American Empire: A Global History by A. G. Hopkins (review)

Hopkins' sprawling, ambitious, and often delightful tome offers a proudly revisionist history of the United States as written by an "outsider" to American historiography. It is, at turns, enlightening and irritating. This volume is not the first to attempt to fit the United States into global patterns of historical change, but it is undoubtedly among the most successful. Hopkins argues that the rise and fall of the American empire can be best understood within a global framework of worldwide imperial formation driven largely by economic forces: "The trends influencing the course of American Empire were the same as those shaping the other Western empires" (636). But this book deals with more than just empire. Hopkins provides a synthesis of American history and historiographical reviews of dozens of topics that deserve frequent future consultation by both students and advanced scholars.

Hopkins divides the U.S. empire into three phases of globalization, according to specific crises driven by dialectical forces. The initial phase of proto-globalization was, not surprisingly, mercantile in nature. U.S. historians mark the late eighteenth century, when the colonies achieved independence from England, as the end of this era, but from a global perspective, political independence is far less significant than "effective independence"—when the United States became economically separated from England. This independence, Hopkins argues, did not occur until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The second phase of globalization, which lasted roughly until World War II, was characterized by nation-building and industrialization, driven largely by war. During this period, the United States superseded Britain as the leading empire, embarking on colonial rule in island territories to which few people in the continental United States gave much attention. In a particularly strong chapter about the twentieth-century bureaucracy of empire, Hopkins credibly supports his contention that "the disappearance of the insular empire after 1898 is an omission unparalleled in the historiography of modern empires" (498).

The third phase of empire was characterized by decolonialization driven by human-rights concerns and the rise of nationalism in colonized territories. Hopkins makes a compelling case that the decolonization of U.S. territories deserves a larger place in reigning Europe-centered narratives. He also argues that the United States ceased being an empire after decolonizing its insular territories, despite popular perceptions otherwise.

Hopkins' command of detail and historiography is stunning. As a work of synthesis, his volume is unquestionably successful, but his methodology has its limits. Any model-driven synthetic history will inevitably elide certain topics, but Hopkins' insistence that the United States be understood in a world context leads him to some questionable positions that are asserted rather than argued. Although a generation of historians influenced by Charles Sellers' The Market Revolution (New York, 1991) has documented the extent of market penetration in the decades before the Civil War, Hopkins writes, "The rural order remained the matrix within which all other activities were set, as it was in Europe" [during the mid-1800s], "notwithstanding claims that the period experienced a 'market revolution'" (144).¹

Although Hopkins can be charmingly self-effacing about the merits of his own approach, his critiques of methods that do not fit with his own can verge on dismissive. "The cultural approach" to studying the wars of 1898, he writes, "is limited by its own specialization, which rarely engages with the politics and economics of imperialism" (343). The new history of capitalism fares little better. "Some revisionist accounts have gone so far as to portray the relationship between South and North [in the antebellum period] as that of two dynamic forms of capitalism. However a line needs to be drawn between industrial and commercial capitalism. If power-driven manufacturing and wage labor are taken to be hallmarks of modern capitalism, as long tradition claims, the South clearly fails the test" (221). Moreover, those of us who have written extensively about nineteenth-century U.S. empire may find his statement that "imperialism and empire make only limited appearances...