Don’t call them colonies

Where other nations disbanded their empires following the second world war, America’s underwent transubstantiation, from something solid to something more ethereal. It became a shorthand, connoting an amorphous global entity and its quasi-imperial depredations: commercial infiltration, cultural indoctrination, fomenting coups, waging war. Suitably, this construct (Coca-Cola and cruise missiles) acquired a ‘logo’, writes Daniel Immerwahr — the silhouette of the continental United States sitting athwart the northern half of the Western hemisphere, as iconic as Nike’s swoosh; on the map at least, minding its own business.

Yet what about America’s actual extraterritorial holdings — slighted not only in the concept of US imperium but conventional accounts of American history? In How to Hide an Empire, Immerwahr chronicles the history of these ‘large colonies and pinprick islands’. The result is a whimsical-serious work: a deft disquisition on America, and America in the world, with a raconteur’s touch and keen sense of the absurd.

US empire-building was nothing if not streamlined. The Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam — a vestigial rump of Spain’s once-sprawling empire — were loot from the 1898 Spanish-American war, with Hawaii, American Samoa and Wake Island claimed shortly thereafter. And much of this insta-empire was, in Immerwahr’s telling, the work of one man of manifest destiny: Theodore Roosevelt, the then-assistant secretary of the Navy who, in a fit of insubordination and agency, unilaterally engineered mobilisation against Spain — forcing a reluctant President McKinley’s hand — and then stormed the Spaniards in the field with his Rough Riders.

The acquisitions recast national consciousness. References to ‘America’, uncoupled from ‘the United States’, entered discourse; there was a boomlet in maps of ‘the Greater United States’. But they were also an aberration. Imperialism is complicit in America’s original sins: purloining land from Native Americans; the chatteldom of African Americans; and much of the Western US having been appropriated from Mexico.