Uncovering America’s secret – How to Hide an Empire, review
In 1945, the United States possessed the fourth-largest empire in the world but its existence has since been a secret history has somewhat forgotten.
Britain and the United States have long had a ‘special relationship’ that goes back to the American War of Independence in the late 18th century. One of the less obvious things the two countries have had in common is a weakness for empires, or at least for what empires can deliver. Britain had a succession of empires, some acquired unintentionally or at the bidding of aggressive commercial interests. It is a lesser-known fact that the United States had an empire, too, one which also had some unintended aspects. The difference between them is that British governments trumpeted their empire whilst the United States tried to hide or camouflage theirs.
A young American historian, Daniel Immerwahr, has written a book that should undermine the twin beliefs of many Americans that their country has never had an empire and has always been the champion of colonial peoples. How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States is myth-busting history. All countries tell stories about themselves, that is what national histories are about and the stories are often selective and purposeful and all about ‘who we are’ or, at least, who we think we are. The United States is no different in this sense to other nations. Nor is it surprising that a country formed out of a set of colonies – parts of another country’s empire – should want thereafter to depict itself as anti-empire and a friend of ‘subject peoples’ everywhere. The only problem is that the story isn’t quite true.
The United States’ first colonial empire started close to home. Early US administrations resisted any expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains. They had no wish to take on costly obligations outside the pale of the new republic. From the start, they drew distinctions between the ethnic character of the governing class in the founding States and the mixed populations and anarchic habits that lay beyond their mountainous borders. They couldn’t stop their own countrymen from seeking better lives beyond the Appalachians, but they knew how to stymie their political aspirations. Drawing on a rather vague formulation in the US Constitution, they resisted the extension of the Union through the foundation of new States by instead setting up ‘Territories’ in the new lands to the west. James Monroe – who had drafted the text in the Constitution – said a Territory was “in effect” a “colonial government similar to that which prevailed in these States previous to the [American] revolution”. It was a constitutional device that continued to be handy even into the 21st century.
Whatever the constitutional constraints, a rapidly rising migrant population in the course of the 19th century sought new lands in which to settle and prosper. The often unintended reach of the United States stretched outwards to the Pacific and the northern areas of Mexico. In the process, the native Indian populations were decimated by imported diseases (smallpox, typhus and measles especially) and what remained of them were corralled into ever smaller areas of allocated land. Nor were racially-based distinctions set aside as expansion continued. Not until 1880 and 1890 were Alaskan Natives and mainland Indians included in the census and even then the statistics recorded their numbers separately from those of people “in the United States”. Whether a Territory was elevated to become a State of the Union was often as not determined by its ethnic make-up. Immerwahr argues persuasively that statehood for Alaska and Hawaii came later than might otherwise have been expected because of their majority Native populations.
If the first US empire grew out of westward expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the second one almost fell into the United States’ lap as a result of the collapse of the Spanish empire in East Asia and the Caribbean. By 1902 the Philippines had been purchased from Spain for $20M whilst Puerto Rico and Guam were acquired without charge. However, the US showed little or no sustained interest in its new colonial territories which were added to the dozens of small islands (some little more than rocky islets) across the Pacific acquired principally for their guano deposits the previous century. Whilst President Woodrow Wilson developed a line in anti-imperial rhetoric during the First World War, at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 he focussed on eastern European claimants to independent statehood. The claims of the US territory of Puerto Rico didn’t feature on the agenda and a penchant for anti-imperial rhetoric did not stop the US from purchasing the Danish West Indies, subsequently renamed them the US Virgin Islands. And, as Immerwahr notes, Wilson and the United States ruled out from consideration Japanese overtures to include language on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations.
By the 1930s, the US second empire was well-established, but the impact of the Second World War produced novel patterns. In 1945, the United States possessed the fourth-largest empire in the world. All of that changed in the years ahead, not least when the Philippines gained their independence; but the dominance of the United States globally took different forms, ones which Immerwahr sees as a new kind of empire. That said, the US territorial footprint after the 1940s became smaller and more bespoke to its post-war obligations and ambitions. The United States often utilised leased territories (a number from Britain) whilst on the territories of its allies across East Asia and Western Europe, the US military established numerous bases. Together these constituted a new frontier of forward defence of the United States and of its friends. Important but not quite an empire.
Meanwhile, and closer once more to home, Alaska and Hawaii remained territories – as originally defined by James Monroe in the late 18th century – and would only become States of the Union in 1959. Puerto Rico remained what it still is, an “unincorporated” territory of the United States. So too did the US Virgin Islands and Guam. Expressed territorially there is not much left of the United States empire, but it mattered whilst it existed. After all, for the United States, the Second World War began at Pearl Harbour, then still one of its territories.