Political science interpretations of international relations tend to focus on abstract terms of economic interest domination rights and justice. Trapped within this limited horizon the discipline fails to explain why nations of similar economic structure would have variant ideas for their foreign policies and why nations with different economic structures and ideologies could develop a similar global posture during certain periods of their histories. This innovative study examines imperialism from a cultural and linguistic perspective portraying the rise and fall of ancient Greek Roman medieval Islamic modern British Russian and American empires as a part of the natural life of world civilizations.