EMPIRES at the National War College

Welcome to the "Empires" program of the National War College, located at Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington, DC, and part of National Defense University. This page is hosted by the National War College Alumni Association, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and enhancing the mission and goals of the College.

For those new to the NWC's History & Strategy Roundtable: The purpose of the "Empires" series is simply to take a sophisticated and explicitly historical look at the experience of past imperial powers, always with an eye towards the United States' current "imperial" issues. Normally our speakers do not address these current issues overtly in their prepared remarks—but they seem to emerge pretty naturally in the open exchange that follows. Events are free and open to the public, or at least to that part of the public willing and able to make it through Fort McNair's security arrangements. Announcements and invitations, however, are sent only to a select e-mailing list.

Previous topics in the series have included: "The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power," by Niall Ferguson (Stern Business School, NYU, and Jesus College, Oxford University); "The Empire of the Roman Republic" by University of Maryland historian Arthur Eckstein; "The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation: Invalid or Incubator?" and "The Austro-Hungarian Empire: Decline, Fall & Disaggregation, 1815-2000," by Purdue University historian Charles Ingrao; "The Ottoman Empire and Its Legacy in the Arab World," by Faruk Birtek (Bogazici University, Istanbul); "U.S. Special Operations Forces and the Problem of Imperial Policing," by journalist Robert Kaplan; "American Empire" by Boston University's Andrew Bacevich; and "American Empire: Past and Future," by Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. [Not a complete list]

The event format is:
1700 — refreshments in the rotunda.
1730 — speaker delivers a short talk (preferably no more than 30-40 minutes)
— followed by a free-form Q&A with audience members.
1900 — the formal session always ends promptly at this time, but the speaker—travel schedule permitting—normally remains available to talk with individual participants.
1930 — dinner for the speaker, the event coordinator, and interested event participants (the latter must, unfortunately, pay their own way), at a local DC restaurant (usually Les Halles, on Pennsylvania Avenue [see map]).

VIDEOS — Click here to see a new version of the NWC Empires Series Videos. This is an experimental website containing full-length videos of each of our AY2008 discussions. We're still playing with it, so expect technical problems. These videos are in QuickTime format (.mov).

We also have some videos made for NWC's "Empires" elective, which are in Windows Media Video format (.wmv).
Dr. Arthur Eckstein (University of Maryland), "The Empire of the Roman Republic"
Dr. Charles W. Ingrao (Purdue University), "Habsburg Empires"