American Empire: A Global History.

• Date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Brock, Darryl E.

Hopkins, A. G. American Empire: A Global History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, xviii + 980 pages. Hardcover, $39.95.

The September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States drew British economic historian A. G. Hopkins to examine Washington's response to the first strike against the nation's mainland since 1812. Considering the vast literature on US history, Hopkins concludes "the only possibility I had of making a contribution to the subject was by looking at it from the outside in, instead of from the inside out" (xv). Hopkins delivers by applying his decades of knowledge from three specific fields: 1) Globalization as the analytical framework; 2) Western imperial expansion as the globalizing impulse; and 3) Former colonial states regarding their reception and negotiation with the colonizer. The Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, Hopkins views empires as agents of globalization. He thus argues that U.S. history ought to be interpreted beyond a national context; indeed, analysis within a global, imperial context "changes the questions asked of some of the central themes in the history of the United States" (p. 7).

Anchored in three key phases and crises of globalization over a three-century period--at the end of the eighteenth century, near the end of the nineteenth century, and during the...