A. G. Hopkins. American Empire: A Global History.

Extract

As a nation forged though anti-imperial struggle, built on settler colonialism, and defined by the eventual reach of its global power, the United States has had a long and vexed relationship with empire. A. G. Hopkins’s American Empire: A Global History finally treats this subject with the dramatic scope and detailed attention it deserves. At more than seven hundred pages in length, the ambitions of this book are immense. As an eminent scholar of British imperial and global history, Hopkins skillfully challenges the predominantly nationalist orientation of studies on the subject by vastly expanding its field of view. Few scholars have succeeded so brilliantly at capturing the broad reach of imperialism throughout U.S. history while situating this story within the tectonic shifts of global politics over the course of three centuries.

Despite the overwhelming scale of his subject, Hopkins imposes order on the narrative by dividing it into three broad periods: one spanning from the Seven Years’ War to the Civil War, another from the Civil War to World War I, and the last from World War I to the era of post–World War II decolonization. Following the lead of scholars who have recently examined early U.S. history though a postcolonial lens, Hopkins uses the book’s first several chapters to foreground how British imperialism defined the evolution of mainland North American colonies into the early United States. Hopkins casts the young nation as engaged in a century-long decolonization process during which it remained largely characterized by its ongoing military, diplomatic, and economic relationships with the British Empire. For Hopkins, the United States only began to assert its true independence during the decades after the Civil War by following its European counterparts on a path toward national consolidation and industrial development. Hopkins argues that it is these commonalities, rather than any unique characteristics of the United States, that led the nation to seek overseas colonies at the turn of the century, develop techniques of rule over them for several decades, and finally relinquish most its control over them by the mid-twentieth century.