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

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019) by American historian Daniel Immerwahr is the history of the United States seen through the lens of the American Empire. By focusing on American territories outside the North American mainland—the Greater United States—Immerwahr presents many well-known historic events in new and surprising ways and reframes the perception of American history in general. The book traces the trajectory from the 19th-century frontier drive westward across the North American continent toward becoming a formal empire after the Spanish-American War (1898), and an even more powerful informal empire after World War II. How to Hide an Empire combines several approaches to history—the traditional focus on leaders, the social history of ordinary people, the borderland history of marginalized groups, and even pop culture—to weave a unified narrative about the development and transformation of the American Empire.

The book was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; this guide uses the Kindle edition.

Content Warning: This book deals with topics such as war, violence, racism, and genocide. It contains depictions of outdated and offensive language and racist slurs and attitudes, and this guide obscures the quoted use of the n-word.

Summary

How to Hide an Empire comprises two parts, along with an introduction and a conclusion. Each part follows chronological developments, but the chapters are also organized thematically. The first part, “The Colonial Empire,” discusses US history from colonial America to World War II. The second part, “The Pointillist Empire,” examines American history from 1945 until the present. World War II acts as an important watershed in America’s transformation from a formal empire, with territories like the Philippines, to an informal empire based on points around the world, many of which are its estimated 800 military bases. Significantly, some of the points are the small uninhabited islands that were used to extract nitrogen-rich seabird guano for fertilizer in the 19th century: They transformed into airplane landing strips or radio transmission points in the 20th.

Immerwahr views the history of the United States as a story “told in three acts” (16). Despite many differences, these three acts occur along the same fundamental trajectory. The first act is America’s 19th-century westward expansion underpinned by the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Americans and the extension of the country’s borders on the mainland. The second act involves formal colonial-style territorial expansion outside the mainland: Alaska (1867), Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines (1898) acquired from Spain, as well as Hawaii, American Samoa, Wake Island, and the Virgin Islands. The final part of this development is the US shedding its formal colonies after World War II and replacing them with the control of many points around the world—from uninhabited guano islands to military bases in urban centers of foreign countries.

As a result, the US was able to use “empire-killing technologies” (264), replacing formal colonization with 20th-century globalization. By pursuing this trajectory, American history looks quite different. For instance, the Philippine-American War, including insurgency, was the second-longest war in US history after Afghanistan. Similarly, Americans typically envision Pearl Harbor when they recall World War II on their territory, yet it was the Philippines where “by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil” (212) occurred.

The book examines darker episodes in US history within the framework of the empire: coercive, race-based testing of chemical weapons in the US Army, waterboarding torture that seems to have started in the Philippines in the early 20th century, Japanese concentration camps during World War II, and America’s accidents involving nuclear weapons. At the same time, the author balances these events by using humor and more whimsical episodes, such as Herbert Hoover’s quest for the standardization of the screw thread or the real-life people who may have inspired the characters in Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

It was through pop culture, industrial standardization, logistics, and the domination of the English language that the refurbished US Empire achieved global hegemony in the 20th century. Of course, this hegemony by an informal, neocolonial empire was underpinned by the hundreds of military bases hosted in foreign countries—in some cases, against the will of the locals. The author explores the paradoxical relationship between these military facilities as economic drivers for these foreign countries and a source of discord at the same time. Despite the economic benefits, he asserts that the relationship is unequal between the hegemon and the vassal.

Immerwahr also investigates the persistent self-perception of the US as a republic. There are historic exceptions to this rule, such as President Teddy Roosevelt’s unabashed colonialism. However, in many cases, Americans shied away from using the term “colony,” which is why they preferred the euphemism “territory.” In some cases, the nebulous legal status of such territories allowed for some laws to apply but not others, as was the case with Puerto Rico. The American focus on the mainland as the “true” America—the logo map—rather than the Greater United States in its entirety also translated into ignorance or confusion: mistaking Puerto Rico for Costa Rica or liberating the Philippines from the Japanese occupation during World War II without recognizing that this was American territory. In many cases, there was a racial component for this perception, as the territories were largely populated by those who were not of European descent. By combining different types of history, reexamining well-established concepts and events, and giving a voice to those who were once ignored, the author offers a different perspective on US history.