Why would an imperial nation need a strong navy?

The nation—more precisely, the nation-state—is nothing if not a system of boundaries. in this country, it arose in the middle of the 19th century, powered by the revolutionary advance of industrial capitalism as it moved across europe and the atlantic and on to american soil. like its contemporaries around the world—bismarck’s prussia, say, or qing china—the ascending american nation-state never really had precise boundaries and it faced a vast array of local and foreign challenges to its authority. likewise, its expansion never seemed to end. what was first an open-ended settler confederation on the imperial fringe became an enclosed nation-state, which then transformed into an unbounded empire.

the process through which the american nation-state emerged and then grew into an empire is the subject of a nation without borders, a compendious new work on america’s 19th century by new york university historian steven hahn. the third entry in the penguin history of the united states, a nation without borders takes us from the jacksonian dawn of american “democracy” to the first world war.