Review of How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

*How to Hide an Empire* by Daniel Immerwahr (2019). Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lately, I’ve been missing graduate school. I received my master’s degree in Global Humanities, and it was basically an interdisciplinary degree where we read a lot of literature, history, communication, and gender studies content. I read so much theory and history during that time, and I loved what I was doing.

That said, I can feel my brain slowly rotting away these days. I was waiting for a Fulbright visa that would never come, so I call this era my funemployment era. But because I was sitting around and waiting for something to happen, I read a lot of books and movies to try and stop the brain rot.

It was when I was meeting up with a friend still in our graduate program that she suggested reading How to Hide an Empire. We were talking about the election, which had not happened at the time, and she was saying that if a certain candidate won, it might be better for the rest of the world.

I then saw the next day that the book was available through Kindle Unlimited after I got an email offering a three month subscription to the platform for free. So I signed up, planned to cancel before it charged me, and got reading.

Here’s my review! I don’t want to ramble too much in this introduction.

A look into the United States’ version of hidden empire.

This is a book about looking deeper into United States history. As Immerwahr points out early on in the book, we often see a certain map depicting the United States: the 50 states. It does not include all of the territories that the United States holds on to, which is a form of empire, nor all of the military bases that are American property all over the globe.

The United States is a direct product of the search for profit; as a graduate student who often had professors who specialized in American history, I was very familiar with how manifest destiny and whatnot pushed these ideologies of white superiority and the need to “conquer.”

The conquest of indigenous territory is an entirely different textbook in itself, but Immerwahr instead focuses on how the USA expanded abroad. We see the War of 1898 and the acquisition of the Philippines into the United States, changing the hands of the local rulers from Spanish to American.

We get an extensive look into the impact of American rule in the Philippines. There are some horrifying aspects, especially when we dive closer to World War II. While we often consider American WWII history to just be mainland soldiers being sent off to the Pacific or Europe, the homeland only touched when Hawaii was bombed, the Philippines was under threat way before that.

Yet, because they were not seen as Americans, it flew under the radar. This is something that becomes a reoccurring theme throughout the course of this book. We see how those falling under the American empire are erased from the main narratives of the USA, even with increasing immigration to the mainland.

One of the main chapters that stood out on this was Puerto Rico. The sections on forced sterilizations of Puerto Rican women and the practice of birth control to try and diminish that population is more than terrifying in so many different ways.

As someone who also works in theater, I appreciated the discussion of West Side Story and how it evolved from stereotypes used to try and make Puerto Ricans “un-American.” While I knew some of the ground this book covers before reading it, I felt like I learned a lot as well.

Overall Thoughts

This is a book I find so important because we still don’t think about the territories we have. Puerto Ricans are not allowed to vote, nor are the people who live on other islands. Yet they are heavily impacted by US policy, even if they themselves are not allowed to participate in what is claimed to be a whole democracy.

Immerwahr writes clearly, although this content matter is fairly dense. It took me a hot minute to get through the book, as I wanted to take my time understanding what was being dictated on the page. You can’t rush through books like these or you’re going to lose out.

I’d say pick this one up if you haven’t already. It’s critical to understand these forms of history and erasure, especially as the United States starts veering rightward and banning books.

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