This week I’m going to switch subfields: instead of writing about the development of the new history of capitalism as a particular line of scholarly inquiry, I’m going to catch up with an academic controversy from about—sheesh—half a year ago. In November of last year, the journal Diplomatic History published a historiographical essay by Paul Kramer titled “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” a piece that identified widespread conceptual and terminological errors in the field but focused its critique on the work of one historian, Daniel Immerwahr. Immerwahr had given the 2016 Stuart Bernath Lecture entitled “The Read more