This chapter introduces the main claims of Democracy and Empire, which reconceptualizes imperial popular sovereignty and self-determination as imperial concepts and constructs. This requires tracing the racial capitalist logics that marked the historical emergence of claims of popular sovereignty in western polities and their reliance on imperial forms of capitalist accumulation and explicating the political ramifications of these material underpinnings. The introduction explains how the book goes beyond existing accounts of white democracy by theorizing the material and ecological components of this form of rule and conceptualizing it as a properly transnational imperial form. Vis-à-vis the literature on popular sovereignty, the book makes the case that popular sovereignty and self-determination depended on popular claims that demanded collective access to wealth obtained by imperial means and required the exploitation of nonwhite subjects. Finally, the Introduction explains how the framework of racial capitalism informs Democracy and Empire’s project and presents its contribution within this approach, to assess the interconnections between different forms of racial subjection, and to theorize migration and nature within racial capitalism. In closing, this section provides a summary of the substantive chapters of the book.