Imperial history is one long catalogue of crime in the intellectual and political mind of the Anglosphere. Academics dare not utter a word on the moral complexity of empires for fear of campus anathema. Even the Wall Street Journal, usually quick to scorn wokery, can blithely lump together the British Empire, the Nazis, and Pol Pot in the same sentence. Three and half centuries of world history are reduced to genocide, and nobody bats an eyelid. Europe, by contrast, is refreshingly immune to this ideological virus. The idea of empire as an organising form of politics is enjoying a rehabilitation in Brussels, pushed by the court philosophers at the Justus Lipsius HQ, and picked up avidly by exponents of a muscular “sovereign Europe” to match China and America. Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, penned a book four years ago entitled “The New Empire: Europe in the 21st Century”, warning that the EU will be reduced to a vassal unless it equips itself with the full machinery of a su...