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.

Whether by reevaluating previously underappreciated factors or by uncovering new source material, historical scholarship occasionally makes immediate and simultaneous interventions in both academic and public-facing conversations.1 Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is one such work, and actually accomplishes these two tasks admirably. In the last two decades, scholars have investigated African American ownership of real property in land and homes, as well as the ways that governmental and private actors, policies, and practices have impaired Black people's ability to acquire and accumulate wealth in this country.2 This body of scholarship, alongside the work of public intellectuals, has served to jumpstart discussion around the issue of reparations.3 Prior to the release of Kahrl's illustrious book, however, no one had identified property taxes as lying at the very center of race-based structural inequality.4

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.

Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book that urges us to remember the property taxes. The Black Tax tells us, “The property tax is the most local of all taxes” (5). More than that, though, the property tax is the most literal way that state policy hits close to home. Kahrl thus studies local taxation to show how white people wielded state power to threaten Black Americans’ tenuous grip on property ownership—and generate handsome profits along the way. The ends—dispossession of Black-owned property and unfair tax burdens—will surprise few readers. But the means—tax-buying, fractional assessments, and other bureaucratic technicalities—will shock, frustrate, and anger most. This is the force of The Black Tax: Kahrl reminds us that, for Black people as with other racialized minorities, the barriers to homeownership do not end when the sale closes.

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?

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.

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.