From co-produced hegemony to coerced imperial governance

This paper is inspired by recent analyses of the nature of imperial power that unbundle it from the modes of global governance performed by European rulers in the 'Age of Empire'. While maintaining the defining features of the concept, it argues that today's global Pax Americana is constituted by a variety of legal regulatory instruments that define the topography of an imperial regime through strategies of inclusion/exclusion that dilute the national and economic sovereignty of the targeted community or state. The argument is fleshed out by applying it as a grille de lecture to four existing case studies published by historians of science and technology, including my own. The regulatory systems they describe evolved from a classic metropolitan-periphery mode of colonial subordination (in the case of Hawaiʻi in the early twentieth century), through a US–UN brokered legal status of strategic trusteeship to legitimate the use of the Marshall islands to destructively test weapons after World War Two, to the use of export controls and other regulatory instruments to control the transnational flow of US-origin knowledge, know-how and technical data in the nuclear and commercial fields.