How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr surveys the history of the United States’ acquisition and control of territory, from Daniel Boone to Donald Rumsfeld. His main contention is that most people conceive of the United States as the contiguous lower forty-eight states to the exclusion of other places that have been under various kinds of formal control such as Puerto Rico, Guam, occupied Okinawa, and the U.S. military base at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. While scholars have studied overseas holdings, typical “mainlanders’” understanding of the United States and history textbooks ought to be expanded to include these territories as a central part of the story. The book divides the history of the U.S. Empire into three acts. First was the conquest of Indian country and the consolidation of the territories that would become the mainland United States. Next came the acquisition of overseas territories beginning in the nineteenth century with small guano islands and culminating in the turn-of-the-century annexation of Spain's former colonies and other islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The third phase came after World War II, when the United States shifted from attempting to hold large colonies to a new interest in tiny spots of overseas territory. Chemical and industrial advances and other “empire-killing technologies” left the United States less dependent on natural resources and better able to move goods and people around the globe using only small, scattered bases (p. 279). This new “pointillist empire,” Immerwahr holds, meant that in the postwar decades “the U.S. Empire had visibly diminished,” in the sense that it formally held much less territory than it once had (p. 262).