It must have been eight years ago when I read Paul Kramer's article for the first time. Back then, I had just finished my PhD and was developing a new research project thematically located at the intersection of medical, imperial, and global history. One of the particularities of the German academic path when compared to the Anglo-American context is the expectation to embark on a completely different line of inquiry after defending your doctoral dissertation. Postdoctoral researchers venture into an entirely new topic, often take on a new century, and, for good measure, turn to another region of the world. At a time when I was surfacing from a thesis on German post-1945 international history, reading “Power and Connection” was tremendously helpful and instructive in guiding my first steps into the vast terrain of nineteenth-century imperial and colonial history. While its insights into the imperial dimension of U.S. history were fascinating, it was more so its framing of the American case, as a modern empire among others, that led me to the article. Ultimately, this interest evolved into my current project on the policies on epidemics in the nineteenth-century British and American empires. This framing provides the angle for my re-reading of “Power and Connection.” From an imperial historian's perspective, particularly of British imperial history and comparative empire studies, I explore here some of the links between the broader discipline and Kramer's essay up to 2011 when it was published and thereafter.

In the 1907 book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, the American philosopher and psychologist William James recalled a heated argument among companions during a camping trip. The quarrel was not about one of the heavy metaphysical topics that James addressed in his lectures, but instead a much more mundane matter: a squirrel. Imagine a squirrel clinging to one side of a tree trunk, while a man stands on the other side of the tree. The man attempts to catch a glimpse of the squirrel by moving around the tree, but the squirrel darts around just as quickly, evading observation, until both creatures circle the tree completely and end up where they started. James's friends were at loggerheads over the question: “Does the man go round the squirrel or not?”1

I am delighted to have an opportunity to reflect on Paul Kramer's rich and highly influential “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World.” Since its publication in 2011, “Power and Connection” has been a cornerstone of my graduate U.S. in the World classes and has been invoked in every graduate qualifying exam. The essay has had a direct and indirect influence on the wave of innovative scholarship that has been produced in the past decade. I first want to note some of the essay's important interventions. Then, rather than attempting to extend or update Kramer's extensive historiographical review, I want to think with “Power and Connection” by taking up two of Kramer's suggestions and discussions. First, I take up his suggestion to think about imperial power through a Gramscian frame of domination and consent, arguing that the concept of hegemonic struggle is critical for thinking about power within empires and shifts in global imperial formations. Second, I engage Kramer's discussion of the relationship between imperial and transnational histories, arguing that scholars need to consider transnationalism as a highly specific and contingent political formation, as well as an analytic category and sometimes actors' category.

In 2011, Paul Kramer published a review essay titled “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the US in the World.” Thick with conceptual language and historiographical references, the piece is clearly pointed toward a professional audience. Yet beneath its heavy academic garb lay an urgent practical matter. Americanists, Kramer contended, needed to get outside of their innocent nationalistic space and take up the burden of the “imperial” category. And they needed to do so consistently – not conveniently, as a political cry against the declining virtue of the republic.

Published more than a decade ago, Paul Kramer's “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World” is arguably the most important intervention in the field of U.S. and the World history. This roundtable affirms its standing among modern American historians. Yet the essay's exact influence is hard to characterize. Classic state-of-the-field essays—like Charles Maier's broadside against U.S. diplomatic history or Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's invocation of a long civil rights movement—spurred field-wide reckonings. Kramer's impact was subtler. Recently, Daniel Bessner and Fredrik Logevall cited the essay to say that the field should revisit U.S. policy making, using “Power and Connection” as a foil to discuss the limits of the international and transnational turns. However, boosters of those turns—Erez Manela and Naoko Shibusawa, among others—ignore “Power and Connection,” even as they advance claims about globalization and imperialism that touch on the article's arguments. This impasse is as fascinating—as worthy of exposition—as Kramer’s original claims, partly because it invites us to historicize the decade just past. Rather than handling the essay with antiquarian gloves, I’d like to dig into this dirt to consider three questions: What did “Power and Connection” displace? What did it do? And how does the essay resonate in our present?

Published in 2011, Paul Kramer's “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” has become something of a classic text in the historiography of the United States. Twelve years and nearly 400 citations after its publication, historians of the United States who specialize in everything from empire proper to foreign relations to labor and capitalism have looked to this article for methodological grounding, direction, and insight. Countless historians across many subfields have found their work imprinted by Kramer's call for a more systemic and deliberate engagement with the imperial, beyond the “superficial and invocatory” threads of previous generations, such as (though hardly exclusively) those found in the New Left and cultural studies traditions (1348).

It is an honor and pleasure to have my essay discussed by such accomplished and thoughtful colleagues, from whom I continue to learn so much. In setting out to respond to their reflections, I would like to begin by stressing my original essay's tremendous debt to the work of scholars, intellectuals, and political actors who have approached histories of U.S. power in the world from a critical stance, as the piece's long footnotes—about which I have received much good-natured ribbing—were crafted to highlight. Despite occasional efforts to deny or minimize this rich, complicated intellectual history, there is a vibrant, long-standing conversation here—a conversation that is, in fact, my essay's main subject and theme, and without which it simply could not exist.