Daniel Immerwahr

For an empire, the United States hides it well. In his 2019 book, “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” Daniel Immerwahr told the story of the United States beyond its continental borders. Much of that “Greater United States” lies in Asia. The United States of 2023 does not often reflect on itself as a colonial power, but the evidence of American colonialism blankets Asia: from the scars of massive conflicts in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, to military bases dotted across the region, to the dominance of English.

In the following interview, Immerwahr – the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University’s History Department – reflects on the United States’s colonial past, and colonial present, in Asia.

What accounts for the “hidden” nature of the United States’ overseas imperium? Is this simply a matter of historical and geographic distance that places it beyond the national consciousness, or are there other factors at play?

A distinctive feature of the United States’ territorial empire is how it’s been kept like a secret. And why has that been? It’s not geographic distance. Other countries had distant colonies – India is far from Great Britain – that they had no difficulty paying attention to. And Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, two U.S. territories, are quite close to its mainland. It’s also not “historical distance”: colonialism isn’t over for the United States, which has five inhabited territories today.

My sense is that three things are important. First, the United States was born of a revolt against empire, so anti-imperialism has been part of its dominant culture. Second, the experience of settler colonialism – violently dispossessing Native Americans – loomed so large in the cultural imagination of the country that overseas empire became hard to fathom. Third, the United States achieved global power during the age of decolonization, which encouraged its leaders to dissociate themselves from colonialism. All this encouraged the United States to sweep its colonies under the rug.

Briefly, in what ways did the U.S. acquire colonies in Asia? And how did the U.S. at the time conceive of its actions? Did Washington view itself as different from European colonizers?

The United States took its largest colony, the Philippines in Southeast Asia, as the result of two wars. First, it fought a war with the Spanish Empire in 1898, after which the United States claimed Spain’s colonies of Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam (and simultaneously claimed the non-Spanish lands of Hawai‘i and American Samoa). Then, when Filipinos refused to submit to this new sovereignty, the United States launched a war that started in 1899 and lasted four years.

As late as 1913, the army was still fighting Filipinos and ruling parts of the colony by martial law. The war killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. The best count we have suggests that it killed more people than the U.S. Civil War.

Historians have pointed out that U.S. leaders, in subduing and ruling the Philippines, often looked to European empires for inspiration. The most famous imperial poem ever written, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” was composed as advice from Britain to the United States in the Philippines. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt received an advance copy and the poem was published, by extraordinary coincidence, on the day the U.S.-Philippine war broke out. The United States took that advice and, in many ways, fashioned itself as a colonizer in the style of Europeans.

Looking at Asia today, what are the most obvious legacies of U.S. colonialism? What legacies are less prominent?

Asia has been the site of the United States’ largest wars: the U.S.-Philippine War, the bombing of Japan during World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the war in Afghanistan. The military legacy is all too obvious, especially in Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, which have had extensive histories of hosting U.S. military bases. One thing I note in my book is how politically destabilizing these have been. Two Japanese prime ministers have resigned over controversies surrounding U.S. bases.

Another key legacy, though less obvious, is the spread of English. Although Britain sowed the seeds of English in Asia with its colonial incursions dating to the 18th century, English didn’t truly become a global language until the late 20th century, and the rise of the United States is a big part of that story. People learn languages that will in some way get them ahead in life, and the fact that the United States has exerted so much power since 1945 has made English the language to learn. Perhaps this isn’t surprising in Manila or Seoul, where the U.S. has had a “boots on the ground” presence, but in 2004 Mongolia’s prime minister, a Harvard graduate, declared that English would become Mongolia’s first foreign language and that Ulaanbaatar should be a hub for call centers.

People often point out the impacts that the U.S. had on its former and present colonies, but did this impact run the other way? What sort of impact did U.S. colonies have on the metropole?

My book is an attempt to show that territorial empire has mattered for the United States, even if most people on the U.S. mainland are only vaguely aware of its colonial history. One thing I point to is the pattern by which the colonies serve as laboratories or nurseries for phenomena that will later define mainland life. So, I show how one of the most important U.S. architects and planners, Daniel Burnham, could realize his vision more effectively in the Philippines than on the mainland. Or how doctors used Puerto Ricans for medical experimentation, which became especially important in the development of the birth control pill.

If you add military bases into the story, you can see even more ways in which the territorial outposts of the United States haven’t been peripheral but central to its history. The Beatles, Sony, and al-Qaida, I argue, are all in various ways products of the pointillist empire of bases.

Finally, the U.S. maintains several territories in the Pacific – such as Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas – but these are not often referred to as “colonies.” Are there debates about decolonization in these territories?

The question of empire is alive in all the U.S. territories. If you’re born in any of them, you are a U.S. national, but you lack the rights that your compatriots have. People in the territories can’t vote for president, don’t have effective voting representation in Congress, and aren’t fully protected by the Constitution. So, for example, one famous clause in the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment, guarantees citizenship for anyone born in the United States. But if you’re born in American Samoa, you don’t get that citizenship, because, under U.S. law, American Samoa isn’t in all senses “the United States.”

It’s clear that the millions of people in the territories are in some sense colonized, even if not everyone uses that term. Yet what to do about it isn’t obvious. Decolonization might take the form of independence, but it’s not easy for relatively small island societies to economically and militarily set out on their own, especially as their affairs have been so thoroughly entangled with those of the U.S. mainland. Decolonization might alternatively take the form of statehood. Or it might take the form of protecting your ability to have different laws than the mainland. Maybe decolonization is refusing English, shutting down U.S. military bases, or changing discriminatory shipping laws.

The debates over decolonization, in other words, aren’t just about whether to decolonize but about what decolonization should look like.