immerwahr

The historical ground Immerwahr covers here is well known in its contours and, as critics have noted, certainly not ‘hidden’ from the vantage point of anyone with more than a passing knowledge in the field: settler colonialism, dispossession and removal of the Indians, expansionism, the War of 1898 (the Rough Riders get yet another outing), annexations in the Pacific and Caribbean, bloody counterinsurgency in the Philippines, ‘Progressive’ experimentation and impositions. Even the one obscure episode here, Senator William Seward’s signal opening in the Guano Islands Act of 1856 for the addition of ‘appurtenances’—small islands having deposits of bird droppings—has been intensely scrutinized. Historians of the us do write about empire, and a great deal of attention has been devoted to such subjects as colonial rule in the Philippines. Immerwahr is of course aware of this; but he claims, with some justification, that much of that attention is episodic, focused on the pronounced imperialist moment around 1900 and its immediate aftermath. Books on us overseas territories are metaphorically ‘filed on the wrong shelves’, he claims—they seem to be about ‘foreign countries’. Besides, his target audience is ‘the public’; hence he largely avoids historiographical engagement. Nevertheless, general readers, too, could have benefited from an appendix on the historiography and his position within it.

The genre, then, is popular history, and the author pursues it with vigour. The book is packed with pictures, the tone is informal, the language flows, the stories are poignant, if occasionally formulaic. Immerwahr writes with passion about the many ‘native’ victims of his Greater United States, from evicted Cherokees to Filipino navvies and Puerto Rican freedom fighters. Colourful figures and personalities are evoked to considerable effect. One striking case is Fritz Haber. A German-Jewish chemist around the turn of the century, Haber was a chief inventor of substitute fertilizer, thus eliminating the need for guano and greatly aiding the German position in World War I. He followed this up by creating poison gas. After the War, he did pioneering work on insecticides. Upshot one: Haber the brilliant chemist unwittingly provides substances that would later be used in the extermination programmes in which some of his relatives would perish. Upshot two: Clara, Haber’s long-suffering scientist wife and opponent of his war-time work who committed suicide in 1915, was the cousin of Immerwahr’s great-grandfather. Personal anecdote aside, Immerwahr has an outstanding eye for the telling detail and the unusual angle. The factual approach, sometimes deadpan, sometimes existentially invested, is effective. As popular history, it works: How to Hide an Empire is filled with stories many general readers may not have come across. The problems lie elsewhere. They have to do with the argument, which eventually materializes.

Even as the shape of the logo map was being finalized in the 1850s, Immerwahr asserts, it was already being transcended by the ‘appurtenant’ guano islands. He is right, but only in retrospect; contemporaries scarcely imagined us expansion had come to a stop. The Civil War—rather a massive assault on the logo map and relatively absent from Immerwahr’s narrative—was followed by a reluctance to expand into what were seen as racially suspect areas, conversely permitting the mammoth addition of the Alaskan tundra in 1867. Nonetheless, even some anti-imperialists at the turn of the century blithely assumed the ‘natural’ addition of, say, British Columbia, according to the old model of continental expansion. This is the imperialist moment, then, when the logo map briefly took second place to school-room maps of the ‘Greater United States’. It was soon followed by a period of relative neglect, when the outside territories became either a naval concern or a ‘zone of experimentation’.

Immerwahr’s account of the latter is especially good. He delineates, for example, post-annexation Puerto Rico through the figure of Pedro Albizu Campos, hero of the independence struggle. The extraordinary Albizu (1891–1965) returns throughout the book, whenever his island is the subject-matter: sent by fortuitous circumstances to the United States for higher education, and graduating from Harvard and Harvard Law, he participated in the us army in World War One; then, deeply disappointed by Wilson’s lack of interest in Puerto Rican autonomy, he founded the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and eventually spent decades in prison for real and imagined crimes of insurrection, the last in the early 1950s when his followers unfurled the Puerto Rican flag and fired gunshots in the House of Representatives in Washington. By then, Albizu had been politically out-manoeuvred by his rival Luis Muñoz Marin, whose awkward but effective half-measure, neither independence nor statehood, won the day. This is Immerwahr at his best, combining an account of an individual fate with a structural dissection of colonial conditions. Puerto Rico, as it happened, was turned into a laboratory for sundry experiments in ‘family planning’ on the premise that its chief problem was over-population, leading to the development of the contraceptive pill, as well as a truly staggering incidence of sterilization procedures.

The real argument of Immerwahr’s book emerges with the Second World War, which, on his account, had two effects. On the one hand, it brought enormous violence, brutalization and devastation in the Pacific, especially in the Philippines, where the reconquest of Manila turned into the single most destructive event on us soil, not least because of bungled American tactics. Beyond the ferocity of the War itself, the territories experienced harsh impositions, courtesy of the us authorities, including de facto internments. On the other hand, the mobilization for war generated vast innovations in logistics and transportation, as well as in manufacturing, especially in synthetics. This is a topic of the keenest interest to Immerwahr. He is a logistical materialist with a consuming interest in how things actually work. His elective affinity with Herbert Hoover (‘an astonishingly capable bureaucrat’) is not surprising.

In Immerwahr’s telling, the dramatic consequences of the War laid the ground for the ensuing shift from colonization to globalization and the ‘pointillist empire’. Put simply, his thesis is that there was no longer any need for the tropics and so, at the very peak of its global power—the ‘dizzying heights of imperial possibility’—the United States chose to decolonize rather than to annex more territory. Immerwahr mentions that anti-imperialist resistance had been sparked by the War. But his real driving force, described with a set of breathless compound-verbs—‘empire-killing’, ‘territory-defying’, ‘space-hopping’, ‘space-annihilating’—is technology, logistics, the spread of us standards. We are given a detailed account of how the us forced the British to follow its screw-thread standard. Even as geopolitics almost disappears, empire as such finds new forms: standardization, plus a map dotted with bases. The new world of ‘Baselandia’ is coupled with the globalizing might of sundry American technical and cultural standardizations, as power in another format: the dominance of English as a first and second language, the ubiquity of the red octagon (the stop sign), synthetics, communications. In a word, globalization.

This is not persuasive. Though standardization certainly happened, Immerwahr’s language becomes oddly exaggerated and celebratory in describing these changes. Just as there were few limits to the successful mobilization of the War at home, there seem in his account to be few limits to the post-territorial empire afterwards. One must remind oneself that the world actually went metric. More important, the functional argument is wrong. There was no ‘need’, even in Immerwahr’s minimalist sense, for ‘empire’ in 1939 (or even in 1900) and no ‘need’ in 1945. The little shedding that took place post-war was not about declining ‘need’, synthetic rubber notwithstanding. The dots are there and the empire changed, but the framing, periodization and causal argument are wrong. What emerged after the War was not points, but a new geopolitics of alliances dominated by the hegemonic United States in the name of the Cold War.

Strategically, it was always the case that the us Navy would ‘need’ some version of a world dotted with bases. Alfred Mahan had said as much in the 1890s. The military had already set forth strategic claims with a globalist flavour midway through the Second World War. The name-to-be of that game was, of course, ‘national security’—a notion that rarely appears in Immerwahr’s account. The ‘empire’ that emerged after the expansionary turn of the War featured not only bases but alliances, protectorates, client states, trading zones, all manner of asymmetrical economic relations, interventionism—and, indeed, retained colonies. Thus the post-war era, dominated by global-security concepts pitched on Cold War grounds, included an array of different spatializations not easily fitted into Immerwahr’s original version of ‘empire’. As it happened, the war-time concept of future bases became—unexpectedly—a worldwide system of multilateral and bilateral security pacts, anchored in and guaranteed by the United States, all in the name of ‘national security’ and anti-communism. This was not just a ‘pointillist’ network of ‘semi-sovereign’ dots, logistically connected and radiating cultural and technological influence (exposing the impressionable Liverpudlian teenagers John and Paul to American popular music). This was a new geopolitical map of agglomerated Cold War alliances and us dominance.

Need is one thing, actually existing empire another; getting out is fraught with the inertia of the real. It was not the case that the us actually decolonized to any great degree at the end of the War; there was more us enthusiasm about the British being forced to relinquish their quasi-colonial market barriers. The only sizeable shedding here was the Philippines, and that had been decided in the 1930s, long before Immerwahr’s logistical revolution, in part because of the eagerness of domestic sugar interests to exclude Philippine competition. The romance of classical European colonialism as civilization had long since faded. Even before the First World War, the arrival of William Howard Taft in the White House signified a change, with his ‘dollar diplomacy’—Taft, whose experiences in the Philippines in the early 1900s had made him acutely aware of the difficulties of colonial rule. What remained on the us side in the interwar period was desultory management coupled with direct rule here and there—as Immerwahr himself records. The pre-eminent us conception of ‘interest’ in the world was not territorialized colonialism but control of markets and strategic points.

This, obviously, had nothing to do with synthetic rubber. In fact, no substantial us interests had ever taken root in the Philippine islands—unlike in Cuba, technically non-imperial but essentially a protectorate. Puerto Rico remained, as did lots of islands in the Pacific; indeed, the us added some under the subterfuge of un trusteeship. Some colonial possessions proved continuously useful as militarized spots—Guam remains an ‘instrumentality’ of the us Congress—while others were retained because there was no great push to do otherwise. Some were dedicated to obliteration as nuclear-testing sites. To this day, the us strategically controls a huge aquatic area in the South Pacific.

Immerwahr’s argument, however, turns out to be less about shedding colonies than the absence of further claims: enormous us power in 1945 was not expressed in annexations. To make that into a problem requires a singularly apolitical reading of the War. The us affirmed the virtues of ‘self-determination’, and there is no doubt that fdr was convinced colonialism was over and done with. Actual emancipation might take a long time, but the historical fact of the matter was clear. This would have been the conviction with or without the Second World War; but conflict intensified the issue, not least because the monumental struggle was fought against three neo-imperialist powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, whose entire being was predicated on territorial conquest and annexation. To destroy their project was in itself to affirm the value of the opposite. The Atlantic Charter may have been a play for the galleries, but it expressed the ideology of the operation, as did the un Charter of 1945. France, Britain and the Netherlands tried in different ways to reclaim their empires after the War, but in world-historical terms the game really was over. Politically, there was never a moment of ‘imperial possibilities’ in 1945. Immerwahr’s aside that fascist annexation had somehow shown the viability of the concept for the United States creates a puzzle out of nothing. The anti-fascist nature of the War was not a minor aspect.

Equally strange in the would-be puzzle of shedding is Immerwahr’s inclusion of the post-war occupation zones of Germany and Austria along with Japan in the ‘Greater United States’. There was never any prospect of annexing that territory. The authority of ‘occupation’ is not the same as the authority of territorial sovereignty—if it were, Immerwahr should have included the various earlier occupations, ending in the 1920s and 30s, of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. It was already clear by then that such strategies were unproductive and that other modes of domination and control—such as farming out repression to local constabularies—were preferable. Conversely, if annexation was not on the cards, occupation was not ‘wrapped up speedily’ after the War, as Immerwahr claims. The occupation of Japan went on for seven years and ended, not accidentally, with a security treaty that turned Japan into a us protectorate. Meanwhile, the formal end of the occupation of the Bundesrepublik in 1955 was coupled with membership in the us-led nato; it would continue to house some twenty-plus American divisions. This, again, is neither the relinquishing of territory, nor the emergence of pointillism. It is another kind of geopolitical mapping altogether.

One problem here is Immerwahr’s undifferentiated concept of us power—the logo map as a unitary actor, a notion ironically reinforcing what is supposed to be in question. After the War, the us is said to have ‘reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe.’ Immerwahr’s semantics suggests, if not a hedge-fund manager, then at least some figure of panoptical intelligence making decisions for the whole. Viewed in a global context, however, us interests actually moved along different axes of policy orientation. This is unsurprising: the spatial logic of running a global navy differs from that of running a geopolitical alliance, which is itself different from that of running a financial system, which is also different from that of controlling raw materials. Techno-logistics enter into all these tasks, but it is not their determinant; nor are the resultant spatializations the products of any single logic.

From having had no argument, then, Immerwahr advances to an altogether too simple thesis of points and standards. His belief in substitutionism seems boundless. He approvingly quotes U Thant, Secretary-General of the un in the 1960s, who believed that developed economies could have ‘the kind and scale of resources they decide to have’, as though creation out of nothing was and is the order of the day. This is not the way the world economy works, then or now. There was never any direct correlation between ‘colonialism’, as Immerwahr defines it, and the control of raw materials. This is a complex question, as political control was sometimes practical but very often not. The concern was always central for Japan, whose pre- and post-war history is eloquent testimony to the problem of resources; much less so for the logo map, within which ample coal and iron ore could always be combined into steel.

Rather than seeing the post-war period as rational shedding of territory, one might consider it a moment when the ‘hiding’ operation is reaffirmed by means of deficient attention. The old colonial possessions did not matter that much—as Immerwahr notes in passing. The new empire was by no means merely one of ‘semi-sovereign’ points, however, but a global, hegemonic system of geopolitics and economic dominance, involving all kinds of spatializations and zones of intervention. Amidst the official plaudits of anti-colonialism, self-determination and ‘freedom’, the logo map (with the eventual addition of Hawaii and Alaska) was thus given pride of place in the new world order of struggle against the forces of evil. Indeed, the us logo map became the very guarantee of that world order. This entailed ‘empire’ on a wholly different scale and of a wholly different kind than that of Immerwahr’s jurisdictions.