural violence facilitated widespread ecological devastation: forests razed, rivers dammed, and agricultural lands eroded, with the environmental burdens disproportionately borne by colonized and dispossessed communities.
In the imperial core, or Global North, impoverished migrants became the invisible machinery of logistical capitalism. Labor-intensive industries—spanning agriculture, meatpacking, and sweatshop manufacturing—depended on their hyper-exploited labor. Displaced by imperial economic policies in their home countries, these migrants were commodified upon arrival, reduced to undervalued “flesh” that was essential to production yet systematically dehumanized and fragmented within the circuits of capital.
This exploitation extended beyond labor to ecological systems. Energy grids were redirected, forests logged, and waterways rerouted to sustain industrial and consumer economies. These disruptions compounded the displacement of communities in the Global South, which bore the environmental destruction while receiving little benefit from the wealth their resources generated.
Under U.S. hegemony, Empire reached unprecedented levels of integration, weaving its circulatory systems so seamlessly into the fabric of global life that they appeared efficient, natural, and even inevitable. Beneath this veneer, however, lay the violent exploitation and ecological devastation that sustained them. The Global North reaped the benefits—consuming and profiting—while the Global South bore the costs: fragmented lives, ravaged ecosystems, and depleted resources. This phase did more than reshape the rhythms of global life; it entrenched Empire’s domination so thoroughly that its machinery, omnipresent and deeply embedded, often seemed invisible.
Banksy, Napalm (2004)
A Note on “Internalization”
Capitalism, at its core, is financial and parasitic in nature. Like a virus, it hijacks non-capitalist structures within host societies, draining them of vitality and often destroying them in the process. Historically, capitalism may have emerged multiple times, but it typically either killed its host or was itself killed by its host before it could fully entrench itself. The process of internalization, however, allowed capitalism to evolve into a more insidious form—sustaining its hosts in a zombie-like state and enabling the infection to spread further.
At each stage of its evolution, capitalism adapts by preserving, repurposing, and parasitizing critical systems to ensure its survival, even as it hollows out societies and ecosystems. In the Genoese phase (conquistador capitalism), it operated as a pure parasite, draining the Spanish Empire through financial manipulation and resource extraction. During the Dutch phase (trade company capitalism), it co-opted the host’s arms and defensive mechanisms, transforming them into tools that safeguarded and expanded its predatory reach. The British phase (industrial capitalism) seized the digestive systems of the host—production and consumption—fueling industrialization while metabolizing entire societies into engines of systemic transformation. By the U.S. phase (logistical capitalism), capitalism had further evolved, refining and optimizing the circulatory systems of its hosts—global commercial and monetary infrastructures—to consolidate planetary dominance and deepen its entrenchment within every ecological and social vein.
In its current phase, capitalism is mutating into surveillance capitalism, an even more invasive form that hijacks the sensory and nervous systems of its hosts. Through pervasive data capture, algorithmic governance, and digital technologies, it embeds itself into the most intimate dimensions of life. Human attention, perception, and emotional responses are captured, commodified, and manipulated, ensuring that social behaviors, desires, and imaginaries are aligned with the imperatives of capital accumulation. In this form, capitalism does not merely monitor and predict behavior; it shapes and engineers it, transforming individuals and societies into extensions of its logic.
Looking ahead, capitalism is showing clear signs of mutating further into biocapitalism, a form that internalizes and commodifies the costs of social and ecological reproduction. It hijacks the reproductive systems of its hosts, intensifying its parasitic grasp over life itself. While this trajectory appears novel, its roots extend deep into earlier forms of racialized and gendered exploitation. During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved populations were subjected to brutal reproductive regimes, forced to maximize labor output while minimizing the costs of their own social and biological reproduction. Today, these dynamics re-emerge under neoliberal regimes of so-called innovation, where human reproduction, care work, and ecological regeneration are increasingly framed as marketized resources. This logic subjects life-making processes to systems of surveillance, commodification, and control, deepening inequality under the pretext of efficiency and sustainability.
Yet this trajectory is far from linear. Capitalism has always experimented along multiple axes, testing and refining strategies for survival and expansion. Historical moments, such as the transatlantic slave trade’s attempts to internalize reproductive costs, demonstrate that these strategies often operate in parallel, rather than sequentially. Under specific conditions, one approach achieves dominance, and the empires that master it ascend to hegemonic status within Empire. It is this adaptive, opportunistic nature—capitalism’s ability to parasitize, mutate, and entrench itself—that ensures its persistence, even as it corrodes the very societies, ecosystems, and bodies upon which it relies for survival.
This ongoing process of mutation reveals capitalism not merely as an economic system but as a planetary contagion—parasitic, self-replicating, and increasingly invasive—requiring ever-new territories, forms of life, and systems to consume. Its survival depends on its ability to move deeper into the social, ecological, and biological realms, transforming living systems into extractable, commodified flows. In doing so, capitalism brings its hosts ever closer to exhaustion, setting the stage for crises that simultaneously mark its limits and the potential for its unraveling.
The Present: Shifting Hegemonies
Today, Empire is in crisis, fractured by shifting centers of power. The rise of China as an economic and military force challenges the long-dominant Euro-Atlantic hegemony, yet this ascent does not signify a rejection of Empire but rather a reconfiguration of its analytics. China’s ruling elite has appropriated and adapted the tools of racial capitalism and patriarchal control developed by Euro-Atlantic powers, forging a new iteration of imperialist racial capitalist patriarchy.
China’s trajectory mirrors a familiar pattern in which regional powers assimilate and weaponize Empire’s structures to assert dominance. In the late 19th century, Japan pursued a similar course, modernizing through the selective adoption of Euro-Atlantic technologies of domination. As Mark Driscoll notes, Japanese elites inoculated themselves with the “toxicity” of European racial capitalism, using its extractive logics to defend sovereignty while asserting regional power. China’s modernization follows this blueprint, leveraging capitalist systems and technologies while maintaining a centralized, Han-centric nationalist framework. In this configuration, China internalizes the costs of labor reproduction, resource extraction, and infrastructural expansion—endeavoring to pioneer a new form of capitalism that hijacks the reproductive systems of its hosts—while positioning itself as a global competitor to the United States. This escalating rivalry has deepened Empire’s fractures, intensifying extractive pressures on Indigenous lands, ecosystems, and bodies, and fueling a neo-Scramble for Africa aimed at exploiting the continent’s resources under the guise of development.
The current crisis of Empire arises from China’s resurgence after centuries of exploitation, subjugation, and exclusion under Euro-Atlantic dominance. While Euro-Atlantic elites successfully integrated smaller East Asian client states—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—into the global capitalist system, they now face an existential challenge with China: a militarily independent, territorially vast nation encompassing nearly a fifth of the world’s population. The Long 20th Century strategy to integrate China as “the world’s factory” was designed to extract surplus value from its immense labor force while circumventing the political and racial anxieties tied to mass migration. Containerized logistics, just-in-time production, and extraterritorial Special Economic Zones—reminiscent of 19th-century treaty port concessions—were central to this imperial strategy. Yet this gambit has backfired. China not only absorbed the mechanisms of global capitalism but also leveraged them to emerge as a formidable geopolitical rival, shifting economic gravity from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific.
And yet, China’s rise does not dismantle Empire’s extractive and exploitative systems—it reshapes and reinforces them. The global order remains anchored in domination, inequality, and systemic extraction, ensuring the survival of Empire’s destructive logic even as hegemonies shift. Empire’s infrastructure mutates, its technologies are repurposed, and its fractures deepen, but its foundational imperatives—accumulation, control, and extraction—endure. Hegemonic rivalry does not mark the end of Empire; it accelerates its destructive momentum, spreading its parasitic reach into new frontiers and onto new hosts.
China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already one of the largest-scale detentions of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
The Diffusion of Racial Capitalist Patriarchy
At the heart of Empire’s evolution lies its transformation and diffusion of patriarchal systems. Pre-modern patriarchies were often localized and “low-intensity,” maintaining control through relatively decentralized mechanisms. Empire magnified these structures, integrating racial capitalist techniques and technologies of power to create a global system of domination.
This transformation relied on alliances with regional patriarchal elites. China’s rise, like Japan’s earlier modernization, illustrates how regional powers adopt Empire’s tools, blending them with local hierarchies to create hybrid systems of control. This fusion sustains Empire’s overarching logic while localizing its manifestations.
India offers another example of this adaptation. The rise of an upper-caste Hindu-centric nationalist imperialism reflects the integration of modern capitalist and racialized technologies with pre-modern patriarchal, religious, and caste hierarchies. This pattern demonstrates how regional powers not only adapt to but also contribute to Empire’s evolving system of control, perpetuating domination while reinforcing global inequality.
The Enduring Fractures of Empire
As the current hegemon faces challenges, some suggest the possibility of a multi-polar world where multiple regional powers share influence. While this might redistribute power among individual empires (e.g., a Han-supremacist China, a Hindu-supremacist and caste stratified India, and a white-supremacist Europe and North America), it does not necessarily dismantle Empire’s foundational logic. Instead, such multi-polarity risks producing a meta-stable Empire in which rival powers, despite their competition, collaborate to sustain the fractures of racialized domination and ecological exploitation under new arrangements.
Empire thrives on both continuity and transformation, adapting to power shifts while preserving its core logic of extraction, hierarchy, and control. Its fractures—between humanity and nature, and between so-called “superior” and “inferior” races—remain the bedrock of its dominion. From the Genoese-Iberian alliance to the ascendance of China, Empire’s history is one of relentless adaptation and expansion, ensuring its survival across centuries.
The Desertion of Empire
The fractures of Empire—between peoples, and between humanity and nature—are not incidental byproducts but its very foundations. Sustained by a system that extracts, divides, and exploits under the guise of progress, stability, and order, Empire’s logic perpetuates domination. Yet, these same fractures expose its vulnerability. The accelerating crises of ecological collapse, racialized inequality, and geopolitical conflict reveal the fragility of a system that perpetually and purposefully breaks its promises.
To be an anti-imperialist today is to recognize that neither the consolidation of current hegemonies nor the rise of new ones offers a solution. Whether led by NATO's neoliberal globalists or the emergent BRICS coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), Empire’s logic remains rooted in domination—genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal. A multi-polar order is not the antithesis of Empire but a variation of its machinery, ensuring its fractures persist under shifting arrangements of power.
The task, then, is not to steer Empire away from its trajectory of self-destruction but to desert it altogether. To desert Empire is not a retreat into nihilism; it is an active refusal to perpetuate its violence and an embrace of the transformative potential in its unraveling. This involves deconstructing the administrative statements, technical implements, and built environments that sustain Empire’s logic while (re)constructing alternatives that nurture autonomy and conviviality.
Thomas Cole, “Desolation” from The Course of Empire (1836)
Petit & Grand Marronage
The desertion of Empire unfolds as a continuum of refusals and (re)creations, encompassing practices of petit and grand marronage. Rooted in the Black radical tradition, marronage embodies a spectrum of escape and resistance that deconstructs systems of domination while reconstructing autonomy and conviviality.
Petit marronage, aligned with what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney term the “general antagonism,” consists of everyday acts of defiance—small, incremental refusals that chip away at systems of exploitation. These include reclaiming time from labor, creating temporary autonomous zones, and subtly subverting oppressive ideologies. Such acts mirror the fluid, dispersed nature of pack formations—small, dynamic groups that evade and disrupt the constraints of larger, hierarchical systems.
Grand marronage, by contrast, represents a radical rupture—a collective and decisive refusal of Empire’s logic through flight and autonomy, reaching its apogee in the “general strike.” Historically, it manifested as enslaved peoples fleeing plantations to establish maroon communities or, in the most profound acts, leaping en masse from slave ships to escape the horrors of bondage. Grand marronage is not merely physical escape but a spiritual and existential leap toward freedom, often at the cost of life. Like the transformative force of mass movements, it embodies collective rupture and creates the space for new forms of sociality to emerge.
Together, petit and grand marronage form a tidalectic of resistance. Incremental acts of petit marronage lay the groundwork for grand gestures of refusal, while the audacity and vision of grand marronage inspire and amplify the quieter, everyday acts of defiance. This interplay offers a dynamic framework for dismantling Empire and imagining life beyond its reach.
Maroon Infrastructures
What would it mean to build infrastructures that enable forms of petit and grand marronage today, that heighten the general antagonism and create the material conditions of possibility for a general strike? How might we design autonomous spaces and systems of survival that sustain incremental acts of defiance while also preparing for collective flight and radical transformation?
Such infrastructures would need to balance practicality with subversion, combining the adaptability of pack formations with the transformative energy of mass movements. Thriving in the margins of Empire, they would rely on this flexibility to evade control while fostering resilience and solidarity. Just as maroon societies flourished in spaces Empire deemed “uninhabitable,” modern maroon infrastructures could carve out possibilities for autonomy and conviviality within the fractures of its decline.
