American Empire: A Global History
This book challenges conventional accounts of the place of the United States in the international order during the last three centuries. It shows that the US was part of a Western imperial order throughout this period. After 1898, it ruled a now forgotten empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. It brought formal colonial control to an end after 1945, when other Western powers also abandoned their empires. The conditions sustaining territorial empires had changed irrevocably. Thereafter, the United States was not an empire but an aspiring hegemon.
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Overview
American Empire challenges conventional accounts of the place of the United States in the international order during the last three centuries. It shows that the US was part of a Western imperial order throughout this period. After 1898, it ruled a now forgotten empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. It brought formal colonial control to an end after 1945, when other Western powers also abandoned their empires. The conditions sustaining territorial empires had changed irrevocably. Thereafter, the United States was not an empire but an aspiring hegemon.
Tony Hopkins is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History in the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Emeritus Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History in the University of Texas at Austin, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written extensively on African history, imperial history, and globalization. His most recent books are Globalisation in World History (2001), Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (2006),British Imperialism, 1688-2015 (with P. J. Cain, 3rd ed. 2016), and American Empire: A Global History (2018).
The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Philippa Strum (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.
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History and Public Policy Program
The History and Public Policy Program makes public the primary source record of 20th and 21st century international history from repositories around the world, facilitates scholarship based on those records, and uses these materials to provide context for classroom, public, and policy debates on global affairs. Read more
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