Interview with Sean Byrnes, author of “The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776”
Sean Byrnes is a historian of the United States, teacher, and author. He has written academic books and has been published in Jacobin, Time, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere. His newest book is out this year from Bloomsbury (you can order it here), and he was kind enough to chat with us about that book, U.S. history, and the state of the discipline.
Your new book is The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776 (Bloomsbury, 2026). If you are at a cocktail party, how do you explain what it is about to someone who hasn't read it?
You assume I get invited to cocktail parties!
So the book is meant to be an accessible, narrative overview of the relationship between the United States and what we might call the “long decolonization,” the slow, halting, sometimes-reversed, and still incomplete transition from a world dominated by empire in 1776 to the present world divided into supposedly independent nation states. Obviously, empires expanded during this period, particularly in Asia and Africa. At the same time there is a through line, beginning in English North America in the late 18th century, before moving to Haiti, and Central and South America at the dawn of the 19th, and then in the 20th century expanding across the Eastern Hemisphere, where formal empire went from being a ubiquitous form of government to a vanishingly rare one. The book— intended for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students (but hopefully of value both for the general reader and established scholars as well)— seeks both to highlight the significant role the United States has played in that transition and reveal how the hierarchies of empire remain embedded in the contemporary global order despite the apparent end of the imperial age.
Can you say a little more about the link between 1776 and decolonization? What makes the American Revolution more than a move for independence and something connected to decolonization more broadly?
While we don’t often think of it that way, the American Revolution was itself the first steps in a process of decolonization for what became the United States. While the Treaty of Paris of 1783 secured political independence for the colonies-turned-states, it did not remove them from the cultural and, especially, economic hierarchies of the British Empire. As scholars like Kariann Yokota and Sam Haynes have shown, Americans thus struggled to define what cultural practices and institutions—other than those inherited from Britain and Europe—defined and unified them as a people. They also had to reckon with a capital-poor, agricultural and export dependent economy that had long been structured around participation in trade with the rest of the British Empire. This economic vulnerability—indeed dependence—put severe limits in practice on the US’s political independence. Many of the political battles of the Early Republic (like those between Republicans and Federalists that gained renewed fame thanks to the musical Hamilton) were in fact debates over the best way to gain truer independence for the country. The furor around the Jay Treaty (a 1794 accommodation with Britain that Federalists believed was essential for restarting the American economy, and Republicans believed to be selling-out American independence) is a good example of this. In some ways, then, the US experience is typical of what we see for decolonizing countries later, whether in Latin America or in Africa and Asia. What is perhaps unique is the way the US ultimately gained a more substantive independence: through imperial expansion of its own.
Your title references "the ends of empire"--how do you define empire?
Drawing on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (and others, including Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton), the book focuses on the relationship of empire to political and economic hierarchies designed to extract wealth from “peripheries” for the benefit of elites in the “center.” Key as well to the book, and to the “ends of empire” in the title, is the distinction between “formal” empire—where the center asserts sovereignty over the periphery— and informal empire, where extractive hierarchies are constructed without formal claims of territory or authority. The latter, “empire-lite” as I sometimes call it, is particularly significant to the history of the United States in the 20th century and, for that matter, in the present.
Many historians consider there to be a distinction between the early modern empires and the "new imperialism" which began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Your book is looking at the world order "since 1776." So, how does it engage with this notion of a shift between earlier colonialism and later empires?
This evolution plays a role in the story I am trying to tell in the book to be sure. That story is in part one of how the US navigated its own decolonization, and that of its Western Hemispheric neighbors, to move from the periphery of the global economy to becoming a new center. Essential to that process was a US settler-colonial project in North America that mirrored British early modern imperial practices, with American settlers moving west in large numbers, violently displacing the Native Americans who lived on and owned the land. This expansion, while supported by the state, was as much a result of private initiative, and private violence, as well as initiative by the individual states (not dissimilar, in some ways, from the chartered sub-sovereign “companies” common to early modern imperialism), as anything directed by Washington, D.C. The federal government provided more support with time, particularly with the arrival of Andrew Jackson in the White House in the 1830s, but continental imperial expansion had a distinctly early modern character. It also was essential to the process whereby the US became a powerful manufacturing state by the end of the 19th century, at which point the country joins in the new imperialist fray, seeking sources of raw materials and markets for goods—all justified by claims that Americans were advancing the cause of humanity as a whole.
How would you describe the understanding of hierarchy in the United States let's say at or just after independence?
Not all that different than it was before independence! Indeed, the egalitarian, Enlightenment rhetoric of documents like the Declaration of Independence can easily distract us from the fact that most of the American revolutionaries were not rejecting hierarchy or empire per se. They were instead rejecting a particular hierarchy: that of the late 18th century British Empire and London’s growing insistence after the Seven Years War on the subordinate place of the American colonies within that structure. Colonial polemics regularly argued that European-Americans were just as good as their cousins in Britain, insisting that living in America did not make them “slaves” or “savages.” As the latter suggests, they understood the world in a very hierarchical fashion, and would continue to do so after the Revolution, seeing Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans at the bottom of a hierarchy that continued upward through the white colonists, sorted themselves along lines of gender and class. The Revolution certainly set in motion forces that would being to break down some of that top part of the hierarchy, among white males, eventually creating a novel—though highly circumscribed—mass democracy. Yet, that egalitarianism relied upon (and only came to exist because of) a hierarchy which placed people of color, whether Indigenous or enslaved, outside the embrace of “civilization.”
On the Bloomsbury page for the book, it says "This book shows how a hierarchy born of the age of empire and determined by race and civilization has shaped perceived rights to sovereignty." That seems to be making a pretty big case for the importance of origins and the conceptions of 1776 continuing to shape US foreign policy and global interactions up until the present. How significant do you think America's origins are in present-day decisions? And do you think the US is more or less origin-obsessed than other countries?
Well, that line (and that description has since been updated!) I think was meant less to contrast 1776 with the present and more to point to one of the key themes of the book. Namely, that the US was born of, and then participated in, and eventually became the power maintaining, a hierarchically organized political and economic “world-system” (to use Wallerstein’s term—one can also think along the lines of Beckert, who sees this more as a collection of linked networks of trade and power) that was born in Western Europe, expanded across the Atlantic, and eventually came to incorporate much of the world. So, the United States helped organize the world hierarchically—participating in the “enforced globalization” of empire, as A.G. Hopkins has described it— helping ensure that power and capital concentrated among the states of the global “North” or “First World.” As it became the most powerful state of that group, it increasingly took over the duties of maintaining that hierarchy, particularly after World War II. This interest in preserving the global hierarchy of wealth and power as constituted by imperialism continued to shape American policy even after the great wave of decolonization in the mid-20th century largely brought an end to the age of formal empire. This can be seen both in the Cold War effort to limit the spread of communism and the largely hostile way the US responded to the effort of the so-called “Third World” to reform the global economic order in the 1970s (through UN resolutions like the 1973 Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order).
Historians are always trying to watch for both continuity and change over time, how can both be seen in your book?
In lots of ways! But to mention one, as we discussed above, American conceptions of hierarchy were initially very much shaped by ideas about racial—i.e. white—superiority, and the idea of an expanding “civilized” world that was destined to extirpate the “savage.” These ideological justifications have evolved with time, with race, for example, fading somewhat in salience (without ever really going away of course). The exact content of what was “civilized” evolved considerably, with certain attributes moving in and out, losing and/or gaining importance. At the same time, the idea that the United States represents the “civilized world,” and as such has a responsibility to expand/protect that civilization has never really gone away, remaining critical to how US foreign policy—and the global hierarchy of wealth and power it protects—have been justified.
What did you learn while writing this book? Did anything surprise you?
I was not so much surprised by the following but instead had it sort of put in front of my face every day. What emerged to me over and over again as I wrote this book—which is primarily a synthesis of work by other historians—is how intellectually vibrant the historical discipline is, despite the ebbing of financial and institutional support for historical research. Historians are still managing to put out remarkable scholarship—work essential for a functioning democratic society, I think—despite dealing with declining job prospects, insecure employment, and increasing workloads. This sort of struggle against material constraints cannot go on forever, of course, and so this project daily put me in contact with an incredible treasure we are very much at risk of losing.
Was this a topic you wanted to write about for some time, or is there something about this book that makes it specially suited for right now?
The project emerged from a desire to place my previous book—which focused in detail on the US response to the aforementioned Third World challenge to the global hierarchy in the 1970s—in broader context. The critique that the Third World advanced in the UN at this time was very much one that relied on a longer narrative, often reaching back to the 18th century, so I wanted to tell that story more. That said, I think an exploration of the US relationship to empire seems increasingly well suited to current events, to put it mildly.
What do you hope this book will achieve in the world?
I certainly hope it will be useful in the classroom, providing a broad survey of the US relationship with empire, decolonization, and world order that is scholarly but also highly readable and assignable. I also would like to think that it would appeal to readers outside the academic context as well, providing a narrative introduction to a different way of thinking about the origins of the contemporary world than that which we tend to encounter in much public commentary. Along those lines, I’m hopeful that it offers some insight for those who feel that something has perhaps gone awry over the past few decades—both in the US and globally—exploring what those problems might be, why they have emerged, and whether they are, in fact, “new” problems at all.
What are you working on next?
I’m back to the late 1960s and ‘70s, hard at work on a history exploring the “Family Assistance Plan,” a program for a minimum guaranteed income for all Americans advanced by the Nixon administration. The plan—which nearly passed Congress and became law—offers an interesting window into significant transformations in US political and economic life and speaks directly (I think) to contemporary questions about inequality, “affordability,” and changing US political coalitions.
Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice
