American Empire

In this book, A.G. Hopkins offers an interpretation of the United States seen through the lens of comparative imperial history. By plotting the growth and expansion of the United States against other globalising empires, Hopkins suggests, we can see a nation that looked and behaved much like other imperial powers, despite its repeated and long-standing claims to distinction. Challenging American exceptionalism can hardly claim to be an innovation, of course, but the devil of this argument is in its extraordinary level of detail. Hopkins’s comprehensive synthesis produces an interpretation that is extensive, persuasive and repeatedly innovative. The book is structured around three historical periods: a phase of ‘proto-globalisation’, which, until 1861, saw the United States emerge and develop under British imperial influence; a main phase of globalisation that lasted until the 1950s, in which the United States operated more or less as a conventional imperial power; and a phase of decolonisation and ‘post-colonial globalisation’ beginning in the second half of the twentieth century in which the United States sought (unsuccessfully, in Hopkins’s view) to achieve hegemonic status

American exceptionalism · Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis · Colonialism · Decolonization · Economic history · Empire · Exceptionalism · Globalization · Hegemony · Interpretation (philosophy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · World history · Australian History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy