In February 2003, Al Jazeera broadcast an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, then George W. Bush’s secretary of defense. “Would it worry you,” the interviewer asked him, “if you go by force into Iraq that this might create the impression that the United States is becoming an imperial, colonial power?” Rumsfeld swatted away the question. “I’m sure that some people would say that,” he responded, “but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power.… That’s just not what the United States does. We never have and we never will.” In March, the United States invaded Iraq. By April, it was operating a government of occupation. By May, it had effectively placed a proconsul in charge of the country.



In the early years of the Iraq war, the idea of the United States as an imperial power was, for a moment, a subject of serious debate. Longstanding left-wing critics of empire like Noam Chomsky were now joined by conservative hawks such as Niall Ferguson in agreeing that the United States was an empire, though they differed deeply on whether this was a good thing. But both Rumsfeld and the journalist questioning him exhibited a kind of historical amnesia. Rumsfeld denies the possibility that the United States could ever be an empire; the journalist asks if it is in the process of becoming one. But what if it had been all along?

HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF THE GREATER UNITED STATES by Daniel Immerwahr Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pp., $30.00

That is the question Daniel Immerwahr pursues in How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. “One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire,” he observes, “is how persistently ignored it has been.” In order to address this historical amnesia, we must, he argues, consider the United States not as it is typically represented on the map—as the mainland United States with corners in Washington state, Maine, Florida, and Southern California—but as a collection of all of the territories in which the United States has exercised sovereignty. This “Greater United States” includes not only Puerto Rico, whose colonial status is at least widely recognized if not deeply considered, but also other territories ranging from rocks covered in bird excrement to the approximately 800 military bases that the United States still operates around the world. (Britain and France have 13 bases combined; Russia has nine.)

The book is written in 22 brisk chapters, full of lively characters, dollops of humor, and surprising facts. (Did you know that the U.S. greenback, for example, is modeled on the Philippine colonial currency, and not the other way around?) It entertains and means to do so. But its purpose is quite serious: to shift the way that people think about American history. Americans tend to see their country as a nation-state, not as an imperial power. As such, its global reach and influence are often invisible to its own citizens. So are the complex reactions that its actions around the world produce. Without an understanding of empire, Americans may see events elsewhere—a caravan of Central American migrants heading through Mexico, let’s say—as foreign threats, rather than as a consequence of the global distribution of power and violence, as something shaped by the history and politics of the United States.

Histories of U.S. empire often start in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, out of which the United States took control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. But nearly since its founding, the United States had been in the process of expanding and debating how it would expand from 13 Eastern states across the continent. Early national elites were divided on how to apportion land for Native Americans and maintain peace between them and European settlers. Daniel Boone, for years taught to schoolchildren as a “pioneer,” was in his own time a criminal, who, by taking white settlers westward into Native American lands, risked involving the U.S. government in conflict. Thomas Jefferson’s original idea for the Louisiana Purchase was that it would primarily provide access to southern ports, and that much of the remaining land would be kept for Native Americans, along with free black people, Catholics, and others he judged unfit for citizenship.