Designs on Empire

Julian Go, author of Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present:
What did America think of “empire” before it constructed its own overseas empire? By illuminating the often ambivalent views held by Americans of European imperialism in the Reconstruction era, this book offers a novel and welcome contribution to America’s fraught relationship with imperialism.

Katherine Unterman, author of Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives Across Borders:
Unlike any other book on the matter, Designs on Empire takes a deep dive into American elites’ rhetoric about European empires. Priest forcefully challenges the exceptionalist view that the United States was both nonimperial and uninvolved in European affairs prior to the 1890s and exposes the many ways that the United States was tied up in European power politics throughout the nineteenth century.