Empires do not just rise and fall—they bump into one another when they come and go. For an evocative glimpse of how, pay a visit to Istanbul’s sublime Hagia Sofia, formerly a Byzantine basilica, now perhaps the only mosque where you can find mosaics of angels and saints hovering above Koranic verses. Or go to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, later consecrated as a cathedral by the Spanish, and sit in the Gothic chapel they plopped down amidst the Moorish colonnades. Almost since history began, empires have been built on top of one another. The Persians conquered the Egyptians. The Greeks defeated the Persians. The Romans took over the Greeks. The eastern part of the Roman Empire was handed down via the Byzantines, while the Holy Roman Empire claimed to inherit Rome’s mantle in the west. The last Holy Roman Emperor fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, who married the Emperor’s daughter and named their infant son the King of Rome. History’s most recent imperial megalomaniac, Adolf Hitler, hoped to establish his Thousand-Year Reich in alliance with the British Empire, and when that failed, aimed to supplant it.

Empire is such a dirty word these days that one can easily forget that empires are the most durable and enduring form of political organization in world history. The nation-state, a bit like homo sapiens in the trajectory of human evolution, is a comparative novelty—and even then, plenty of nation-states have aggressively pursued empire-building themselves. Otto von Bismarck observed as much when he remarked, at the height of the Scramble for Africa, that his map of Africa lay in Europe. He meant that nation-states used empire-building as a kind of ego-building, enhancing their prestige with competitive conquest. He would know: in 1871 he had orchestrated the coronation of Kaiser Wilhelm I inside the Versailles Hall of Mirrors, a slap in the face of the recently-defeated French, who lost Alsace and Lorraine to the new German empire.

What are the consequences for an imperial power when it fills the shoes of an earlier one? For a start, empires build on the structures and policies of their predecessors. Consider British India, the largest colony of the largest modern empire. The Raj tends to evoke stereotypes of pith-helmeted, gin-soaked Britons governing with pomp and arrogance. Actually, Britain commenced its rule in India as a vassal of the Mughal Emperor. In 1765, the Emperor granted the British East India Company the right to collect taxes in Bengal. Announcing a desire to govern Bengal according to its “own” customs, the East India Company began to codify Mughal systems of landholding, revenue collection, and legal administration. But in the process, it hardened once-fluid social distinctions within and between religious groups, infamously between Hindus and Muslims. Ironically, it was by trying to emulate the Mughal Empire that the British began to “divide and rule”—a tactic they would be criticized for deploying everywhere from Ireland to Palestine. In South Asia, the eventual consequence would be the excruciatingly violent segregation of Hindus and Muslims into the nations of India and Pakistan in 1947.

New empires also inherit problems from older ones. This has been particularly evident in the modern Middle East, ever since Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Ottoman imperial province of Egypt in 1798. Napoleon hoped that the Egyptians—Arabs, who had a different language and ethnicity from the Ottoman Turks—would flock behind his standard of liberation. He even prepared declarations in Arabic to this effect, proclaiming himself to be the mahdi, or promised Muslim messiah. Instead, Napoleon discovered exactly what the Ottomans had: an existing struggle for power among Mameluke Beys, which helped provoke his own ignominious defeat. When the Ottoman Empire eventually collapsed, at the end of World War One, its successors took on the problem of managing diverse religious, ethnic, and regional interests. France, awarded Syria and Lebanon as League of Nations mandates, attempted to balance different groups with a provocative political quota system—a source of Lebanon’s civil war. Britain, given control of Palestine, attempted both to encourage Jewish settlers and to placate native Arabs, also with unsatisfactory results. In another of its mandate territories, Iraq—cobbled together out of three historically distinct Ottoman provinces—Britain faced a massive revolt, which it suppressed with brutal bombardment.

As these examples imply, looking at the layering of empires provides more than just an illuminating angle onto history. It promises a useful way to approach present-day international problems. Some people think that we have evolved beyond empires, that our era is qualitatively different from what Eric Hobsbawm dubbed the “Age of Empire” that flourished before 1914. But this pattern of imperial succession continues profoundly to shape our world. Not only were both World Wars imperial wars. The unraveling of British and French empires after World War Two helped fuel the longest imperial war of the twentieth century—the Cold War—as the US and USSR vied for influence in former European and Japanese imperial domains. The end of the Soviet empire has triggered a new age of American imperialism, and left its own legacies—such as the Taliban, funded by the US to resist Soviet occupation.

Instead of pretending that empires no longer exist, we would do better to recognize the ways in which the US, too, has inherited imperial problems, policies, and worldviews. Invoking Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” historian Niall Ferguson has called on the United States to accept its imperial responsibilities in Iraq and Afghanistan and govern openly, as Britain once did. Ferguson is right to pull the mask off the American empire. But our assumption of an imperial role should go beyond just announcing that we are in charge and proceeding to assert our will. By looking at the histories of the empires we have replaced—and the legacies we have been left—we can learn how better to manage the responsibilities we have incurred.

The American empire draws most immediately on its British predecessor. The British inheritance is perhaps most evident in South Asia, where we have embraced a geopolitical vision that posits Pakistan and India as irreconcilable enemies—though in fact it was the British Empire that reified this division in the first place. In Iraq, we seem to assume as fixed the boundaries of a nation whose integrity was essentially forced onto an divided population. In Afghanistan, we have adopted the preferred British technique of indirect rule, through indigenous agents and institutions. There are things to commend in this approach, but there is ample historical evidence to suggest that such administrations neither thrive nor often survive.

And let us not forget the legacies left for the United States by its own imperial occupation by Britain. America is the only former colony in modern history to become an empire in its own right. Thomas Jefferson envisaged America’s western expansion as forging an “empire for liberty,” promoting Anglo-American values. But the concept was paradoxical from the outset, thanks to two imperial legacies reshaped by the expanding US. The first was how to deal with Indians and their lands—a question the British eventually resolved by blocking settlement west of the Appalachians. The US quickly overturned the ban, and refined methods of Indian expulsion to enable it. The second legacy was slavery—introduced by Britain, but embedded and extended by the United States. Maybe these contradictions in our own imperial past have made us more willing than we should be to overlook analogous discrepancies in our present imperial policy.

Just because empires have always been around does not mean they always should be. But since they are for now, we ought to contemplate how to make an “empire for liberty” seem less of a paradox. A good first step would be to stop exacerbating the tensions of empires that we have replaced, and to start probing their histories for more constructive lessons—if only of what not to do.