Hopkins’ ambitious book seeks to integrate the history of the global American territorial empire with the scholarly literature on European imperialism. He argues that examining European and American imperial trajectories in tandem reveals far more commonalities than differences. He shows that the timing of the American seizure, governance, and relinquishment of a formal overseas empire was in step with the new imperialism of other Western powers. Such a chronology suggests that ‘supranational forces’, rather than coincidental alignments between national histories, are to account for the rise and dissolution of Western empires in the twentieth century (p. 492). Drawing on Marxist theory, Hopkins contends that transnational economic considerations, especially transformations in the extent and pace of globalization, determined the patterns of Western imperial history. He defines globalization generously, seeing it as a ‘process that also incorporates political, social, and cultural change’ alongside economic integration (p. 12). Inspired by Montesquieu’s observation that structure is relative to scale, he further argues that globalization was itself shaped by the political form of the dominant imperial regimes at any given period (p. 32). Thus, he portrays the history of imperialism and globalization as intermixed and dialectical, with empires powering globalization, and globalization supporting and then gradually destabilizing and reshaping Western empires. While he draws comparisons with continental European powers, Hopkins mostly employs the British empire to contextualize American imperialism. This is largely because of the British empire’s size, efficiency, and influence on North America and globalization (pp. 27, 36, and 47).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, globalization unfolded through the agency of military-fiscal states. These were expansionist, agrarian, dynastic polities that struggled to pay for extensive militaries in defence of their empires (p. 34). By expanding and developing overseas dominions, military-fiscal states initiated the first stirrings of global integration, or ‘proto-globalization’ (p. 7). That extension came with a cost, however; in what Hopkins calls the ‘great convergence’, wars of imperial expansion pushed Europe’s military-fiscal states toward a financial and imperial crisis at the end of the eighteenth century (p. 52). When the British parliament tried to raise revenue from the North American colonies to help manage its debt from the Seven Years’ War, it provoked the American Revolution. Likewise, France’s intervention in the conflict later precipitated a similar fiscal crisis in 1789.
After winning formal independence, American revolutionaries faced the challenges of decolonization and nation-building (p. 19). They began by crafting the Constitution on the (British) military-fiscal model in order to stabilize the US economy (p. 125). Fractious antebellum politics reflected contests between liberals and conservatives in nineteenth-century Europe, who jousted over whether economic policy should favour agricultural interests through free-trade or industrial interests via protectionism (p. 144). Overall, the partisanship of the early American republic ensured that the United States would remain dependent on Britain politically, economically, and culturally. Without ‘effective independence’, the United States was a state without a nation (p. 19). Interestingly enough, it was also a state without an empire. While the United States seized Native American lands in the west throughout the nineteenth century, Hopkins believes that such acquisitions did not comprise an empire because the Native American population was comparatively small and the new territories became incorporated into the Union as states with the same rights as the original thirteen (pp. 236–7).
The mid nineteenth century witnessed the ‘great transition’, whereby modern globalization began to transform military-fiscal states into industrialized nation-states (p. 94). Industrialization and urbanization produced social tensions that only unified nation-states seemed able to resolve. One of their strategies was imperialism, which appeared poised to ameliorate class divisions by boosting economic opportunity and patriotism. Hopkins believes that the United States followed this basic European pattern. By defeating southern agricultural conservatives in the American Civil War, Union forces ‘broke a state to build a nation’ (p. 36). Between 1865 and 1898, Americans shed vestiges of postcolonial dependency on Great Britain and assumed more and more political, economic, and cultural independence. But because their contests with Democrats at the ballot box continued, Republicans looked abroad for ways of preserving their electoral dominance. Empire, via a successful war with Spain, was their solution. By engaging in a righteous, patriotic war and joining the other major industrial nation-states in the new imperialism, Republicans hoped that they would rally the nation’s electorate to their brand of political economy and reject the neocolonial conservatism of their political competitors.
The gambit only partially worked. By annexing the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, the United States joined the imperial club. Yet the nation soon found that gaining an empire was much easier than governing one. As Hopkins shows, Americans ruled over their ‘insular empire’ in much the same way as British and French imperialists reigned over their own foreign territories. On a global scale, the new imperialists quickened the pace of modern globalization. The First World War served as the final clash between outdated military-fiscal states and modern industrial nation-states (p. 444). Contrary to conventional thinking, Allied victory actually strengthened the territorial empires of Britain, France, and the United States, which enjoyed widespread prosperity in the 1920s (p. 536). Yet by delivering public goods and cultural constructs (including racism, ethnic nationalism, and natural rights philosophy), modern territorial empires facilitated a transition to postcolonial globalization. With the onset of the global depression of the 1930s, simmering anti-colonial movements gained momentum (p. 445). While the strategic experience and post-war landscape of the Second World War encouraged the Allies to maintain their overseas empires, postcolonial globalization made such an endeavour impossible (pp. 639–40). Decolonization followed rapidly in the 1950s, with Britain, France, and the United States giving up their overseas territories or otherwise rearranging their relationships with them. In place of an empire, since 1945 the United States has sought hegemony, positioning itself as the essential guarantor of world order and security (p. 692). Yet its unilateralist tendencies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have often fallen short because nation-states, even hegemonic ones, are ill-equipped to tackle the world’s challenges in a postcolonial, transnational, globalized economy.
American empire is a thoughtful, well-written, and deeply researched book. Hopkins set out to immerse American imperial history in the larger stream of Western imperial history, and in that he has succeeded. His core argument, that the United States was as subject to the forces and chronologies of globalization as other imperial powers, is convincing. His treatment of the formal American empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean is a welcome contribution to an area that has been greatly understudied in a comparative context. By assuming a larger perspective, Hopkins melds diverse literatures in American and European histories together in a productive manner. Like Kariann Yokota, his application of decolonization and postcolonial studies to the nineteenth-century United States is illuminating for American and world historians alike.Footnote 1 Where else might one encounter comparisons between Andrew Jackson and Mahatma Gandhi as leaders of ‘green uprisings’ (p. 148), or John Quincy Adams and Jawaharlal Nehru as post-revolutionary, decolonizing leaders (pp. 142–3)? The overall result of such efforts deals a significant blow to American exceptionalism in the area of imperial studies. Perhaps more importantly, American empire offers a usable model for incorporating the American imperial career into world history textbooks, courses, and scholarship.
For all this, American empire has its limitations. One is Hopkins’ insistence that the transcontinental expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century, while imperialistic, did not produce an empire. He contends, for example, that the Native American population was too small for Indians to be considered imperial subjects (p. 237). Hopkins is right that scale matters in imperial studies: seizing a three-hut hamlet in an adjoining state cannot, by itself, make an empire. But surely the slaughter, dispossession, and incorporation of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans and their several hundred independent polities in the nineteenth-century North American west was on an imperial scale. Finally, by self-consciously excluding informal empire, Hopkins elides American imperialism and empire in its most global of incarnations. Although his observations on the challenges in defining and measuring informal influence are well stated (pp. 15 and 23), a growing body of scholarship has shown that Americans sought and achieved some measure of informal empire on the global stage as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 2 The fullest global history of the American empire would include these maritime, commercial, diplomatic, naval, and missionary activities alongside the formal insular empire that Hopkins surveys so well. Such an approach would have the additional benefit of integrating more of the Global South into the spatial scale of American imperialism. While this is not the book that Hopkins set out to write, such an approach would nonetheless have had a better claim to the mantle of global history. Until that book is released, however, Hopkins has made his mark, and has made it well. American empire is a provocative, perceptive, and compelling step towards a richer integration of American, European, and world history.
