Contributor(s): Professor Odd Arne Westad | For the last seventy years, the United States has been the predominant state within the international system. Does it make sense to call the United States an empire? Is its power now irrevocably waning? Are we in the midst of a transfer of global power and wealth from west to east? Will China — another international power that can be seen as an empire — be the state benefitting most from the global changes we are now seeing?

Meet our speaker and chair

Odd Arne Westad is the Engelsberg Chair for 2020/21 at LSE IDEAS. He is currently the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, and is a former director of LSE IDEAS.

Christopher Coker is Director of LSE IDEAS.

More about this event

In this series of four lectures, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, will discuss the concept of empire and why it is still relevant today. This event is the final in the series.

A podcast of the first lecture can be found at Empires Past & Present: the idea of empire.

The second lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1800, took place in January, a podcast is available.

The third lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1900, took place in March, a podcast will be available.

LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. We connect academic knowledge of diplomacy and strategy with the people who use it.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19