The US might not have physically conquered western Europe after the second world war, but that didn’t stop the French from complaining of “coca-colonisation”. “It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper.”.

Race has not only shaped lives, but also the country itself – where the borders went, who has counted as “American”. Last modified on Mon 4 Mar 2019 12.00 GMT. From this larger war, How to Hide an Empire goes through the interesting unknown histories of some smaller possessions, mostly rocky dry islets for guano, a late 19th-century chemical needed for agriculture. The land, in general, went from wilderness to the Indian Territory, to a pre-state territory and finally into statehood. The years since the second world war have brought the US military to country after country.

After racism as a theme, the main idea of the book, a hidden empire, is obvious, and the answer is also obvious.

'Wry, readable and often astonishing... A provocative and absorbing history of the United States' New York TimesThe United States denies having dreams of empire.We know America has spread its money, language and culture across the world, but we still think of it as a contained territory, framed by Canada above, Mexico below, and oceans either side. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly 19 million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines.

The result was profound confusion.

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The first is simply to ignore it: these histories are seldom if ever mentioned in the mainstream media or even in alternate media; the education system presents its histories in terms of defining dates and glorified names and supposed victories. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. Yet today, the US continues to hold overseas territory.

They are then inculcated with the dominant myth of their needing enlightenment or civilization or in most early cases Christianity. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after US colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). They had been trying to follow the war on their maps. It is “an alibi instead of an explanation”.

This is the shape of power today.”. We know America has spread its money, language and culture across the world, but we still think of it as a contained territory, framed by Canada above, Mexico below, and oceans either side. Sixteen million Filipinos – US nationals who saluted the stars and stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief – fell under a foreign power. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British empire. The national maps they used rarely showed the territories.

The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire.

“We believe this statement is not true,” they wrote. The girls forwarded the correspondence to the Department of the Interior and asked for adjudication. Looking beyond the logo map, however, could be hard for mainlanders. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.

We don’t know, but it’s not hard to guess. How, they wondered, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been an attack on the US if Hawaii was foreign? Although it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black.



The book is a brilliant exposition of the geopolitical impact of modern science and technology on the 'logistics' of empire, specifically a contrast between that of the United States BEFORE and AFTER World War II. The maps of the country that most people had in their heads didn’t include places such as the Philippines.

This is the story of the United States outside the United States – from nineteenth-century conquests like Alaska and Puerto Rico to the catalogue of islands, archipelagos and military bases dotted around the globe. “Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes and drones – these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. Then there are the military interventions. Other territories, although they were not granted independence, received new statuses. But that is not true, and it has never been true. How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr will be published by Bodley Head on 28 February.

But how much can most people say about the colonies themselves? Not so in the Philippines. At some point he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines. Buy it at guardianbookshop.com.

This is, it is worth emphasising, unique.

Hawaii and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there. Its both enlightening and easy to read and digest. The Palestine Chronicle is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to educate the general public by providing a forum that strives to highlight issues of relevance to human rights, national struggles, freedom and democracy in the form of daily news, commentary, features, book reviews, photos, art, and more.

If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawaii was being rounded up to “American”. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union.


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