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

by Daniel Immerwahr

In industry after industry, the world tuned itself to the United States. This happened literally in music, where countries bickered over the pitch of a concert A. The United States had been tuning its instruments to an A of 440 hertz since 1917. But continental Europe was officially tuned to the “French pitch,” a slightly flatter A of 435 hertz, closer to the classical pitches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Austrian delegates pushed for A435 at the United Nations. Yet with U.S. recordings flooding the market and the U.S. government broadcasting a pure A440 tone around the world from powerful radio stations in Maryland and Hawai‘i as a “service” to musicians, the Austrians stood little chance. Today, except for those playing period instruments such as baroque flutes or older church organs, A440 is the law of the land.

Something similar happened in the skies. International aviation relies on standards. Air traffic controllers and pilots must speak the same language, plane parts must be similar enough that repairs can be made in any country, and the world’s radio frequencies must be arranged so that the navigational channels in one country are the same as in the next. Representatives of the U.S. aviation industry worked aggressively to secure all these objectives and to make sure that the language of the air was English. By 1950, they had largely succeeded.

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.

Outside of the settler population, though, enforcing English as a national language proved to be a more violent undertaking. Slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language. Those caught speaking their home languages could face serious punishment; there are reports of some having their tongues cut out. The result was total linguistic annihilation. Although traces of African idioms can be found in today’s black speech, not a single African language made it over on the slave ships and survived.

“Speaking frankly, we didn’t want to manufacture VHS,” its deputy president confessed. “However, you don’t conduct business according to your feelings.” Sony hadn’t been compelled to give up on Betamax, exactly. It’s just that the cost of sticking with it had become prohibitively high. Too many people had already chosen VHS.

Super weird that there is an example of this vhs/betamax discussion in my cost benefit analysis textbook... time is a circle

This wasn’t a choice made because of a desire to turn the world Anglophone. It was made from necessity: there had to be one language, and the United States at that point was responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles.

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.

“It is the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism,” sighed the director of an internet provider in Russia. “The product comes from America so we must either adapt to English or stop using it. That is the right of business. But if you are talking about a technology that is supposed to open the world to hundreds of millions of people you are joking. This just makes the world into new sorts of haves and have nots.” The president of France, Jacques Chirac, deemed the English-dominant internet “a major risk for humanity.”

Fleming spent every winter in Jamaica from 1946 until his death, in 1964. It was where he wrote all the Bond books. Jamaica was also where Fleming conducted an affair with a rich widow named Blanche Blackwell, who was in turn having an affair with Fleming’s neighbor, Errol Flynn. Scampering underfoot at Goldeneye was Blackwell’s young son, Chris, who would later grow up to found Island Records and launch the reggae musicians Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Peter Tosh onto the world scene. (After Fleming’s death, Bob Marley bought Goldeneye, but he deemed it “too posh” and sold it to Chris Blackwell, who owns it now.)

Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.

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.

If there is one episode that perfectly captures the dual nature of the U.S. basing empire, it’s this one. Participation and protest—the Beatles and the peace sign, Sony and the Okinawa riots—braided within a single family. The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them.

Nearly half the Republican members of the House Committee on Resources went to Saipan or sent staffers there.

Jack Abramoff.

There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised. As Guamanians and Puerto Ricans have recently seen, this disenfranchisement carries potentially lethal consequences.

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.