This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-hand with imperial place-making? Both questions force us to reckon with empire as a multi-scalar project that entangles the foreign and the domestic, the intimate and the global, and so on.
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