This is the third and final part of the Empire Without Flags series. Part I examined Imperial Outreach through finance and institutions: debt, capital markets, civil society funding, and the production of consent. Part II examined the material infrastructure beneath those flows: ports, chokepoints, submarine cables, data centers, and payment systems. This final part brings the two dimensions together and asks the larger question: if imperial power no longer requires the direct occupation and administration of territory, what does it require instead?*

From Occupation to Structural Power

Direct colonial rule was one of the most visible historical forms through which imperial power was organized. Armies crossed borders, administrations were installed, governors ruled colonies, and resources and labor were extracted under direct political authority. The flag mattered because the state stood openly behind the economic relationship — even though, as the classical Marxist theory of imperialism always insisted, the underlying relationship was never simply territorial. It was a relationship of capital: the fusion of finance and industry, the export of capital abroad, and the competition of rival powers for position in a single world market. Colonial administration was one institutional form that relationship took. It was never the whole of what the relationship was.

This distinction is worth holding onto, because it clarifies what has and has not changed. Empire, in the sense this series uses the word, names a historical and institutional form: a structure of formal rule, a flag planted over a territory. Imperialism names something narrower and more durable: the relationship of unequal capacity between social formations that empire, in its classical form, was one way of organizing. An empire can dissolve. The relationship that “imperialism” names can persist, or even intensify, in the empire’s absence.

That form of imperialism has not disappeared from history, nor has military occupation ceased to exist. But it is no longer the only, or even always the primary, way in which dominant powers shape the conditions of accumulation beyond their borders. The contemporary world economy operates through a more dispersed architecture of power. A country can formally retain sovereignty while becoming deeply dependent on external finance, foreign technology, international markets, infrastructure networks, legal regimes, and payment systems. No foreign governor needs to administer its ministries, and no colonial army needs to occupy its capital, for the range of economically viable choices available to its government to be narrowed by structures operating largely outside its borders.

This is the central argument of Empire Without Flags. Imperial Outreach does not abolish power; it changes its form. Instead of the classical sequence of occupation, administration, and extraction, the contemporary architecture increasingly operates through dependency, influence, regulation of flows, and extraction. The distinction matters, because the absence of colonial administration does not necessarily mean the absence of imperial relations. What has changed is the mechanism through which power is exercised.

Dependency: The Point of Entry

Part I of this series examined the financial and institutional dimensions of that dependency. Debt can create external constraints on domestic policy. Access to capital markets can depend on credit ratings, investor confidence, and institutions whose decisions are made beyond the borders of the borrowing state. Sanctions can exclude particular countries from financial networks without physically blockading their territory, and civil society funding and institutional networks can shape political agendas without requiring direct political control.

None of these mechanisms alone constitutes imperialism, and foreign investment does not automatically create an imperial relationship. The issue is structural: dependency becomes politically significant when a country’s capacity to reproduce its economy depends on access to institutions, markets, technologies, currencies, or infrastructures whose terms it cannot itself determine. This is why formal sovereignty can coexist with substantial external constraint. A government may be free to choose its policies in principle, while discovering that some choices carry costs so high that they become economically or politically unsustainable. The crucial question, therefore, is not simply who governs the country, but who determines the conditions under which the country can reproduce itself within the global economy. That is the point at which sovereignty and structural power begin to diverge.

From Dependency to Influence

Dependency alone does not automatically produce political obedience. It creates an opening through which influence can operate. Financial institutions can attach conditions to credit, investors can reward or punish particular economic policies, and governments can use access to markets, technology, or currencies as leverage. International institutions can establish standards that domestic governments must accommodate if they want access to global networks.

This is where the distinction between formal sovereignty and effective autonomy becomes important. A sovereign state may still possess the legal authority to regulate labor, taxation, capital, technology, or natural resources, but if doing so threatens the external conditions on which its economy depends, its practical room for maneuver may be sharply reduced. Imperial Outreach therefore works less through direct commands than through structured incentives and constraints. Power does not always say “do this.” Increasingly, it creates a situation in which certain choices are simply the only ones available. That is a different form of power, but it can be no less consequential.

The Power to Set the Rules

The architecture becomes deeper when dependency is combined with the power to define the rules through which global exchange takes place. International standards are rarely discussed in the language of imperialism. Technical standards appear neutral, financial regulations appear administrative, internet governance appears technological, and credit ratings appear commercial. Yet rules determine access. Standards can determine which technologies are compatible with global markets, financial regulations can determine how banks assess risk and move capital, credit ratings can affect the price at which governments and corporations borrow, and digital governance can determine who controls the infrastructure through which information circulates.

Institutions such as ISO, ICANN, the Basel framework, and international credit-rating systems are not interchangeable, nor should they be treated as instruments of a single state; their structures, mandates, and relationships to governments and markets differ substantially. The point is more general, and it is the argument this final part of the series exists to make: power increasingly operates not through the ownership of a port or the threat to a shipping lane, examined in Part II, but through the prior and less visible ability to write the rules under which ports, ships, and everything else must operate. This is a crucial dimension of contemporary imperial power precisely because rule-making can appear politically neutral even when its consequences are profoundly unequal. The most effective form of structural power may therefore be the one that no longer looks like political power at all.

Regulating the Flow

Part II examined the physical infrastructure through which global circulation takes place. But infrastructure alone does not determine circulation. Law determines it as well. Investment treaties, arbitration mechanisms, export controls, sanctions regimes, customs rules, financial regulations, and technology restrictions all determine what can cross a border, under what conditions, and at what cost — and, as the naval confrontations over Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb examined in Part II make clear in real time, the legal authority to close, restrict, or license passage through a chokepoint is now as consequential as the chokepoint itself.

Part II already showed how sanctions can exclude a country’s banks from a payment network like SWIFT. The more general principle behind that example is what matters here: legal authority, not physical invasion, can isolate a country economically, closing the institutional conditions for cross-border movement while the physical movement of goods itself remains possible. This is why the politics of circulation, examined in Part II, is inseparable from the politics of law: the power to determine what may move, through which channels, under whose rules, and at what cost, is itself a form of structural power — and it is this legal layer, more than the infrastructure it governs, that this final part of the series is concerned with.

Extraction Without Colonial Administration

The final question is what happens at the end of this process. Imperial power ultimately matters because it affects the distribution of value. Contemporary extraction does not necessarily require the direct seizure of territory or the formal ownership of a colony; value can leave a country through profit repatriation, debt servicing, unequal trade, transfer pricing, royalties, licensing fees, financial charges, and the control of strategic infrastructure. But extraction should be understood more broadly than the movement of profits alone. A dependent economy can lose natural resources, labor value, technological capacity, tax revenue, data, domestic markets, and the capacity to determine its own development priorities, without a single foreign flag ever being raised over its territory.

The result is not necessarily the impoverishment of every individual within the dependent country. Local elites may benefit enormously from the same structures that constrain the broader economy, and this is crucial: imperial relations are not simply relationships between countries. They are mediated through classes and domestic institutions. Foreign capital does not operate in isolation; it requires local partners, political intermediaries, financial institutions, state agencies, and domestic elites capable of translating external power into internal economic arrangements. This resembles what classical dependency theory described as the role of the comprador bourgeoisie: a local capitalist class whose interests are bound up with the continued flow of foreign capital rather than with domestic productive development, and which therefore has every incentive to manage, rather than resist, the relationship of dependency. Not every local partner of foreign capital fits this description, but the pattern is common enough to name, and it is what finally distinguishes extraction from mere exchange: extraction is not simply value leaving a country, but value leaving a country through channels that a domestic class has itself helped build and has every interest in keeping open. The boundary between external domination and domestic class power is porous, which is why an analysis of imperialism that looks only at states — and stops at the point where value crosses a border — is incomplete. It is at this point, and not before, that dependency, influence, and the regulation of flows become imperialism in the full sense: not merely an asymmetry of power, but an asymmetry that reproduces itself, turning today’s constrained choice into tomorrow’s structural condition.

Hambantota: A Case Without a Colony

The Hambantota port in Sri Lanka provides a useful illustration of this architecture, precisely because it should not be reduced to the familiar story of a Chinese “debt trap.” The port was developed with Chinese financing during a period in which Sri Lanka was pursuing an ambitious infrastructure and development strategy. The project encountered serious commercial difficulties, and Sri Lanka later entered a broader debt crisis involving multiple creditors and structural weaknesses within its own economy. In 2017, the Hambantota port was placed under a long-term lease to a Chinese state-owned company in exchange for a substantial payment.

The episode became internationally famous as evidence of Chinese debt-trap diplomacy. That interpretation is too simple. The broader Sri Lankan debt crisis cannot be explained by Chinese lending alone, and the Hambantota transaction did not amount to China taking ownership of Sri Lanka or establishing colonial administration over its territory. The relationship between the port, Sri Lanka’s broader debt crisis, and Chinese lending is considerably more complicated than the popular loan-default-seizure narrative suggests. But rejecting that narrative does not make Hambantota analytically unimportant; it makes the case more interesting, because what it demonstrates is how finance, infrastructure, strategic geography, ownership, and long-term control can become connected without colonial occupation. A sovereign state can borrow for infrastructure. The infrastructure can fail to generate the expected returns. Debt pressures can accumulate through a much broader set of domestic and international relationships. Assets can then be reorganized through long-term leases or ownership arrangements, and strategic infrastructure can consequently become integrated into transnational networks of capital and logistics. No governor is appointed and no colonial administration is established, yet the distribution of control over a strategically important economic asset changes all the same.

The important question is therefore not whether China colonized Sri Lanka. It did not. Nor is it whether every Chinese overseas investment is an act of imperialism, because it is not. The more useful question is under what conditions foreign capital, combined with financial dependency and strategic infrastructure, acquires the capacity to shape the long-term conditions of accumulation in another society. That question applies far beyond China.

Beyond the China Question

This distinction matters in the contemporary era because the rise of China has encouraged a tendency to interpret every new infrastructure project through a simple geopolitical binary: Western imperialism on one side, Chinese imperialism on the other. That binary is inadequate, and China is the clearest available test of why.

The Limits of Structural Power

None of this means that structural power is absolute. Dependent states retain agency: governments can renegotiate contracts, diversify trade and payment systems, nationalize assets, or build the domestic and regional institutions needed to reduce exposure over time.

The constraint runs both ways. Part II of this series showed the point through chokepoints: the power to disrupt circulation is real, but the actor exercising it is often dependent on the same circulation it threatens. The same holds for finance and infrastructure more broadly. A dominant investor needs profitable markets. A creditor needs borrowers capable of repayment. A port operator needs cargo, and a state imposing sanctions must still operate within a global economy whose networks it cannot completely control. Structural power is powerful precisely because it is relational — no single actor stands entirely outside the system it dominates.

What Makes the Relationship Imperial?

This leads to the central conceptual problem this series has been building toward. If not every foreign investment is imperialism, not every unequal relationship is imperialism, and not every powerful state is necessarily imperialist in every external action, then what distinguishes an imperial relationship from an ordinary one?

The answer proposed by this series is structural. An imperial relationship exists when external political or economic power systematically expands one social formation’s capacity to shape the conditions of accumulation, circulation, and reproduction in another, while the latter lacks equivalent capacity to shape the former. This asymmetry can operate through finance, through infrastructure, through technology, through legal regimes, through military power, and increasingly, through their combination. This definition also explains why the absence of occupation is not sufficient evidence that imperialism has disappeared. The colony was one historical institutional form of unequal power. It was never the only possible form.

China is the clearest test of this definition, precisely because it resists the easy answer. China is a major capitalist power with enormous state capacity, growing international investment, and an increasingly consequential geopolitical presence, and it is challenging aspects of the U.S.-dominated global order in finance, in infrastructure, and now, as Part II showed, in the naval contest over the chokepoints themselves. But the definition proposed here does not ask whether China is powerful, or whether it competes with the United States. It asks whether Chinese capital, in a given relationship, systematically expands its own capacity to shape another society’s conditions of accumulation while that society lacks equivalent capacity in return — and, as importantly, whether China’s own weight in the world system yet approaches that of the historically dominant imperial powers it is challenging. Sometimes the answer is yes. Often, as Hambantota showed, the relationship is more contested and more mutually constrained than either the “debt trap” narrative or its dismissal allows. The nationality of the investor is not the analytical question. The structure of the relationship is. A Chinese company investing in a foreign port, a Western corporation acquiring a mine, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund purchasing infrastructure, or a multinational technology company owning submarine cables may operate through very different political arrangements, yet each becomes part of the same broader architecture the moment ownership, finance, infrastructure, and rule-making combine to shape the conditions under which value is produced and circulated. The question is never which flag flies over the infrastructure. It is who controls the conditions under which value is produced, financed, circulated, and extracted — the question that takes this series beyond geopolitical campism, in either direction.

Empire Without Flags

The three parts of this series can now be read as different layers of the same architecture, organized around a single, shifting question. Part I asked who determines the conditions of entry into the system: how debt, capital markets, investment, civil society networks, and hegemonic institutions shape the terms on which a society participates in the first place. Part II asked who controls the arteries of movement within the system: how ports, chokepoints, cables, data centers, and payment networks structure the physical and digital circulation on which global capitalism depends — a question that a live war over the Strait of Hormuz has, as this series has been written, made impossible to treat as merely theoretical. This final part has asked who writes the rules and captures the value once a society is inside the system and connected to its arteries: how access is regulated, and how value is extracted without direct colonial administration.

Entry, artery, rule. Part I closed by asking whether the system these three layers compose could be restructured, and by whom. The answer this series has tried to build toward is structural: no single capital commands this architecture, and no occupation sustains it. It persists because entry, artery, and rule each reproduce the same underlying asymmetry through different actors — investors, terminal operators, standard-setters, and the comprador classes who benefit from keeping each arrangement in place. That is what makes the architecture durable. It is also, for the same reason, what keeps the question open: a system reproduced through particular choices, by particular actors, under particular conditions, is not a law of nature. It can be reproduced. It can also, under different conditions and by different forces, cease to be.

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