The United States and the Ends of Empire : Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776

Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order. Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present.Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age-and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization-fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when.Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and powe