There's a funny thing about naming empires. There was the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, even the Belgians had an empire. Those are the kinds of empires that we've grown up with. They are empires which identify a people and a place as the carriers of that empire.
Yet people seldom, today, refer to the US Empire. The US doesn't like to refer to itself this way. In 1941, Henry Luce wrote his famous essay in Life magazine about the American Century. Sixty years later, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) advocates what it calls "American global leadership". The PNAC brings together the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other key members of the Bush administration. They claim the next hundred years are 'ours'.
They're claiming not a place, but every place, for the next hundred years. So, the US empire is both intrinsically global and not actually, necessarily, about occupying territory per se. The implication, of course, is that whether you want it or not, you're all within the boundaries of the American Empire, whether you are in Pakistan or Botswana. Because you are all living in the Twentieth Century and now the Twenty-first Century. How do you confront a century?
Empire is not just about geography and history, it's about a relationship. Too often, we use a lazy notion of empire. We think of Roman legions, British ships, American troops chasing up and down. The important aspect about the imperial relationship are those who are willing to collaborate with empire. There are not just economic dependencies, but social and cultural ones.