Dr. Sean T. Byrnes, a 2014 graduate of the doctoral program in U.S. history, recently published his second book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, with Bloomsbury Press. The four-century history examines the relationship between the United States, empire, and decolonization from the revolutionary war through the present.

Fellow Emory History Department alum Dr. Elizabeth Stice (Palm Beach Atlantic University) recently interviewed Byrnes about his new monograph. Find their conversation here: “Interview with Sean Byrnes, author of ‘The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776.’”

Byrnes’s research centers on U.S. politics, international relations, and global economic inequality. His first book, Disunited Nations: U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, was published by LSU Press in 2021. His writings have also appeared in Time, The New Republic, Dissent, Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, International Journal, and for the History News Network. He hosts conversations with authors on the New Books Network, serves on the Board of Editors for Federal History, and is a Section Editor for the newly released Routledge Online Encyclopedia of the Cold War.

Byrnes completed his doctoral training under the advisement of Dr. Fraser Harbutt.

Read an abstract of the Byrnes’s new book below and learn more via Bloomsbury Press.

Few topics are more important to understanding the origins of the modern world than decolonization, and few countries have played a more important role in that history than the United States.In this book, Sean T. Byrnes provides a definitive, single-volume account of the relationship between the United States, decolonization, and world order.

Through a lively narrative history that ranges across four centuries, Byrnes reveals how the process of ending and replacing empires defined the American relationship to the world from the colonial era to the present. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution, hierarchies born of the imperial age—and defined by ideas about race, capitalism, and civilization—fundamentally shaped American views of who was entitled to sovereignty and when. Therefore, far from building a world of “Westphalian” sovereign equality, the United States instead manipulated, expanded, and then attempted to dominate globe spanning structures of wealth and power that served the few at the expense of the many.

From early interactions with Native Americans and a decolonizing Latin America, to efforts to bolster global hierarchies after the World Wars and influence the postcolonial “Third World”, The United States and the Ends of Empire, tells the story of a US that may not always have embraced formal empire but nevertheless still sought to organize the world in imperial ways. In the process, it reveals how Americans helped build today’s modern, globalized world—and the unequal hierarchies of wealth and power that define it.