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AMERICAN EMPIRE: A GLOBAL VIEW OF AN INSULAR HISTORY
(Princeton University Press, September 2017)
A. G. Hopkins
(Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Cambridge, and former
Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History, University of Texas at Austin)
Summary
This study uses the history of globalisation to suggest a new approach to the history of the
United States. It outlines three transformative phases of globalisation between 1700 and the
present, and traces their evolution through the history of the Western empires that extended
the process across the world. Far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe,
followed similar trajectories throughout this period. The revolt of the mainland colonies was
the product of a crisis that afflicted the imperial military-fiscal states of Europe. The history
of the Republic between 1783 and 1865 was a response not to the termination of British
influence but to its continued expansion. The creation of an industrial nation-state after 1865
paralleled developments in Western Europe, fostered similar destabilising influences, and
found an outlet in imperialism through the acquisition of an insular empire in the Caribbean
and Pacific in 1898. The long neglected period of colonial rule that followed reflected the
history of the European empires in its ideological justification, economic relations, and
administrative principles. After 1945, a profound shift in the character of globalisation
brought the age of great territorial empires to an end. This book is aimed at historians of
empire who lose sight of the United States after 1783, at historians of the United States who
bypass developments in Europe and the wider world before World War II, and at policymakers who need to understand the history of globalisation to avoid carrying the assumptions
of a bygone age into the twenty-first century.
agh, 22 December 2016