On December 7, 1941, the Japanese military launched a massive, coordinated strike against the United States. They bombed Hawaii. They also bombed the Philippines, Guam, Midway, and Wake Island, soon conquering the Philippines entirely and subjecting sixteen million U.S. nationals to a brutal foreign occupation. If you only remember Pearl Harbor, you are suffering from a specific strain of engineered geographical amnesia. Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire drags those forgotten places back into view — the islands and archipelagos the country held, used, and carefully cropped out of its own self-portrait. The thesis is plain enough. The United States has always been an empire, with vast overseas territories and millions of colonial subjects to its name. What set it apart was the sleight of hand: it swapped flags and viceroys for military bases and technical standards, and got most of its citizens to forget the whole thing.
The Cartography of Denial
Most of us carry a very specific shape in our heads when we think of the country. A contiguous mass bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Canada, and Mexico. The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the “logo map.” It appears on campaign buttons, television graphics, and weather forecasts. It is also, in Immerwahr’s framing, a political construction.
The logo map represents the United States only for a brief three-year window in its history. Before 1857, the borders were in constant motion as the state pushed westward, violently displacing indigenous populations to create “Indian Country” holding pens that were subsequently erased. After 1857, the country began acquiring overseas territories. By the eve of the Second World War, the “Greater United States” included Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Nearly nineteen million people lived in these colonies. More than one in eight people under U.S. jurisdiction lived outside the mainland. You were more likely to be a colonized subject than an African American.
Immerwahr traces how this expansive reality was systematically cropped out of the national portrait. Census reports gathered data on the territories, only to drop them from the final calculations of the “United States proper.” Mapmakers banished enormous landmasses like Alaska to tiny inset boxes and left places like Puerto Rico off the page entirely. The result was a population that simply did not know its own borders. When the Japanese attacked the Philippines, politicians and the press struggled to articulate what had happened. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously edited his “Infamy” speech to focus almost entirely on Hawaii, crossing out prominent references to the Philippines. He needed to tell a story about an attack on America. He knew the public did not consider Manila to be America.
Blood in the Tropics
How the country acquired these territories is a story often buried under the mythology of westward expansion. We are taught about pioneers and covered wagons. We are rarely taught about bird droppings.
In the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. agriculture faced an existential crisis. Soil exhaustion threatened the food supply, and the only reliable fertilizer was guano, found in massive, calcified deposits on arid islands off the coast of Peru, heavily monopolized by British firms. Desperate for this “white gold,” Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. It allowed any citizen to claim uninhabited, guano-rich islands for the United States.
The legislation triggered a land rush in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Speculators claimed dozens of rocks and atolls. The working conditions were hellish. On Navassa, a tiny Caribbean outcrop, African American laborers from Baltimore were effectively enslaved by a private phosphate company. When they revolted and killed their white overseers in 1889, their lawyers argued that the U.S. courts had no jurisdiction because Navassa was not truly part of the United States. The Supreme Court disagreed. It ruled that the island “appertained” to the country. A quiet but enormous legal shift. The United States could now hold territory that was not a state, not a territory on the path to statehood, but simply a possession. The legal scaffolding for 1898 was already up.
That was the year the United States intervened in the Cuban war for independence, defeated the collapsing Spanish Empire, and walked away with the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. It also annexed Hawaii. Suddenly, the republic absorbed eight million nonwhite subjects.
Immerwahr’s recounting of the Philippine War is brutal reading. Filipinos had already declared independence and established a republic. When the U.S. military arrived, it did not liberate them; it replaced their Spanish masters. The resulting conflict lasted fourteen years and required hundreds of thousands of troops. To crush the guerrilla resistance, the U.S. military relied on torture — specifically the “water cure,” an early form of waterboarding — and reconcentration camps. General Jacob Smith ordered his men to turn the interior of Samar into a “howling wilderness,” instructing them to kill any male over the age of ten. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died, largely from disease and starvation exacerbated by the destruction of their agriculture.
The Supreme Court moved quickly to launder all of this. In the Insular Cases of 1901, the justices determined that the Constitution does not fully apply to “unincorporated” territories. Congress could rule these new lands without granting their inhabitants the rights of citizens. The country was legally partitioned. There was the mainland, where the Bill of Rights applied, and there were the colonies, where it did not.
The legal ambiguity proved useful. In 1932, a Rockefeller Institute doctor named Cornelius Rhoads, sent to Puerto Rico to study anemia, wrote a letter describing Puerto Ricans as “the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere.” He claimed to have murdered eight of his patients and injected others with cancer. When the letter surfaced, the colonial government suppressed the investigation. Rhoads faced no charges. He returned to the mainland, became a pioneer of chemotherapy, won the Legion of Merit, and had a prestigious medical award named after him. I had to read that passage twice — the boast itself was sadly familiar, but it was the award, in the end, that stopped me.
The mainland forgot him. Puerto Rican nationalists used his letter to fuel an armed uprising. Decades of economic exploitation and political limbo had birthed a militant nationalist movement on the island. Pedro Albizu Campos, a Harvard-educated lawyer, led an armed struggle against U.S. rule. His followers attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman at Blair House in 1950. Four years later, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. Mainland newspapers treated these events as the inexplicable actions of lunatics. They refused to connect the violence to the island’s colonial status or the grinding poverty engineered by mainland sugar quotas.
The amnesia, by design, held.
The Second World War and the Great Forgetting
The violence of the colonial project peaked during the Second World War. Immerwahr rightly points out that the U.S. mainland was entirely spared the physical devastation of the conflict. The U.S. Empire was not.
When Douglas MacArthur abandoned Manila to the Japanese, he left behind a population that would endure years of starvation and torture. When he returned in 1945 to retake the city, the U.S. military relied on massive artillery barrages to clear out Japanese defenders, prioritizing the lives of mainland soldiers over the architecture and civilian population of the colony. Manila was reduced to rubble. Roughly 100,000 Manilans died in the crossfire. It was the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.
Yet the mainland public barely noticed. They cheered MacArthur’s heroism. They watched Hollywood films about the doomed white soldiers on Bataan. Filipino suffering was rendered invisible by a press corps that had no language for it.
Stress Testing the Transition
The Second World War changed the calculus of empire. The United States ended the war with unprecedented power, and by the old rules of geopolitics, it should have annexed the territories it conquered. It occupied Japan. It held massive swaths of Micronesia. It had troops stationed across the globe. Instead, it let the Philippines go. It eventually granted statehood to Hawaii and Alaska. Its formal territorial holdings shrank to a few small islands.
Immerwahr argues that this retreat from formal colonization was driven by two forces. The violent resistance of colonized peoples around the world made holding large territories too costly. And technological innovation made those territories unnecessary. The U.S. military and industrial base developed synthetic substitutes for colonial raw materials. Plastics replaced ivory and tortoiseshell. Synthetic rubber replaced the sap of Asian rubber trees. Aviation and radio communications let the military project power without needing contiguous landmasses. They didn’t need to conquer a country. They just needed a runway and a radio tower.
The empire of land became a “pointillist” empire.
The argument is elegant. Perhaps too elegant.
Immerwahr leans heavily on the idea that technology — specifically the logistics of the Second World War — liberated the United States from the burden of territorial administration. He spends chapters on the standardization of screw threads, the invention of the shipping container, and the mass production of DDT. These innovations, he suggests, created a frictionless world where the U.S. could extract wealth and project force without the messy business of ruling foreign populations.
When a historical transition resolves this cleanly, look at what’s been left out. The shift from a territorial empire to a pointillist one was not merely a matter of improved logistics and synthetic chemistry. It was a calculated political mutation, driven by the imperatives of global capitalism and the Cold War.
By focusing so intensely on the mechanics of transportation and the chemistry of plastics, Immerwahr risks downplaying the sheer economic coercion that replaced formal colonial rule. The United States did not give up the Philippines because it could synthesize rubber or fly bombers over the Pacific. It gave up the Philippines because it had successfully structured the postwar global economy to ensure that the newly independent nation would remain totally dependent on U.S. markets and capital. The Bell Trade Act of 1946 tied the Philippine economy to the U.S. dollar, established quotas on Philippine exports, and forced an amendment to the Philippine constitution granting U.S. citizens equal rights to exploit the country’s natural resources.
This was not the obsolescence of empire. It was its financialization.
Immerwahr acknowledges the economic dominance of the United States, but his fascination with the material culture of logistics — 60-degree screw threads, standardized traffic lights — sometimes obscures the brutal financial architecture that made the pointillist empire function. A military base in Okinawa or Dhahran is indeed a “point,” but the power it projects is designed to enforce a sprawling, invisible web of economic compliance.
The author paints the transition away from formal colonies as a uniquely American innovation, a workaround for the country’s republican self-image. He contrasts this with the European empires, which clung to their vast African and Asian holdings until bloody insurgencies forced them out.
If technology was the primary solvent of territorial empire, why did it dissolve the American empire so much faster than the others?
The answer lies in the peculiar nature of American domestic politics. The United States was a settler-colonial project that had convinced itself it was a republic of liberty. The psychic dissonance of holding millions of brown subjects in perpetual limbo was politically toxic — not only to anti-imperialists like Mark Twain, but to white supremacists who feared the contamination of the body politic. The pointillist empire solved a domestic political crisis. It allowed the United States to dominate the globe without admitting nonwhite populations into the civic fold or answering uncomfortable questions about the consent of the governed. The solution carried its own contradiction. It could only function in the dark. The ignorance that sustained it at home was precisely what let its worst abuses flourish abroad.
The Architecture of Evasion
The “pointillist” framework works well as a spatial metaphor, but it occasionally lets the United States off the hook for the ideological enforcement required to maintain those points. The shift from holding land to holding bases didn’t just solve a logistical problem. It solved a legal one. Small, strategically located islands could be stripped of their indigenous populations and turned into extraterritorial zones where the Constitution simply did not exist.
We see the Solomon Islanders unloading beer for GIs. We should also look at the darker mutations of these isolated outposts. Immerwahr traces this evolution to its modern terminus. He points to the expulsion of the Chagossians from Diego Garcia (a British territory leased to the U.S.) and the removal of the Inughuit in Greenland to build the Thule Air Base. These dots on the map became the nervous system of military supremacy. They also became the staging grounds for operations that could never withstand domestic legal scrutiny.
When the Bush administration needed a place to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists outside the bounds of the Geneva Conventions, it did not look to the mainland. It looked to Guantánamo Bay, a territory held on a perpetual lease from Cuba since the Spanish-American War. The administration’s lawyers, specifically John Yoo, recognized that Guantánamo was a legal black hole — a place where the government exercised complete jurisdiction but technically lacked ultimate sovereignty. The empire’s forgotten corners proved highly useful for extraordinary rendition and torture.
The colonies also served as laboratories for social engineering. Fearing that poverty in Puerto Rico was driven by overpopulation, mainland officials and doctors heavily promoted female sterilization. By 1965, more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers aged twenty to forty-nine had been sterilized, often immediately after childbirth under highly questionable conditions of consent. The island was also used to test the first high-dosage birth control pills on women in public housing projects, allowing researchers to gather data on side effects without facing the regulatory hurdles they would have encountered in Massachusetts.
Saipan tells another version of the same story. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands functioned for decades as a laboratory for extreme capitalist extraction. Because it was a territory, garments stitched there could bear the “Made in USA” label, bypassing tariffs and quotas. Because it was exempt from federal minimum wage and immigration laws, manufacturers could import thousands of desperate Asian workers, trap them in debt peonage, and run sweatshops that would have been illegal anywhere else under the same flag. When reformers tried to close the loophole in the 1990s, the island’s government hired the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He used the territory’s anomalous status to shower congressmen with unreported gifts and junkets, keeping the sweatshops open another decade.
Even the pop culture is a byproduct of the pointillist empire. Immerwahr traces the origins of the Beatles to the massive U.S. Air Force base at Burtonwood, just outside Liverpool. The base flooded the local economy with dollars, nylon stockings, and, critically, R&B records that were otherwise unavailable in austerity-era Britain. The Beatles began as a cover band imitating the sounds radiating from the military installation. The traffic ran the other way too, but only after censoring. When the military detonated the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in 1954, the fallout irradiated a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon. In response, a Japanese film studio produced Gojira, a movie about an ancient monster awakened and mutated by American nuclear testing. It was a bleak, angry protest film. When Hollywood imported it, executives spliced in a white protagonist, deleted the anti-nuclear commentary, and released it as Godzilla — just another monster movie.
The empire excised the critique, renamed the monster, and sold the spectacle.
The Empire of Standards
Immerwahr’s exploration of standardization shows how the empire operates at a microscopic level. The military didn’t just occupy foreign lands. It forced the physical world to conform to its measurements. During the Second World War, the incompatibility of British and American screw threads became a severe logistical liability. The United States effectively forced the British Empire to abandon its 55-degree thread angle and adopt the American 60-degree standard. The British retooled their factories. The Americans did not. Today, the world operates on American specifications.
The same logic applied to language. Immerwahr treats English as the ultimate imperial infrastructure. In the Philippines, the colonial government ruthlessly enforced English instruction, attempting to overwrite indigenous tongues. The desperation to export English was so intense that politicians seriously considered altering the language itself. Winston Churchill championed “Basic,” a stripped-down version of English with only 850 words and 18 verbs. Former Senator Robert Latham Owen went further, designing a completely new phonetic “global alphabet” to bypass English’s chaotic spelling rules.
Neither scheme caught on. They didn’t need to. The true global victory of English was not won in colonial classrooms or by linguistic tinkerers. It was won by the gravitational pull of American scientific, aeronautic, and digital dominance. Air traffic controllers worldwide must speak English because the United States dominated early commercial aviation. The internet speaks English because American engineers designed the encoding systems. Anyone who has asked for directions in a Southeast Asian airport in halting English and received them back in fluent, faintly accented American knows what that gravity feels like at the level of the throat. Immerwahr characterizes this not as a free choice made by the global community, but as a coercive standard. You adopt the standard, or you lock yourself out of the modern economy.
The Fragility of the Points
In Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson diagnosed the United States as a “basenation,” arguing that the military’s global footprint was an empire in all but name. Immerwahr builds heavily on this premise but pushes it further back in time, linking the modern basing strategy to the nineteenth-century guano islands. He also mounts a quiet but devastating attack on the globalization theorists of the early 2000s. Pundits like Thomas L. Friedman famously declared that the world is “flat,” suggesting that technology and free trade had leveled the economic playing field. The world did not organically flatten itself. The U.S. military flattened it. Japanese industry did not spontaneously rise from the ashes of the Second World War; it was deliberately incubated by military procurement orders during the Korean War. By grounding globalization in the dirt, concrete, and aviation fuel of the U.S. military, How to Hide an Empire aligns closely with the work of critical geographers like William Rankin. We think we live in a republic. We move through a world shaped by the contours of our empire.
Immerwahr’s historical diagnosis is sharp. He leaves one geopolitical thread dangling. If the United States successfully transitioned from an empire of territory to an empire of points, what happens when those points become vulnerable?
The narrative details the development of drone warfare and describes it as the ultimate expression of pointillist violence. A pilot in Nevada can eliminate a target in Yemen without the government ever claiming a square inch of Yemeni soil.
The system relies on the assumption that the points themselves — the bases, the satellite uplinks, the deep-sea cables — remain secure. The book documents how local populations have repeatedly protested and sometimes evicted the military from these bases, from the Philippines to Vieques to Okinawa. Osama bin Laden’s primary grievance, the one that motivated the September 11 attacks, was the stationing of troops at the Dhahran air base in Saudi Arabia. The empire vanishes from the mainland’s field of view. It never leaves the line of sight of the people who live in its shadow.
Beyond local resistance, the pointillist empire now faces a structural threat from rival powers who have read the playbook. China is currently dredging sand in the South China Sea, constructing artificial islands to serve as military bases. They are essentially building their own guano islands from scratch. The wheel turns and the dirt is the same. If the American empire relies on controlling isolated nodes of power, the next global conflict will not be fought over vast territorial expanses. It will be a war of points. A severed submarine cable, a disabled GPS satellite, a cyberattack on a logistics hub — these are the vulnerabilities of a networked empire. Immerwahr brilliantly explains how the system was built. He stops just short of asking whether it can survive its own fragility.
Verdict
How to Hide an Empire belongs on the shelf of anyone trying to understand the spatial and material realities of American power. Read it if you want to know why your clothes say “Made in Saipan,” why the Beatles sounded the way they did, and why the shape of the United States is a carefully maintained illusion.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com