American Empire is a panoramic work of scholarship that presents a bold new global perspective on the history of the United States. Taking readers from the colonial era to today, A. G. Hopkins shows how, far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe followed similar trajectories throughout this long period, and how America’s dependency on Britain and Europe extended much later into the nineteenth century than previously understood. A sweeping narrative spanning three centuries, American Empire goes beyond the myth of American exceptionalism to place the United States within the wider context of the global historical forces that shaped Western empires and the world.
Awards and Recognition
- One of BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year
A. G. Hopkins is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge and former Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Global History, Globalization in World History, and British Imperialism, 1688–2015.
"A grand history that combines great ambition, immense learning, and illuminating insights. . . . No one who studies modern empires and America's place among them can ignore this book."—Dane Kennedy, H-Diplo Roundtable Review
"Hopkins has rendered the topic of American empire not merely interesting but truly compelling again."—David Armitage, Times Literary Supplement
"Hopkins has written a stunning book. We are immensely in his debt for restoring great narrative history to the top shelf in a book that ranges in its erudition from a Mediaeval Middle Eastern historian to Captain America to make its points."—Lloyd Gardner, H-Diplo Roundtable Review
"In this immense, feisty, delightfully pugilistic book, one can't help but appreciate [Hopkins's] intellectual fireworks, his depth of reading, and his conviction that history sits as the exacting judge of even emperors."—Joseph Fronczak, Jacobin
"Sweeping, ambitious and hugely illuminating . . . surely the definitive account of perhaps the most underestimated 'European' empire of all."—Dominic Sandbrook, BBC History Magazine
