How to Hide an Empire: a History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr.- 2019 - 517 Pages

How to hide an empire: a history of the greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr.- 2019 - 517 Pages

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune

A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff pick.

A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

This standard time line leaves itself open to the suggestion that the Philippines had no history prior to 1531.

• Spanish rule (1521–1898)

• American rule (1898–1946)

• Japanese occupation (1941–1946)

• Philippine self rule (1946–present)

Immerwahr book exposes the racist ideas inherent in not seeing any import to learning about the history of the Philippines before 1531.

"In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.

In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history."

From the publisher 

I found this book of significant personal interest. Twenty years ago I moved from Florida to the Philippines. I began to learn the culture and the history. Everywhere fast food places with American pedigrees are ubiquitous. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos was propped up by the US. TV, movie and streaming services are dominated by American products. Without a very high proficiency in English, it is very hard to get a professional job.  

The USA bought the Philippines from Spain after it beat Spain in a war. They also got Puerto Rico, Guam and some very small islands. Immerwahr spends a lot of time detailing the 13 year waged by Philippino guerrillas and armies in a failed attempt to gain independence. The Americans killed not just fighters by women, children, even Infants. The American forces were much better equipped. Many of their officers were veterans of wars against Native Americans. When some later suggested statehood for the country the response of American politicians was no way was a non-whites dominated territory going to be allowed a state

When the US military prevailed in the Mexican-American War, in 1848, many in Congress wanted to annex all of Mexico. In the end, the victor limited its spoils to the most northerly, least populated areas (including the current states of California, Nevada, and Utah) —“all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people,” as one newspaper editorialized. Or as John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery senator from South Carolina, put it: “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race.” 

The same objections were raised to western territories to Alaska and Hawawi for a long time.

Immerwahr goes into a lot of detail on Douglas MacArthur's long relationship with the Philippines including his return to lead the US attack on Japanese forces, his governing of the post war country and his absolute rule of Japan.

  The Philippines in particular suffered deeply. Expecting independence after the Spanish were vanquished, this archipelago of more than two thousand islands instead endured an American takeover that led to fourteen years of warfare, with more deaths than the Civil War, including the worst massacre by Americans in recorded history (the Battle of Bud Dajo, in which nearly one thousand Filipino Muslims were slaughtered). The country’s anguish, and American indifference to it, persisted into the mid-twentieth century: Immerwahr’s descriptions of how the Filipinos experienced World War II — caught between the Japanese occupiers and an American government much more focused on the war in Europe — are especially disturbing. 

Immerwahr devotes a lot of time to talking about Puerto Rica how has never been given the level of help as American states have been during natural disasters. Puerto Ricans were used as test subjects in medical tests without their knowledge.

I found Immerwahr's information on the Guano Islands fascinating as I had no prior knowledge of the extreme importance of these small uninhabited islands in the Pacific to American food production.

Immerwahr provides a very informative account of the latest phase of American empire — the post–World War II era. With decolonization sweeping Africa and Asia, the optics of the world’s triumphant democracy holding on to its possessions would have been abysmal. So the four largest territories all got decolonized in some fashion: in 1946 the Philippines received its independence; in 1952 Puerto Rico was granted what Immerwahr calls the “nebulous status” of commonwealth; and in 1959, Alaska and Hawaii became states. 

There is much more in this book. All with a serious interest in American history will be enthralled by this book.

Daniel Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Intellectual History Award. He has written for Slate, n+1, and Dissent, among others.

Mel Ulm