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December 31, 2024 - January 6, 2025
It suggests that the United States is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that’s not true, and it’s never been true. From the day the treaty securing independence from Britain was ratified, right up to the present, it’s been a collection of states and territories. It’s been a partitioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying in each.
Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. population. Again taking 1940 as our year, slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in twelve was African American. If you lived in the United States on the eve of World War II, in other words, you were more likely to be colonized than black, by odds of three to two.
What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to U.S. history than is usually supposed. It hasn’t just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, it’s shaped the country itself—where the borders went, who has counted as “American.”
“Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an integral part of this country,” the publisher replied. “It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper.”
They justified this by claiming “obvious differences” between people in the overseas territories and those on the mainland.
Readers of the 1940 census were told that the United States’ largest minority was African American, that its largest cities were nearly all in the East, and that its center of population was Sullivan County, Indiana. Had overseas territories been factored in, as western territories had previously been, census readers would have seen a different picture. They would have seen a country whose largest minority was Asian, whose principal cities included Manila (about the size of Washington, D.C., or San Francisco), and whose center of population was in New Mexico.
“As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only ‘foreigners,’ such as the British, have an ‘empire.’ Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an ‘empire.’”
The United States might not have physically conquered Western Europe after World War II, but that didn’t stop the French from complaining of “coca-colonization.” Critics there felt swamped by U.S. commerce. Today, with the world’s business denominated in dollars and McDonald’s in more than a hundred countries, you can see they might have had a point.
Since 1945, U.S. armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.
Territorial empire is treated as an episode rather than a feature.
It’s just that when it comes time to zoom out and tell the story of the country as a whole, the territories tend to fall away.
Extraordinarily, this Philippine bill was the basis for the design of the familiar U.S. dollar, not the other way around.
By the Second World War, the territories made up nearly a fifth of the land area of the Greater United States.
Why did the United States, at the peak of its power, distance itself from colonial empire?
One part of the answer is that colonized subjects resisted, forcing empire into retreat.
Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.
Globalization is a fashionable word, and it’s easy to speak of it in vague terms—to talk of increasingly better technologies drawing a disparate world together. But those new technologies didn’t just crop up. Many were developed by the U.S. military in a short burst of time in the 1940s, with the goal of giving the United States a new relationship to territory.
They make up what I call (building on a concept from the historian and cartographer Bill Rankin) a “pointillist empire.” Today, that empire extends all over the planet.
This is, it’s worth emphasizing, unique. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British Empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn’t forget that Algeria was French. It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders. The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. 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. It even fights empires in its
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This self-image of the United States as a republic is consoling, but it’s also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies, in the occupation zones, and around the military bases.
The overseas parts of the United States have triggered wars, brought forth inventions, raised up presidents, and helped define what it means to be “American.” Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country—not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.
Washington thus insisted that settlement proceed in a “compact” manner, under elite control. That way, the frontier would be not a refuge for masterless men like Boone but the forefront of the march of civilization, advancing at a stately pace. To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory.
This meant that, from day one, the United States of America was more than just a union of states. It was an amalgam of states and territory.
Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them. Initially, territories were to be ruled by an appointed governor and three judges. Even after they gained legislatures, the governor retained the power to veto bills and dissolve the legislature. “In effect,” wrote James Monroe, who drafted the ordinance, it was “a colonial government similar to that which prevail’d in these States previous to the revolution.”
Rather than putting Louisiana through the normal Northwest Ordinance procedures, Jefferson added a new initial phase, military government, and sent the U.S. Army to keep the peace. By 1806, the Territory of Louisiana hosted the largest contingent of the army in the country.
Jefferson’s appointed governor to Louisiana Territory, like Arthur St. Clair, griped about the “mental darkness” of Louisiana’s inhabitants. Allowing them to vote, he believed, “would be a dangerous experiment.”
(the territorial system was “the most infamous system of colonial government that was ever seen on the face of the globe,” grumbled a delegate from Montana Territory),
But by doubling down on Europeanization, the Cherokees were calling the government’s bluff. They were “civilized” by every rule of white society. So shouldn’t their land claims be respected?
Without the representative government that Western Territory would have provided, Indian Country was, from the perspective of Washington, less a colony than a holding pen.
“No matter how little is left the red man, such heartless wretches will never rest content or let the Government rest until the Indians are made landless and homeless,” warned The Cherokee Advocate. “It is beyond the power of words to express the character of such men—dead to all human feeling and knowing no law.”
The logo-map silhouette accurately captured the borders of the United States for only three years. Because in 1857, not long after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified (1854), the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them.
The author of a much-used textbook estimated the annual value of “lost” human feces to be $50 million, which approached the size of the federal budget.
Sailors hauling guano could spend no more than fifteen minutes belowdecks with it. They would emerge gasping for breath, sometimes suffering nosebleeds or temporary blindness.
“Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article,” Fillmore said, that he regarded it as the “duty of the Government” to secure it at a “reasonable price.”
Pierce not only obliged, he went one better by backing the Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.”
At every other stage in U.S. history, territorial expansion had been contentious, debated in newspapers and fought over in Congress. Now, if the law passed, any random adventurer would be “at liberty to tramp about the Pacific, or any other ocean, and annex islands to the United States,” as one paper put it.
By the time the last claim was filed, in 1902, the United States’ oceanic empire encompassed ninety-four guano islands.
Peruvian guano lords, unable to recruit their compatriots, relied mainly on Chinese laborers, whom they lured onto eastbound ships with false promises or sometimes simply kidnapped—between 1847 and 1874, at least sixty-eight of these ships mutinied.
U.S. guano speculators gathered their workforce principally from Hawai‘i,
Without Haber–Bosch, the earth could sustain, at present rates of consumption, only about 2.4 billion people. That is well under half of today’s population.
In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
There has never been a president born in a U.S. territory, and though a few spent time in the territories, they were rarely there for long.
“The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,”
The frontier, Turner argued, had been the great regenerating force in U.S. life—the source of democracy, individualism, practicality, and freedom. And yet, Turner noted, according to the census, the frontier had disappeared as of 1890. The obvious danger was that the national character would die with it.
“I should welcome almost any war,” Roosevelt declared in 1897, “for I think this country needs one.”
“One might, up to that annus mirabilis, have travelled five thousand miles and read a hundred books and newspapers without ever having once come across it; ‘United States’ being almost invariably the term employed by the American for his own country.” After 1898, though, he noted that “the best speakers and writers,” feeling that the United States no longer captured the nature of their country, switched to America.
It’s true that the United States had been annexing territory for nearly a century. But there was something different about the post-1898 acquisitions. It wasn’t the land. It was the people who lived on it.
Looking back on the years before 1898, one sees a pattern. Though the United States had rapidly annexed new territory, it had rarely incorporated large nonwhite populations.
The Mexican War of 1846–48 had ended with U.S. forces occupying Mexico City. Some in Congress proposed taking all of Mexico. From a military perspective, that was entirely feasible. But South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of the nation’s prime defenders of slavery, objected. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico?”
This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.”
