Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776

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

Byrnes, Sean T.

Hardcover

Series: New Approaches to International History

Native American HistoryGeneral United States HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1350341665
ISBN13: 9781350341661
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Apr 30 2026
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.39
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

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 power that served the few at the expense of the many.

From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial Third World, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today's modern, globalized world-and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.

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General United States History

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