Review | The United States’ imperial reach, from Mexico to the Philippines to the present day, dissected
- From Alaska to Puerto Rico to 94 guano islands, Daniel Immerwahr examines the acquisition of territories by the US
- In How to Hide an Empire, he argues that the US’ empire persists today in its overseas bases, dominance of trade and willingness to project force
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States , by Daniel Immerwahr, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 4/5 stars
Asians, in general, need little convincing that the United States is, if not an empire per se, at least imperial. So the title of How to Hide an Empire might be seen as an attempt at irony.
Daniel Immerwahr, admittedly, wasn’t writing for an Asian audience. His book is targeted squarely at Americans. It’s not that “empire”, as a concept, is entirely alien: conventional wisdom, to be fair, usually acknowledges that the US had at least a dalliance with empire, which was how the country ended up with the Philippines for just under 50 years.
Whether this was really empire, or just a phase thrust upon it before global decolonisation caught up, is a matter of (often disingenuous) debate.
But Immerwahr not only presses the case that the post-war US is also, via its overseas bases, its willingness to project force, and dominance of such things as industrial standards, global trade policy and the English language, still an empire – that, in short, empire is as empire does – but that the earlier, 19th-century Western expansion up to and including the acquisition of Alaska and Hawaii were also imperial.
