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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Men like Herbert Hoover standardized the mainland. Colonial rulers then imposed those standards on the territories. But both processes stopped at the border. Within the Greater United States, one way of doing things prevailed. Foreign countries had their own nursing practices and screw thread angles. In Hoover’s day, it was hard to imagine changing that. Getting brick manufacturers in one country to agree had been difficult enough. Who was going to get French brickmakers into agreement with Japanese ones? The difficulty of standardizing across jurisdictions explains why countries through the first half of the twentieth century had largely distinct material cultures. The First World War drove this point home. The United States sent its troops to Europe. They found, on arriving, that Europeans used different weapons, had a different sizing system for uniforms, and measured distance differently.

Standards clashed again in the Second World War. This time the problem was even worse. This time the United States wasn’t sending only men and money to Europe. It was supplying a relentless torrent of stuff to theaters all over the world.

It was as if the things themselves spoke different languages. “We can’t borrow parts from the British,” one U.S. mechanic complained. “We can’t even steal them. They don’t fit.”

In the First World War, which was still fought with horses, industrial incompatibilities among allies had been inconvenient. Now, in a war of jeeps and bombers, they were crippling.

Yet deferring to European standards only made sense if Europe was the heart of the Allied war economy, and Europe soon lost its centrality. The fall of France and bombing of Britain took European factories off-line. At the same time, U.S. manufacturing kicked into high gear. By the war’s end, the United States had produced 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of small ammunition. The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A.

All this turned the United States into the undisputed standard-setter for the Allies. The war had united their economies, but Washington set the terms of the union.

from 1942 to 1944, after Douglas MacArthur abandoned the Philippines but before the United States could fully provision his troops via the mainland. MacArthur still relied on the United States for ships and weapons, but for high-volume, low-value items such as food and clothing, Australia became the source. At peak, some 15 percent of Australia’s national income came from meeting MacArthur’s procurement orders.

The entire Australian shoe industry was similarly overturned as shoemakers retooled to make shoes in U.S. sizes rather than British ones. With sixty thousand pairs of shoes ordered a month for army use, they couldn’t afford not to.

Quite a lot of things, in fact, would have to be remade to a metaphorical 60-degree angle. The war had stripped economies down, and now they sought to rebuild themselves by tapping into a world market. Yet that market was dominated by the United States, which accounted for an astonishing 60 percent of the industrialized world’s economic production in 1946.

The octagonal stop sign came from Michigan, born when a Detroit police sergeant clipped the corners off a square sign to give it a more distinctive shape. But the early signs were yellow, not red. The first national agreement of U.S. state highway professionals rejected the use of red on any sign, since it was hard to see at night. So the U.S. stop sign, adopted as an international standard in 1953, was yellow. Yet just a year later, in 1954, the United States changed its mind about the yellow. Experts thought that red better signified danger, and new developments in industrial chemistry allowed for durable, reflective red finishes. So, to what I can only imagine was the apoplectic fury of traffic engineers worldwide, the United States abandoned the global standard—its own standard, designed in Michigan and foisted on the world—and began to replace its yellow signs with red ones. This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself.

Standardization, similarly, made foreign places more accessible. Standards had been facilitating long-distance trade for centuries before World War II, of course, but mainly within political jurisdictions. You had to colonize to standardize, roughly speaking (and with important exceptions). What changed in the Second World War was scale. The United States took advantage of its position—as the undisputed economic and political superpower, with its wartime logistical network installed in more than a hundred countries—to push its standards beyond its borders. The wave of U.S.-centered standardization that followed transcended the scale of the nation or the empire. This was standardization at the scale of the planet.

That the United States declined to follow victory with annexations—that instead it decolonized—cannot be explained by a sudden onset of altruism. It was due in part to the revolt of colonized peoples worldwide. It was also due to the lessons learned in the war. Fighting and winning that war had taught Washington the art of projecting power without claiming colonies. New technologies helped it achieve, as a writer in the forties put it, “domination without annexation.”

Those technologies laid the foundation for our world today. It’s a far cry from the world Teddy Roosevelt envisioned, in which the strong violently subdue the weak and take their land. It is much closer to the one Herbert Hoover imagined, held together not by empires, but by the market. It’s a world where the great coordinating process isn’t colonial rule, which operates within borders, but globalization, which crosses them.

Samoset, it turned out, had learned some “broken English” (as one colonist described it) from fishermen plying the Maine coast. A few days later, Samoset returned with a Patuxet man who spoke the language even better: Tisquantum, better known as Squanto. Not only did Squanto speak English, he’d lived in London. Seven years before meeting the Plymouth colonists, he had been kidnapped by an English captain and taken to Europe. He’d sailed across the Atlantic four times—once after being captured, once back and forth on a journey to Newfoundland, and back again with another expedition to his homeland of Patuxet—i.e., southern New England. For the colonists, who had crossed the Atlantic only once, this was a near-inconceivable stroke of luck. A small, nomadic band of Europeans far out of their element had somehow managed to run into one of the few individuals from the vast North American continent who had actually spent time in their home country. Squanto was, in the eyes of the colonists, a “special instrument sent of God.” He translated for them, brokered key diplomatic alliances with Native polities, and taught them the tricks of local agriculture. Quite likely he was the difference between their survival and their death.

Today, four centuries later, the society those Pilgrims founded enjoys a similar good fortune. Its inhabitants can travel to nearly any spot on the map, confident that someone within hailing distance will speak their language. Yet unlike the Pilgrims, they don’t need luck. English has spread like an invasive weed, implanting itself in nearly every habitat. It has created a world full of people ready and able to assist English speakers, wherever they may roam. A world almost designed for the convenience of the United States. A world of Squantos.

There were serious questions about whether English would hold throughout the new United States. There’d never been a native language that stretched over such a large distance as the expanding United States without splitting apart. That it worked—that Virginians spoke the same language as Californians—can be credited to the settlement boom, which swiftly propelled a fairly homogeneous population over a vast expanse. The same wagons and trains that carried the settlers carried the language, too, which survived the long journey with only minor mutations.

English wasn’t a global lingua franca in 1943, and it didn’t seem likely to become one anytime soon. It had a daunting vocabulary, with its largest dictionaries containing some half a million words. Its spelling was a cruel farce. Even Albert Einstein had been brought to his knees by what he called English’s “underhanded orthography.” Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners. The entire system—grammar and vocabulary—could be printed legibly on one side of a sheet of paper, with space left over for sample sentences.

In the forties, FDR and Churchill expected that they’d have to drastically alter English to turn it into a global language. Decolonization, by placing men like Manuel Quezon in power, only worsened English’s prospects. Yet English surmounted these obstacles and became a true world language. How? Part of the story, some linguists have insisted, is the foreign policies of the United States and Britain. Even as Anglophone powers lost political control over much of the world, this explanation goes, they found ways to impose their language on weaker countries. They did that in large part through education. The hundreds of thousands of foreign students streaming into U.S. universities (120,000 a year by 1969) didn’t just study math and sociology. They studied math and sociology in English. They then carried English back to their home countries, where they ranked among the most educated and powerful. Add to those students the nearly half a million foreign military trainees who studied at U.S. military academies, schools, bases, and special facilities.

Though agencies like the Voice of America and the Peace Corps promoted English, that wasn’t their main mission. It wasn’t until 1965 that the U.S. government even set the promulgation of English as a foreign policy objective.

Global English isn’t really, in the end, the product of a few big decisions made in Washington or London. It’s the product of a billion or so smaller ones made all around the world. Those billions of decisions have been, to be sure, profoundly influenced by the predominant position of the United States in the world. But ultimately the language wasn’t imposed from the top down. It emerged from the bottom up.

Governments can tax, enlist, and imprison their subjects. They do those things all the time. But standards are harder to impose, languages especially so. Colonial authorities spent fifty years trying to drum the English language into Puerto Ricans’ heads yet managed to get only a quarter of the population even conversant in it. They had such a hard time because, in the streets and in the home, Puerto Ricans still spoke Spanish.

Standards reflect power, but the real compulsion rarely comes from the state. It comes, rather, from the community.

As distant cultures have come into closer contact, the need for common tongues has grown. Yet which language to use hasn’t exactly been a free choice for everyone. You pick the language others have chosen, the language you think will get you the furthest. And once a critical mass has been reached, that choice becomes practically mandatory.

Different people have undergone this process at different paces. The international communities on globalization’s leading edge were the first to feel the need for a uniform language. They latched on to English early, and as each one adopted it, the language’s momentum grew, eventually dragging whole countries along for the ride.

The first group to fully go in for English was the air traffic controllers. Aviation, being technically complex and profoundly international, is an area where standards are vital. A common language is especially so, given the paramount importance of clear communication in the skies. In the 1950s a Soviet plane carrying the USSR’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to London twice overshot Heathrow Airport and nearly crashed because the pilot struggled to understand the control tower’s instructions. Yet such misunderstandings are happily rare, for when the rules of the international aviation system were agreed upon in 1944, a standard language was chosen for international flights. It was, not surprisingly, English. This wasn’t a choice made because of a desi...

Air traffic control and scientific research turned out to be mere preludes. The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet. It has promoted international communication, but it has set English proficiency as the price. The Internet was invented in the United States and has been disproportionately Anglophone ever since. In 1997 a survey of language distribution found that 82.3 percent of randomly chosen websites, from all over the world, were in English.

English is not the language with the most native speakers today. Mandarin Chinese is, followed by Spanish. There are many people in the United States itself who struggle with English. But what’s remarkable about English is that it’s the language with the most nonnative speakers.

For those who speak English as a foreign language, the reasons are clear. English is the language of power. Speaking it means going to better schools, getting better jobs, and moving in more elite circles. A study commissioned by the British Council of five poorer countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Rwanda) found that professionals who spoke English earned 20 to 30 percent more than those who didn’t.

The United States, in other words, did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe.

One such test at Bikini was of a hydrogen bomb, the “Bravo shot” in 1954. Its fifteen-megaton yield was twice as large as expected, and unusually strong winds carried the fallout well beyond the cordoned-off blast zone. Had it detonated over Washington, D.C., it could have killed 90 percent of the populations of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York within three days.

Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs, each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles. The third bomb landed intact. But the fourth? It was nowhere to be found. Officials searched desperately for nearly three months. The hunt had “all the makings of a James Bond thriller,” The Boston Globe reported. In fact, it bore an unnerving resemblance to Thunderball, the Bond film about missing nuclear weapons that was dominating the box office at the time. When the military finally found the bomb resting on the seabed, it proudly showed it off for the cameras—the first time the public had seen a hydrogen bomb.

Liverpool, a port city in the north of England. Before the war, it had been a dreary factory town without much by way of entertainment beyond the music-hall scene that typified much of provincial England. Then suddenly, in the 1950s, it lit up like a Christmas tree. It turned out far more chart-topping acts in the following decades than it had any right to. Some, like the Searchers or Gerry and the Pacemakers, have faded with time. Others, like the Beatles, have not. A classmate of John Lennon’s estimated that between 1958 and 1964, five hundred bands were playing Merseyside, the area around Liverpool. Why? “There has to be some reason,” wrote the Beatles’ producer George Martin, “that Liverpool, of all British cities, actually had a vibrant teenage culture centred around pop music in the 1950s, when the rest of Britain was snoozing gently away in the pullovered arms of croon.” That Liverpool had a port surely helped. Yet for Martin, the answer was to be found elsewhere. Liverpool was a base city. It was, in fact, fifteen miles west of Burtonwood, the largest U.S. Air Force base in Europe.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr especially. Ringo’s stepfather worked on the base and fed Ringo a steady diet of comic books and records from the United States. John’s mother, Julia, was known as a “good-time girl,” an avocation that, whatever else it entailed, left her with an admirably large and up-to-date record collection, which John and Paul eagerly raided. George got his records by stealing them from Brian Epstein’s shop, which, thanks to the troops, was brimming with the latest music from across the Atlantic

At a time when Britain’s cultural institutions were locked in the vaudeville age and the BBC was trying to stamp out rock, Liverpudlians found themselves in a special position. They had records, particularly those featuring African American artists, that no one else had access to. And they had strong financial incentives to master the songs emanating from the United States. Their music scene exploded. Tellingly, the Liverpool groups were essentially cover bands. They one-upped one another not by composing new songs, but by replicating faithfully the sounds they heard on records and the radio.

military, but that’s often how it went. Those who lived in the shadow of the bases both resented them and built their lives around them, vacillating between protest and participation.

Yet, as the Japanese were well aware, hosting bases didn’t mean just enduring bar brawls, plane crashes, and jeeps driven drunkenly down crowded streets. It also meant that Japan had a special place within the sprawling U.S. military complex. During the Cold War, that was one of the largest and steadiest streams of cash on the planet.

More transformative still were the large military procurement orders, which began in 1950 with the Korean War. Goods from the U.S. mainland heading for Asia might take weeks to arrive. Those from Japan could be made cheaply and arrive in hours. And so the U.S. military began a shopping spree. From the start of the Korean War to the end of the Vietnam War, Japanese firms took in at least $300 million a year from U.S. purchase orders. At the peak of the Korean War, 1952, it was nearly $800 million.

On the eve of the Korean War, the auto firm Toyota had laid off workers, cut wages, and reduced pensions by half. It was the military contracts that reversed its fortunes. They were, the firm’s president recalled, “Toyota’s salvation.” Toyota’s output swelled between three and four times its size in the six years between 1948 and 1954.

Not only did the contracts provide profits, they offered Japanese firms a chance to master U.S. standards—i.e., the standards that were rapidly spreading out all over the world. The U.S. military was the largest and one of the most exacting standard-setting agencies on the planet. Producing for it was like having a well-paid internship: lucrative in the moment but also conferring skills that would prove extremely valuable later.

Not every corner of Baselandia made out as well as Japan did. The Philippines, for example, hosted large contingents of U.S. service members, yet no one was driving Philippine trucks to the battlefronts. It mattered that Japan had other factors spurring its growth, including a high rate of savings, market protections, an entrepreneurial culture, and a government that ably promoted industrial development. Still, the patronage of the United States was essential to the recipe.

Public sentiment was profoundly complicated. Japanese people protested base expansions, but they also protested plans by the United States to remove its servicemen, since the bases were vital sources of employment. In polls from 1958 to 1966, most respondents registered disapproval of the bases. Yet their responses grew more ambivalent over time, with increasing numbers confessing that they weren’t sure how they felt. Even a leader in the campaign to end the occupation of Okinawa acknowledged the “contradiction”: Okinawans had little interest in helping the United States fight in Vietnam, but they desperately needed the money.

Sony’s transistor radio also inaugurated another epochal trend: Japanese technology firms producing superior goods. No longer was Sony the remora on the underside of the U.S. leviathan. It had detached and swum ahead.

Sony’s story was similar to that of the Beatles. Enterprising young men living cheek by jowl with the U.S. military get their start by imitating what they see around them. They learn guitar licks from Buddy Holly songs or struggle with stiff paper and raccoon-hair brushes to replicate a tape recorder. But give them time, and soon enough you’re listening to Abbey Road on your Walkman.

The United States’ ability to promulgate its standards gave it considerable first-mover advantages. But those who adopted U.S. standards early did well, too—call them the second movers. In nursing, the Filipinos were the second movers. In rock, it was the Liverpudlians. In industry, it was Sony and the other Japanese firms that grew up around the U.S. military. Their privileged position within the world economy, close to the source of standards and technology and with easy access to U.S. markets, allowed them to go global. In other words, the international order that the United States built around itself after 1945 redounded to its benefit, but not permanently. Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.

The attacks baffled many in the United States. “To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away,” wrote the members of the 9/11 Commission. So why was a Saudi man there attacking Washington and New York? The answer is that for Bin Laden, the United States was not “very far away.” “Your forces occupy our countries,” he wrote in his message to the U.S. populace. “You spread your military bases throughout them.”

After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.

The more other bases faltered, the more military planners turned to Guam. Stationing forces on Guam, unlike stationing them in Saudi Arabia or Okinawa, did not require negotiating with foreign governments. Nor did Guamanians have congressional representation, as residents of Hawai‘i did directly or as Puerto Ricans did indirectly through the New York diaspora.

Yet one thing is clear: Guam may be a small island, but it matters tremendously that there is this one spot, far into the Pacific, that the U.S. military can use without asking anyone’s permission.

In its peculiar legal status, Guantánamo Bay was not far off from Guam. They’re a fitting pair: two U.S. outposts, spoils of a not-much-remembered nineteenth-century war, both in the United States without being of it. Such places may seem like bizarre vestiges of a long-ago imperialist era, but they aren’t. Small dots on the map like these are the foundation of the United States’ pointillist empire today.

Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.