The American School of Empire

The American School of Empire explores the central role that the idea of empire played in the foundation of the United States in its first fifty years. This book will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience including scholars and graduate students of political and cultural history, literature, and art.

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Early American artists and political thinkers wrestled with the challenges of forming a cohesive, if not coherent, culture and political structure to organize the young republic and its diverse peoples. The American School of Empire shows how this American idea of empire emerged through a dialogue with British forms of empire, becoming foundational to how the US organized its government and providing early Americans with the framework for thinking about the relations between states and the disparate peoples and cultures that defined them. Edward Larkin places special emphasis on the forms of the novel and history painting, which were crucial vehicles for the articulation of the American vision of empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.