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

by Daniel Immerwahr

express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories. It

The pointillist empire

The point was general, applying far beyond guano. Annexing territory was a way to secure both sea routes and the vital tropical materials that one could reach by them.

Simply put, World War II made the United States a planetary presence.

The synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics.

The ability of empires to promulgate standards was a major benefit of colonial conquest.

Imperial standardization meant that even in faraway lands, the colonizers’ practices would be adhered to.

The stop sign can be added to the list of empire-killing technologies. Taken together, they have had a formidable effect. Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes.

Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access.

Innovations in medicine and engineering—such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and “world-proofed” electronic equipment—further r...

They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn’t have t...

Languages are standards, just like stop signs and screw threads, but they run much deeper. Languages shape thought, making some ideas more readily thinkable and others less so. At the same time, they shape societies. Which languages you speak affects which communities you join, which books you read, which places you feel at home. That a single language has become the dominant tongue on the planet, spoken to a degree by nearly all educated and powerful people, is thus an occurrence of profound consequence.

“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 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.

This was Barber’s “strategic island concept,” and it gave a name to what the United States was already doing. It underscored the point that in this new pointillist empire, colonialism was a liability, not an asset. The best bases were those that didn’t enmesh large populations. They were places where, in the words of Doctor No, the United States would have to “account to no one.”