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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Like Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas were subject to some U.S. laws but not others. The federal minimum wage and much of immigration law were waived. The nearest Occupational Safety and Health Administration office was thousands of miles away. At the same time, for the purposes of trade, the Northern Marianas counted as part of the country. The combination was potent: a legal environment where foreign workers could toil for paltry wages with little oversight to stitch garments labeled MADE IN THE USA.

for the purposes of labor law, the Northern Marianas wasn’t part of the United States. For the purposes of trade, it was. And for the purposes of lobbying regulations, it was a foreign government.

He used the same strategy as in Saipan, exploiting the fact that an Indian tribal government could give politicians unreported gifts.

In the end, McCain and Palin weren’t much impeded by their colonial entanglements. They were white, and they projected an image of being “American”—McCain a war hero from a military family, Palin a fierce defender of what she called “the real America.” The same immunity was not enjoyed by their opponent in the 2008 election, Barack Obama. On paper, Obama had fewer colonial liabilities than his opponents. He’d been born in Hawai‘i two years after it became a state, so there was no question as to his eligibility for the presidency—he didn’t have the McCain problem. And though Hawai‘i, like Alaska, has a formidable sovereignty movement, Obama had never engaged with it—he didn’t have the Palin problem, either.

You might see the intrusions of colonialism into recent politics as a sort of hangover—a price paid for yesterday’s excesses. In this view, empire is an affair of the past, even if its effects linger on.

Empire lives on, too, in the overseas bases that dot the globe. It’s easy to think of foreign policy as an affair of the negotiating table: sovereign nation-states sit down to threaten, bargain, or cooperate. But U.S. foreign policy, nearly uniquely, has a territorial component. Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.

Yet empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape. And by this definition, the United States has indisputably been an empire and remains one today.

Still, if there is one thing the history of the Greater United States tells us, it’s that such territory matters. And not only for the people who live in colonies or near bases. It matters for the whole country. World War II began, for the United States, in the territories. The war on terror started with a military base. The birth control pill, chemotherapy, plastic, Godzilla, the Beatles, Little House on the Prairie, Iran-Contra, the transistor radio, the name America itself—you can’t understand the histories of any of these without understanding territorial empire.

The history of the United States is the history of empire.