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

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Particularly, the first half to two thirds of the book is very engrossing - the details of the events the author is describing are truly horrific and I was frankly appalled that I didn’t know any of it. Immerwahr is undoubtedly keen to expose the brutal impact on the oft-forgotten territories, to tell the real stories of the people affected, but he also refers to the developments made possible by empire and war. No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides.

Immerwahr goes on and on with the atrocious accounts of grave crimes against humanity that occurred in all of these territories: martial law in Hawaii where executions occurred regularly, Japanese interment camps in Alaska with zero oversight. Territorial legislators in Missouri wore black armbands in Boone’s honor, but the eastern papers took well over a month to even acknowledge his death, which they generally did with short notices. The thirteen colonies that would make up the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776.This cession came not two months before the United States formally received its independence when Britain ratified the Treaty of Paris. It is very clear and makes connections to the developments of science, technology and communications that fundamentally changed both the nature of war while also changing the nature of ‘empire’ building throughout the twentieth century. When it came to the nationalists of the colonized world, there is no evidence that Wilson even read their many petitions. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to challenge their world view and gain an understanding of what modern empire looks like and for all students of Geography is a useful book for adding context, developing analysis and quotable case studies.

The other image that is immediately associated with the US, something that is also immediately recognisable across the globe, is the ‘logo map’ of the nation. Rather than jumping between topics and concepts, How to Hide an Empire allows any student reader to gain the best overview and to see the changing face of geopolitics with its ebbs and flows. In contrast, people in Puerto Rico have been citizens since 1917 (just in time to be drafted into World War I).Professor Daniel Immerwahr has written a book that seeks to address Americans’ critical lack of knowledge of the country’s overseas territories and military installations, a lack is not surprising since many college students seem severely lacking in knowledge of their own home states, much less distant places. Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Example: Before you even crack the spine, you can tell you’re getting a work in the vein of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, because the subtitle is A History of the Greater United States, not The History of the Greater United States, even though it is the only history of the territories of the United States non-scholars are going to scoop up this summer.

One difficulty with the book is its major focus on the Puerto Rico, the territory about which Americans probably know the most, at the expense of the Pacific territories such as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, of which many are probably unaware. This proposal had a majority of votes behind it— the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable. In Chapter 21, ‘Baselandia’, Immerwahr gives us a geographical and historical insight into where modern US foreign policy is born and develops and provides great contemporary references for those studying human geography. Oh, and Empire is one of the only books of recent vintage that my dad and I picked up independently and simultaneously, though he likely came to it a Mr.You learn how locals were overtly kept out of social clubs and kept from business and governing through less obvious means and how they were victims of a war between their American and later Japanese occupiers. The growth and decline of the British Empire, and the Roman Empire, are well documented but the American Empire less so. The local population, estimated to be at 300,000 at the time of the arrival of Captain Cook in the late 18tth century, dropped to about 40,000 by the end of the 19th. A really interesting read, exceedingly well written, with a lot of terrific human stories and some cracking jokes, even.