Well, people have argued a great deal about what the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated actually meant, legally speaking. In Puerto Rico, where I am from, this issue is positively explosive, since the island was one of those places designated as an unincorporated territory after the Spanish-American War. In fact, I would argue that it remains an unincorporated territory, but those are fighting words on the island—let’s not get into it. Where territorial status is concerned, the basic issue has traditionally been understood to be: “Does the Constitution follow the flag?” Which is to say, if a place belongs to the US, does the Constitution apply there automatically—all the rights and protections it guarantees, etc.? The traditional story has gone like this: the Insular Cases, by making the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories, answered this question in the negative. No, just because we hoist the flag does not mean that all these dark people are suddenly entitled to equal protection, jury trials, and all that other good stuff. That stuff is only for the incorporated territories—as they make their way to statehood. With the unincorporated ones, the Constitution, it has been said, “doesn’t apply.” This sort of thing gets pretty hairy as a legal argument, and I do not want to get bogged down in a lot of technical stuff. Suffice it to say that figuring out what constitutional protections apply to what offshore islands has been—and remains!—a very difficult and important legal problem for the United States. As it happens, my own view is that the most important issue at stake in the incorporated/unincorporated distinction is, in fact, the issue of permanence. I’ve argued for some years that the thing that made everyone most nervous about the new insular possessions at the end of the nineteenth century was the idea that the US would be stuck with them forever. You have to remember that the Civil War was still very fresh in people’s minds in that period. And what was the issue there? It was Lincoln’s central claim that he could not accept the secession of the southern states—not even if he wanted to. He asserted that the Constitution did not permit a withdrawal of a part of the union. This was a situation where constitutional interpretation was performed in blood. I believe that the United States’ imperial exuberance was haunted by this issue: What would happen if, later, there was a need to alienate these places—to get rid of them? Would this trigger a constitutional crisis? At its heart, the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories was a distinction between permanence and fungibility. The insular cases in effect smuggled a theory of secession into American law.