DANIEL. IMMERWAHR

How to Hide an Empire

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Consider how similar events played out more recently. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda launched simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Hundreds died (mostly Africans), and thousands were wounded. But though those embassies were outposts of the United States, there was little public sense that the country itself had been harmed. It would take another set of simultaneous attacks three years later, on New York City and Washington, D.C., to provoke an all-out war.

“in war, truth is the first casualty”

So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost.

Empire isn’t just landgrabs, though. What do you call the subordination of African Americans? In W.E.B. Du Bois’s eyes, black people in the United States looked more like colonized subjects than like citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.

It wasn’t until I traveled to Manila, researching something else entirely, that it clicked. To get to the archives, I’d travel by “jeepney,” a transit system originally based on repurposed U.S. Army jeeps. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after U.S. colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I’d arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, I’d hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English.

Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it’s impossible to miss.

Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.

Globalization is a fashionable word, and it’s easy to speak of it in vague terms—to talk of increasingly better technologies drawing a disparate world together. But those new technologies didn’t just crop up. Many were developed by the U.S. military in a short burst of time in the 1940s, with the goal of giving the United States a new relationship to territory. Dramatically, and in just a few years, the military built a world-spanning logistical network that was startling in how little it depended on colonies. It was also startling in how much it centered the world’s trade, transport, and communication on one country, the United States.

A country that had started out resembling the British Empire, with centers of power in the East and subordinated territory in the West, had been turned by the population bomb into something different: a violently expansive empire of settlers, feeding on land and displacing everything in its path.

Another part of the problem was that the government simply didn’t trust its own subjects. A full defense of the Pacific would require arming the populations of Hawai‘i, American Samoa, Guam, the Philippines, and Alaska. Yet war planners hesitated to do that; they seemed as concerned with defending the United States against those colonized peoples as defending it with them. 

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