The transnational turn has emerged as the paramount conceptual framework of American historiography in recent decades. Transnational approaches have been embraced by many US historians in a bid both to repudiate American exceptionalism and to historicize the global production of the United States. America and the World joins this vigorous and ever-expanding field. The authors’ aims are explicit. Their study “seeks to contextualize and historicize the phenomenon of globalization and America's connections to the world” in a synthetic, transnational account (ix). Exploring these themes across a wide range of pivotal historical events, Peskin and Wehrle offer a multifaceted overview of the importance of global interactions and connections throughout American history.

The authors’ ambitions to this end are geographically and temporally expansive. Their study ranges across the globe through four periods that hinge upon the axes of Columbian contact in 1492, the American Revolution, the Spanish–American War, and World War II. The analytical framework of such an ambitious synthesis hinges upon globalization, defined as “the process whereby the entire world has become linked through numerous and enduring networks” (ix). Adopting such an approach allows the authors to track the shifting structures of the global interactions of the United States across time, charting its transformation from European periphery to agent of global integration via specific points of encounter and exchange. The result is a lucid account of the place of the United States in a deep history of globalization written much less for a scholarly audience than for the general reader.

At the heart of America and the World is a pair of nested arguments. The first is that “connecting America to the larger world made full globalization possible for the first time” (ix). Following this, the second posits that the history of the United States “was influenced by people, events, and trends that originated outside of America,” upon which it, in turn, had reciprocal influence (xii). In order to elaborate these arguments, the authors devote chapters to the interrelated themes of culture, commerce, and conflict for each period. The simultaneous aggregation and disaggregation of global connections therefore emerges as a key theme. Global connections are depicted as contested and contradictory throughout. Peskin and Wehrle detail the global interconnectedness, for example, of American progressive reformers (174–95), while simultaneously the US would retrench from an emerging internationalism after the death of Woodrow Wilson (147–52).

For a study of such expansive geographic and temporal scope, America and the World thus eschews a linear account of the global, rather pointing to its uneven effects throughout US history. The authors are alive to the importance of linking local, regional, and hemispheric connections to the national and global. Peskin and Wehrle give a convincing account of American economic development between 1763 and 1898 “as a way to free the United States from its dependence on Europe” (91). While many Americans dreamed of creating a self-sufficient continental market, westward expansion and the development of manufacturing “soon created greater national and global interdependence than self-sufficiency and independence” (99). Peskin and Wehrle connect this to multidirectional flows of migration, new commercial connections in the Indian Ocean, the emergence of markets in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan, and increased integration in the Atlantic economy.

The effect is to create a sense of the geographic imbrications of globalization in which US national development connected the Atlantic economy to distant regional markets. Yet, although at times it is clear that the authors believe the global and national to be mutually constitutive of one another, they rarely locate the US nation-building project within the context of comparative global processes. Their analysis of the US Civil War sidesteps parallel contemporary developments around the globe (124–26), while the relation of the Spanish–American War, and indeed empire more broadly, to globalization is left ambiguous (136–39). In part this stems from the scale of the study, but at times the authors’ approach overlooks the transformations of the global itself – transformations that would further historicize the relationship of the United States to globalization.

The above precis offers only a glimpse of the broad canvas that America and the World offers. Lucidly composed and insightfully synthesized, Peskin and Wehrle have produced an engaging overview that will introduce new themes to the general reader. Specialists will not find a striking reinterpretation of the global interactions of the United States. Nonetheless, they will be impressed by the chronological and thematic depth of a work that should serve well as a lively introduction for undergraduates studying transnational approaches to US history.