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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.

It was as if someone had depopulated most of Europe and shunted remnants from each country to an allotment in Romania.

On the forcing of so many native tribes into Oklahoma

Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.”

At times, the Industrial Revolution could look like a worldwide scavenger hunt for obscure tropical products.

“We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico?” Apparently not. The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) but let the populous southern part go. This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.”

during the heated election of 1900, the question of empire was argued at high volume. In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two.

For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).

When the Roosevelt administration sought a transoceanic canal to connect its Atlantic trade to its Pacific trade (larger now that the United States had Pacific territories), it eyed the Panama isthmus in Colombia. But it neither bought nor conquered it. Instead, Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian nationalists to secede from Colombia, and then he negotiated for a small zone in which to build the canal. The U.S. lease was perpetual, and within the zone, the treaty gave the United States “all the rights, power, and authority” it would possess “if it were the sovereign of the territory.” But, as in Guantánamo Bay, the United States wasn’t the sovereign—technically.

“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.

In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.

At the end of WW2

What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes. Throughout its economy, it replaced colonies with chemistry.

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.”