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

How to Hide an Empire — and Accidentally Praise It

I just finished How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr, and I think it’s a fascinating book that sets out to poke at some of the ugly things about America and ends up spending roughly a third of its time explaining why America is great. Let me explain.

I’ve been on an American history kick lately, reading my way through the country’s past to mark the 250th birthday. One thread I wanted to pull on was the Philippines: how did America and the Philippines actually fit together, historically? When I asked Claude for a recommendation, it pointed me here — with the caveat that this was not a patriotic book, and that even though I’d asked for a patriotic reading list, it would still scratch the itch I had.

Claude was right.

The book breaks roughly into three parts.

Part One: Manifest Destiny

The first third is about Manifest Destiny, which I’ve read about elsewhere and which sits in the back of everyone’s mind as one of the darker chapters of American history. The short version: America displaced Native Americans over and over again, draining and pushing them westward in cycle after cycle.

What’s new here is that this is the first book I’ve read that really grapples with the population explosion underway in Anglo-America and Europe more broadly. Immerwahr notes that Benjamin Franklin predicted America would outgrow England within a hundred years — and that he turned out to be right. That kind of demographic growth simply could not be held back, even as people kept trying to “solve” what they thought of as the Native American problem.

There were attempts at accommodation. At one point the idea was that the Mississippi might serve as the border between Indian America and white America. Then it was, what if there were an Indian state? — which feeds into the history of Oklahoma. None of this changes the overall arc of the story, but it’s an interesting look at a recurring pattern: a gesture toward accommodation, followed by its failure, driven by the white government blatantly ignoring and then repudiating its own agreements.

This rhymes with the Slave Power thread I’d been following — the outsized weight slaveholder interests threw around in expansion policy. The accommodation failures weren’t only that, but the political grip of slaveholding interests on the territory question is a real part of why every compromise collapsed.

So that’s the first third: very interesting, but not exactly new ground.

Part Two: Inheriting the Spanish Empire

The second part is about how America acquired the remains of the Spanish Empire.

I’d read the Teddy Roosevelt biographies, so I came in with some sense of how he handled this. Immerwahr is not a Teddy fan. He paints him as bloodthirsty and hungry to expand the American empire, and that reading mostly holds up.

There was a real appetite — especially among white slaveholders — to push into the Caribbean. Most people are vaguely aware of this, and of the filibusters, which the book also covers. But after the Civil War, several distinct strains of anti-imperialism were running at once. One was an intellectual and moral strain, embodied by people like Mark Twain, who simply thought empire was wrong. They were correct. One of the book’s takeaways is that the Philippines was, in effect, America’s first Vietnam. At the same time, racists across the country were dead set on keeping people of color out of American territory.

Putting Part One and Part Two side by side is where it gets interesting. In Part One, America is a vast white population expanding under something like Malthusian pressure — growing horizontally and extensively rather than intensively, onto land that was treated as empty. The ratios weren’t close. Yes, there were many thousands of Native Americans, but there were many millions of white settlers, so in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and California the demographic balance was never really in question.

In Part Two, the lands America claims — guano islands aside — already have a lot of people on them. When America liberates Cuba and suddenly owns it, it has inherited a population of color that white Americans don’t want to absorb. Same with the Philippines. And there really does seem to be a genuine anti-imperialist impulse running underneath all of it: America could not absorb an empire and extend democracy to it so it did something cleverer and uglier. It invented a tier of second-class status (the Insular Cases, territories ruled ‘foreign in a domestic sense’) that let it keep the land without enfranchising the people on it.

That tells you something about democracies, and about how America in particular is wired. When Britain expanded its empire, it could build a dedicated imperial apparatus — and it largely did so before democracy was established, and before anyone felt democracy needed to be extended to the people under British rule. In America, there was an expectation that democracy actually had to matter. Cuba was put on a path to independence almost immediately; in the Roosevelt biographies, half the drama is about how fraught that was.

The Philippines is the really interesting case. They win independence from Spain, fielding a rebel force that America initially pairs up with — and then that rebel force basically says: okay, we’re independent now, and we’re a dictatorship.

I don’t think the book fully wrestles with this, but it jumps out when you run the history forward: America can’t simply let the Philippines go. If you genuinely wanted a world of democracies and free trade, America didn’t need the Philippines all that much — there were some economic benefits and a few resources you couldn’t get on the mainland, but the real problem was geopolitical.

And by 1900 the geopolitics had stopped being about wealth. Somewhere in the 1700s, imperialism shifts from “I want to get rich” to “I need an empire to stay relevant,” and by the late 1800s that shift has hardened into a full arms race — powers grabbing territory, coaling stations, and navies less because each grab pays than because a rival takes it if they don’t. By the time the US is deciding what to do with the Philippines, it’s playing inside that forcing game. An unclaimed strategic island in 1900 isn’t a candidate for independence; it’s a square somebody else moves on. There’s no realistic timeline where the Philippines stays independent for long — so America had to bite the bullet, at least partway.

This is one of my few real complaints about the book. It keeps describing America as having an empire without lining up the incentives for why America would want one, beyond that geopolitical logic — a big navy, the naval connections, the bases. The motive stays a little blurry.

The Pivot: The Empire That Took No Land

America eventually puts the Philippines on a path to independence in the 1930s. And then, inconveniently for everyone, Japan invades essentially every country in Asia. America goes to war — with Japan, and with Germany — and comes out the other side as a global superpower spanning the entire planet.

This is the point where the book quietly stops being so hard on empire. It’s still overtly critical. But the register shifts into something I’d call covertly adoring.

After the war, America does several remarkable things. It sets global standards — something it was uniquely positioned to do because the war had given it the ability to ship and train everywhere. It makes English the default language of intellectual and cultural life, building on what the British started and then locking it in through air traffic control, radio, and eventually the internet.

And then the strange part: America takes no territory. In fact, it pressures the other European powers into giving theirs up.

Two things stand out. First, America was in a position where it genuinely could have grabbed land if it wanted to. Plenty of people at the time were amazed it didn’t — you can read accounts marveling that America could have just started bombing the hell out of the Soviet Union and tried to take over the whole world. It just didn’t. I think that’s an enormously lucky outcome, and also a genuinely interesting one.

Second, the book spends a long time on how a non-territorial empire became technologically possible. Immerwahr walks us through the history of rubber — why European powers were so desperate for it, and how engineers eventually got us out from under it. The thing he keeps circling is that, after 1945, America didn’t need an empire to get what it wanted. It had the technological means to pull resources from the air, from oil, and to project power wherever it needed to, without holding large plots of land. Where the UK needed colonial possessions just to lay telegraph wire, the United States had radio and satellites. It was everywhere all at once. It didn’t need a legal border — it was the field around everybody and everything.

I think that’s a genuinely powerful idea.

A Detour Through the European Empires

I kept wishing I could pair this book with a good history of how the European empires actually grew. When you read something like The Anarchy, on the British takeover of India, you notice there was a step change between the 1500s, the 1800s, and the 1900s in how European imperialism even worked.

Spanish imperialism was the first kind, and it ran on the old playbook: one empire walks in, cuts off the head of another, and installs its own head in its place. That’s what happened to the Aztecs, and to the Incas. The space in between filled up with a loose network of Spanish colonies and missionary depots. That was more or less the world standard.

On the other side of the planet, the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British were building something different — trade networks. Corporate networks that didn’t really need land, in much the same way America wouldn’t later. What these operations needed was simply the ability to trade. And what they fell into was a recursive loop: they got wealthier, which meant they had to defend their trading posts from locals and from each other, which meant the locals needed defense too, and around it went.

The technology of the post-1600s world basically manufactured an economic incentive for imperialism. This may not be the standard Marxist read, but it’s the counterintuitive thing the history keeps showing: people didn’t set out to conquer the world. They set out to make a buck, secure some resources, and make sure their geopolitical rivals couldn’t screw them over. The empire was downstream of that.

And this, in a real way, is what drove part of the Great Divergence — and the Divergence closed the same way it opened, through the spread of technology. That spread was backed, after 1940, by American standardization and hegemony.

That’s the part the book does really well: showing how all these small forces lock together.

Which leads me to the question I actually want to sit with: what does the empire of the future look like?

What Does the Empire of the Future Look Like?

The technologies available to us now aren’t that different from the ones we had in the 1940s. We still have humans flying planes. We still have a world that is busy learning English. The large language models being built today learn English first, and they’re driven overwhelmingly by English-language — that is, American — companies. (You can call DeepMind British, I suppose, if you squint hard enough.)

And I think that’s fine. The book is good on this. When people talk about a thousand-year American empire, I think what they’re really pointing at is the cultural layer — and the standardization and Englishification of the world probably aren’t going anywhere. Future empires won’t bother dislodging them. There’s no reason to. It’s wildly expensive to replace a working global system when you could just take it over instead. That, I suspect, is what a future empire actually does.

And at that point, can you even call it an empire?

The book ends on a question: does America have an empire? The answer is yes — technically, because it owns Guam. Which I think is a perfectly fine answer. (Guam should probably get a regular vote on its independence, or on whether to kick the military off, because democracy is good.) But America’s real empire, the one people chafe under, is its ability to influence by projecting power. And future empires, it seems to me, will try to do exactly the same thing.

Here I’m mostly thinking about China.

I think the future empire of the world just looks like America’s current one — what I’d call the pointless empire. Military bases scattered everywhere, projecting power, protecting trade lines and trade barriers, acting as a kind of world police that maintains the strategic balance. On a country-by-country basis, you’d expect future powers to do their own version of this according to their own geopolitical needs.

You’d expect China, for instance, to build a pointless empire connecting it to the oil fields for as long as it needs oil. And you can already see the rough skeleton of it: the Belt and Road Initiative is sort of this, except instead of bases you’re building bridges. It isn’t really working yet, but you can see the attempt. You can see another version in France’s quiet pointless empire over its Francophone ex-colonies.

The book makes a lot of the asymmetry — America has 800 bases, everyone else has maybe 30. But part of that is because the bases are shared. If you’re France, you don’t need many bases; America has you covered. If you’re England, same thing. The networks of influence are already spread across all these countries.

And there’s a part of me that wants to go further and say we may be living in a post-national world, where the forces of capital don’t really care which country is doing the influencing. Nvidia may say it wants America to win the AI race, but what Nvidia actually wants is for the AI race to happen and to be the substrate underneath it. If Nvidia could make more money relocating to China, it would.

That’s worth sitting with. The original empires were built around legal barriers and chartered monopolies — remember, in your American history, that the slaves were carried over by the king’s company. The corporation chartered by the crown is what did the carrying. There was a personal, kin-based, ethnic engine running those empires.

Now? Hopefully everyone in the world owns a sliver of Google. And hopefully, in a couple of years, everyone in the world owns a sliver of OpenAI.

At which point — are you even hiding an empire anymore, or is everybody just in it?

Can you hide the air that you breathe?