Henry James produced a large body of work during dramatic changes in Euro-American imperialism. Much of his work deals centrally with characters, situations and settings in which these changes have immediate relevance. As a cosmopolitan author who wrote centrally about the international theme, was born and raised primarily in the United States, lived most of his adult life in Europe, and in 1915 gave up his US citizenship to become a naturalized British subject, James was profoundly influenced by modern transnationalism. Until recently, however, scholars have not devoted central attention to his work in the context of the several imperial nations competing for power between the Civil War and World War I. Of course, many scholars have commented on James’s references to important events in modern imperial history, but most focus on how he incorporated contemporary news into his fiction, rather than on James’s political views of such events.

Throughout the nineteenth century British and US nationalisms often invoked imperial Rome to justify their expansionist ventures. Neoclassical architecture flourished in both nations, especially in the design of state buildings and monuments. Much as the Roman Empire suggested ancient glory and the success of a well-ordered, albeit brutal, state, it was also a reminder of failure. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was read in Victorian and nineteenth-century US schools, and his account of planning this great, multivolume work during a tour of Italy in 1764, while ‘musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol’, was often imitated by artists and intellectuals wishing to understand the message of ancient Rome’s fall.