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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands—those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No.

Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.

The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial “stability,” U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934. The United States helped to put down revolts, replaced governments when necessary, and offered battleships-in-the-harbor “advice” to others. But the only territory it annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917.

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. Today there are roughly eight hundred such bases, some of the most important of them on islands.

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.