ABSTRACT
This essay reflects on the contributions to the symposium on American Empire. In discussing the previous commentaries, the ‘Response’ acknowledges some of the book’s limits and defends some of its interpretations. Its main purpose, however, is to endorse the various lines of enquiry the contributors have set out because they suggest ways of opening a subject that has long been confined by national borders and separated by regional specialisations. In doing so, the authors of the essays presented here have begun to assemble an agenda for writing a connected, global history to fit an age of globalisation.
