How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.

“pointillist empire.”

His fears were confirmed in the 1790s, when backcountry men in Pennsylvania refused to pay a federal tax on alcohol and threatened armed secession. It was the Boston Tea Party all over again, this time with whiskey.

This was, in other words, a different kind of expansion, reminiscent of the failed vision for Indian Country. Not taking land and flooding it with settlers, but conquering subject populations and ruling them.

The whirlwind also took the form of General Jacob Smith. He had fought the Lakota at Wounded Knee and adopted a similarly unyielding approach to Filipinos.

For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).

Manuel Quezon vibrated with anger. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror,” he exclaimed. “How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”

Washington seemed to him to be “crowded with little Neros, each fiddling away blithely” while the empire burned.

When Japanese politicians failed to write a constitution to MacArthur’s satisfaction, he had one drafted, in English, in nine days. “We the Japanese people,” it starts, and it goes on to affirm individuals’ rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Starting with his second imprisonment, he and his supporters had become convinced that—in a horrifying recapitulation of all the medical experiments run on Puerto Ricans—the government was using cutting-edge technology to kill him.

“I would annex the planets if I could,” the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes once mused. “I often think of that.”