Nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. Was that a lot? Not compared with the world-girdling British Empire, which boasted at the time a population of more than four hundred million (the great bulk of whom lived in India). But the United States’ empire was nonetheless sizable. Measured by population, it was, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the fifth largest in the world. 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
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