Foreign policies and diplomatic missions, combined with military action, were the driving forces behind the growth of the early United States. In an era when the Old and New Worlds were subject to British, French, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the new republic had limited diplomatic presence and minimal public credit. It was vulnerable to hostile forces in every direction. The United States could not have survived, grown, or flourished without the adoption of prescient foreign policies, or without skillful diplomatic operations. An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history—such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s advocacy of an American System, Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama—are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy. An Independent Empire tells the stories of the people who defined the early history of America’s international relationships. Throughout the book are brief, entertaining vignettes of often-overlooked intellectuals, spies, diplomats, and statesmen whose actions and decisions shaped the first fifty years of the United States. More than a dozen bespoke maps illustrate that the growth of the early United States was as much a geographical as a political or military phenomenon.

A bold transatlantic history of American independence revealing that 1776 was about far more than taxation without representation Revolution Against Empire sets the story of American independence within a long and fierce clash over the political and economic future of the British Empire. Justin du Rivage traces this decades-long debate, which pitted neighbors and countrymen against one another, from the War of Austrian Succession to the end of the American Revolution. As people from Boston to Bengal grappled with the growing burdens of imperial rivalry and fantastically expensive warfare, some argued that austerity and new colonial revenue were urgently needed to rescue Britain from unsustainable taxes and debts. Others insisted that Britain ought to treat its colonies as relative equals and promote their prosperity. Drawing from archival research in the United States, Britain, and France, this book shows how disputes over taxation, public debt, and inequality sparked the American Revolution—and reshaped the British Empire.

Foreign policies and diplomatic missions, combined with military action, were the driving forces behind the growth of the early United States. In an era when the Old and New Worlds were subject to British, French, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the new republic had limited diplomatic presence and minimal public credit. It was vulnerable to hostile forces in every direction. The United States could not have survived, grown, or flourished without the adoption of prescient foreign policies, or without skillful diplomatic operations. An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history—such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s advocacy of an American System, Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama—are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy. An Independent Empire tells the stories of the people who defined the early history of America’s international relationships. Throughout the book are brief, entertaining vignettes of often-overlooked intellectuals, spies, diplomats, and statesmen whose actions and decisions shaped the first fifty years of the United States. More than a dozen bespoke maps illustrate that the growth of the early United States was as much a geographical as a political or military phenomenon.

2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

During the first half of the twentieth century, movements seeking political equality emerged in France's overseas territories. Within twenty years, they were replaced by movements for national independence in the majority of French colonies, protectorates, and mandates. In this pathbreaking study of the decolonization era, Adria Lawrence asks why elites in French colonies shifted from demands for egalitarian and democratic reforms to calls for independent statehood, and why mass mobilization for independence emerged where and when it did. Lawrence shows that nationalist discourses became dominant as a consequence of the failure of the reform agenda. Where political rights were granted, colonial subjects opted for further integration and reform. Contrary to conventional accounts, nationalism was not the only or even the primary form of anti-colonialism. Lawrence shows further that mass nationalist protest occurred only when and where French authority was disrupted. Imperial crises were the cause, not the result, of mass protest.

On the eve of the Seven Years' War in North America, the British crown convened the Albany Congress, an Anglo-Iroquois treaty conference, in response to a crisis that threatened imperial expansion. British authorities hoped to address the impending collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in the northern colonies, a problem exacerbated by uncooperative, resistant colonial governments. In the first book on the subject in more than forty-five years, Timothy J. Shannon definitively rewrites the historical record on the Albany Congress. Challenging the received wisdom that has equated the Congress and the plan of colonial union it produced with the origins of American independence, Shannon demonstrates conclusively the Congress's importance in the wider context of Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic empire. In the process, the author poses a formidable challenge to the Iroquois Influence Thesis. The Six Nations, he writes, had nothing to do with the drafting of the Albany Plan, which borrowed its model of constitutional union not from the Iroquois but from the colonial delegates' British cousins. Far from serving as a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional Convention, the Albany Congress marked, for colonists and Iroquois alike, a passage from an independent, commercial pattern of intercultural relations to a hierarchical, bureaucratic imperialism wielded by a distant authority.