American Empire is a recently published history of the United States from a global perspective, written by one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of ‘global scale’ history. In a narrative over three centuries, A.G. Hopkins interprets the United States’ history from the perspective of the new nation’s economic relationships with the Old World, the Caribbean and the Pacific. At the same time, it compares the formation of the American Empire with the trajectories of European empires. In this conference session, a panel of three historians will first lay out the book’s principal arguments before answering the questions: how does Hopkins’ global framing change the way that we tell the United States’ story? And in ways has US imperialism been like and unlike other imperialisms?