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Hopkins’ ambitious book seeks to integrate the history of the global American territorial empire with the scholarly literature on European imperialism.He argues that examining European and American imperial trajectories in tandem reveals far more commonalities than differences. He shows that the timing of the American seizure, governance, and relinquishment of a formal overseas empire was in step with the new imperialism of otherWestern powers. Such a chronology suggests that ‘supranational forces’, rather than coincidental alignments between national histories, are to account for the rise and dissolution ofWestern empires in the twentieth century (p. 492). Drawing on Marxist theory, Hopkins contends that transnational economic considerations, especially transformations in the extent and pace of globalization, determined the patterns of Western imperial history. He defines globalization generously, seeing it as a ‘process that also incorporates political, social, and cultural change’ alongside economic integration (p. 12). Inspired by Montesquieu’s observation that structure is relative to scale, he further argues that globalization was itself shaped by the political form of the dominant imperial regimes at any given period (p. 32). Thus, he portrays the history of imperialism and globalization as intermixed and dialectical, with empires powering globalization, and globalization supporting and then gradually destabilizing and reshaping Western empires. While he draws comparisons with continental European powers, Hopkins mostly employs the British empire to contextualize American imperialism. This is largely because of the British empire’s size, efficiency, and influence on North America and globalization (pp. 27, 36, and 47). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, globalization unfolded through the agency of military-fiscal states. These were expansionist, agrarian, dynastic polities that struggled to pay for extensive militaries in defence of their empires (p. 34). By expanding and developing overseas dominions, military-fiscal states initiated the first stirrings of global integration, or ‘proto-globalization’ (p. 7). That extension came with a cost, however; in what Hopkins calls the ‘great convergence’, wars of imperial expansion pushed Europe’s military-fiscal states toward a financial and imperial crisis at the end of the eighteenth century (p. 52). When the British parliament tried to raise revenue from the North American colonies to help manage its debt from the Seven Years’ War, it provoked the American Revolution. Likewise, France’s intervention in the conflict later precipitated a similar fiscal crisis in 1789. After winning formal independence, American revolutionaries faced the challenges of decolonization and nation-building (p. 19). They began by crafting the Constitution Journal of Global History (2018), 13, pp. 491–499 © Cambridge University Press 2018