The Changing Relation between Nation and Empire

It may be helpful here to suggest some of the ways--interpretively--that A Nation Without Borders departs from many historical accounts of this period. The centerpiece of the book is the changing relation between nation and empire in the history of the United States. In this regard, most historians understand a certain sequence: the United States commenced its life as a nation, and over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerged as an empire too, as it became involved in overseas conquests and markets. A Nation Without Borders suggests something rather different. It argues that the model of governance inherited from the British was empire; that from the birth of the Republic the United States was a union with significant imperial ambitions on the continent and in the hemisphere, many pushed by slaveholders and their allies; that the United States only became a nation, a nation-state--as many others did--in the midst of a massive political and military struggle in the 1860s; and that the new American nation reconfigured the character of its empire, first in the South and the trans-Mississippi West before reaching overseas.

--Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910, The Penguin History of the United States (New York: Viking, 2016), 2.