American Empire: A Global History

Hopkins (British Imperialism, 1688–2015), emeritus professor of Commonwealth history at Cambridge, highlights the imperial context that indelibly shaped political change in the U.S., both at its founding in 1776 and during its late 19th-century overseas expansion. The roots of the drive toward the Pacific, Hopkins contends, can be found not in the exceptional character of American expansionism, but in the legacy of the “military-fiscal” states of 18th-century Europe. This legacy bequeathed to the American colonies an emphasis on land rights as well as an evolving notion of political sovereignty that would allow them to defeat the British Empire and become the world’s first decolonized nation. Hopkins is a master of storytelling on a grand scale, and the narrative abounds with moments—the little-known life story of Harry Washington, one of George Washington’s slaves; the siege of British-occupied Kut, Iraq, in 1915—that resonate across the centuries. But the chapters devoted to U.S. history sit uneasily in the context of the volume as a whole. Rather than connecting back to the book’s imperial themes, they read as textbook-level summaries that bear little relation to the complex imperial networks that Hopkins sketches. This is a good book, if overly long, and Hopkins’s call to read U.S. history as imperial history is hardly new. Maps. (Feb.)