Speaker - Tony Hopkins

Challenging conventional accounts of the place of the United States in the international order during the last three centuries, Tony Hopkins will argue that the United States was part of a British imperial order throughout this period. After 1898, it ruled a now forgotten empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. It brought formal colonial control to an end after 1945, when other Western powers also abandoned their empires. The conditions sustaining territorial empires had changed irrevocably. Thereafter, the United States was not an empire but an aspiring hegemon.

Tony Hopkins held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and was a stalwart member of British Studies. He is now Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has written extensively on African history, British imperial history, and globalization. He has recently published American Empire: A Global History (2018).