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

Product Information

As those who are familiar with work from authors like Tim Marshall will know, power and influence are inextricably linked with land holdings and Immerwahr’s analysis of these examples help to cement this knowledge. As the case of the Philippines made clear, the US could have a territory while the average US citizen in the street of logo map USA wouldn’t have a clue. Immerwahr said in an interview that the colonies “are not usually emphasised when we talk about US history” (Democracy Now! Japan invaded many territories of both the US and Britain during World War Two, this created a scarcity of raw materials crucial for manufacturing and industry. These developments further changed the polices of many former imperial colonies and changed the foreign policy and geopolitics of the 20th century as ‘secure access to raw materials- one of the chief benefits of colonisation-no longer mattered’ (275).

It shows the history of empire, but it also shows us that the concept of empire isn’t one that just exists in history – empire is something that continues today. The Christian missionaries (from the Puritan Congregationalist sect) arrived in 1820 with a plan to convert “the natives. Its founders had wrested liberty from an oppressive empire—turning subjects into citizens and colonies into states—and were eager to push their republican form of government westward across the continent, from sea to shining sea.This is part of the ‘hidden’ nature – the US believed themselves to be freeing their conquests and not acting as imperialists.

Part of its goal is to show how precisely how US imperialism has been made to be more cost-effective and also more invisible. By focusing on the processes by which Americans acquired, controlled, and were affected by territory, Daniel Immerwahr shows that the United States was not just another 'empire,' but was a highly distinctive one the dimensions of which have been largely ignored.This dichotomy forms the basis for this book: Immerwahr details the often overlooked or unknown history of the US empire and aims to explore exactly how the US came to dominate global politics and the maps of the world today whilst maintaining the American belief that they are not imperialist in any way. Vast development in material technology, like plastic and rubber, enabled America to no longer be resource driven and released their grasp on most of these territories while still having bases there to mobilize and continue its global warcraft.

In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime. If you give University of California college students a quiz on where the US' overseas territories are, most who take it will fail (trust me, I've done it).Immerwahr does not seem to fault teachers and his fellow professors who are including decreasing amounts of content relating to the United States’ own colonial roots in their courses without replacing it with information about the territories, let alone military bases abroad. But the other thing this did was to make it less necessary for the US to literally dominate countries in the ways the UK had with its empire (upon which, the sun never set). Clair, a conservative Scotsman who’d been Washington’s aide-de-camp, had little patience for the rambunctious frontier.