Deepak Lal's new book, In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order, argues that empires have played a decisive role throughout history in providing the political stability essential to economic and social progress. Turning to today's debates over economic and cultural globalization, he concludes that "If the U.S. public does not recognize the imperial burden that history has thrust upon it, or is unwilling to bear it, the world will continue to muddle along as it has for the past century--with hesitant advances, punctuated by various alarms and by periods of backsliding in the wholly beneficial processes of globalization. Perhaps, if the United States is unwilling to shoulder the imperial burden of maintaining the global Pax, we will have to wait for one or other of the emerging imperial states--China and India--to do so in the future."

At this AEI Book Forum, Professor Lal will discuss his new book along with panelists Robert Kagan, Allan Meltzer, and Nicholas Eberstadt. Deepak Lal is the James S. Coleman Professor of international development studies at UCLA and the author of many influential books on economic development and public policy, including The Poverty of "Development Economics" and Unintended Consequences. In Praise of Empires is an expanded version of Professor Lal's 2002 Henry Wendt Lecture delivered at AEI.