Antonio Negri (1933–2023) was a leading theorist of Italian autonomist Marxism; after seven years in prison on the dubious charge of being a 'silhouette' figure in the Brigate Rosse investigations of the 1970s, he fled to France and spent years moving between Paris and Padua, between exile and return. Michael Hardt (b. 1960) taught literary theory and political philosophy at Duke University. The two began working together in the 1990s and wrote Empire between 1994 and 1999 — at the peak of online commerce, after the Soviet collapse, and at the height of neoliberal globalisation; Harvard University Press published it in 2000. The book became an unexpected international bestseller; the New York Times called it 'the Communist Manifesto of the twenty-first century'.

The thesis is this. The classical imperialism of the twentieth century — one nation-state directly controlling other territories — is over. What has replaced it is 'Empire': no centre, no outside, no 'remainder' beyond itself. The United States does not preside over it; if Empire has a capital, it sits in the overlapping layers of the Pentagon, the IMF, Davos, and Hollywood. Sovereignty is no longer held by the state alone; it is distributed across financial markets, multinational corporations, the UN, NATO, the NGO network, and the technological infrastructure. Capital has taken the whole world inside itself; there is no outside left.

The second half of the book turns toward hope. This new sovereignty, while binding the whole world into a single site of production, also produces the subject of resistance: the 'multitude' — not homogeneous like a class but heterogeneous and shared in productivity, generating common communication, common affect, common knowledge. Hardt and Negri developed this subject in the next two volumes (Multitude, 2004; Commonwealth, 2009). The academic effect of Empire is unmistakable: debates on globalisation, postcolonial theory, digital labour, and the critique of the platform economy now run through its concepts.