How to hide an empire
I said I’d review this book if I ever got to finish it. Well, I’ve finished it.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.
Better-written than most history books (and by a scholar, not a mere journalist). Nice, light touch. Frequently funny. This is a merciful quality, since reading about many of these events made me feel like throwing up.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
It’s unusual for an historian to get away with writing the phrase “In a delicious historical irony.”
It comes near the end of the guano chapter, in a digression upon the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. “By inventing ammonia synthesis” – the basis of high-yield farming – Haber “became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.”
Nicely put, I thought, but only slightly pertinent to U.S. imperialism.
By the time I’d read the chapter’s last sentence, I was willing to forgive Immerwahr his digression.
And, it turns out, chemical synthesis is a crucial ingredient of today’s scaled-back imperialistic strategy.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Before I continue discussing the book’s content, I need to say more about its style, which I admire but am irked by. It’s probably the most accomplished specimen I’ve seen of what I call “Young Scholars’ Writing.” By “Young Scholars,” I mean people my age or a little older or younger (it’s hard to be a superb scholar without being at least middle-aged). This writing is learned but studiously un-magisterial and un-avuncular – it’s studiously casual, in other words. It sounds like magazine writing: you could find it in The New Yorker or n+1. (See this representative piece by Immerwahr in n+1; his website has other magazine links.)
The prose is peppered with contractions and throwaway pop-culture references, the sort that erudite, hip up-and-comers would pride themselves on identifying. Recounting the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines, Immerwahr says:
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
All right, I’ll try to set aside my own neuroses. What the book does brilliantly is to inform the anti-imperialist general reader of even more facts about imperialism. Out-of-the-way facts. There is nearly nothing about, e.g., the annexing of Florida and Texas. Theodore Roosevelt, the man, is discussed, but there’s surprisingly little about the U.S.’s early meddling in Cuba (the notorious Platt Amendment is briefly mentioned but not named). Of course, Cuba never was U.S. territory; but then neither were Liverpool (U.K.) or Australia, and they get coverage. There is a lot about the U.S.’s heavy-handed rule over and simultaneous neglect of such places as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Aleutian, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islands; and there’s a whole chapter on the annexation of unpopulated “guano islands.” (And then, near the end, there’s another, James Bond-themed chapter about these and other islands.) The emphasis is on regions outside the “logo map,” the map of the contiguous forty-eight states. There is much discussion of maps. Reading the book is like going to one of those websites with topsy-turvy or weirdly-distorted maps that highlight neglected features of the world.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A back-cover blurb says:
Anyway, what the blurb says is false. This book doesn’t make other histories of U.S. expansionism obsolete. As I’ve noted, it doesn’t try to tell us much about, e.g., the acquisition of Florida and Texas. For all the nice points it makes about the influence of U.S. military bases upon, e.g., the Japanese economy, it says next to nothing about whether there was similar influence upon the South Korean economy. I could go on.
The book is, however, immensely entertaining. A lot of the vignettes are awesome.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.
Better-written than most history books (and by a scholar, not a mere journalist). Nice, light touch. Frequently funny. This is a merciful quality, since reading about many of these events made me feel like throwing up.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
It’s unusual for an historian to get away with writing the phrase “In a delicious historical irony.”
It comes near the end of the guano chapter, in a digression upon the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. “By inventing ammonia synthesis” – the basis of high-yield farming – Haber “became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.”
Nicely put, I thought, but only slightly pertinent to U.S. imperialism.
By the time I’d read the chapter’s last sentence, I was willing to forgive Immerwahr his digression.
And, it turns out, chemical synthesis is a crucial ingredient of today’s scaled-back imperialistic strategy.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Before I continue discussing the book’s content, I need to say more about its style, which I admire but am irked by. It’s probably the most accomplished specimen I’ve seen of what I call “Young Scholars’ Writing.” By “Young Scholars,” I mean people my age or a little older or younger (it’s hard to be a superb scholar without being at least middle-aged). This writing is learned but studiously un-magisterial and un-avuncular – it’s studiously casual, in other words. It sounds like magazine writing: you could find it in The New Yorker or n+1. (See this representative piece by Immerwahr in n+1; his website has other magazine links.)
The prose is peppered with contractions and throwaway pop-culture references, the sort that erudite, hip up-and-comers would pride themselves on identifying. Recounting the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines, Immerwahr says:
Building a road to Baguio would became an obsession of the colonial state. The steep slopes and regular landslides turned it into an all-consuming Werner Herzog-style man vs. nature affair.The offhand allusion to Herzog is wonderful – compact, vivid, precise. In making it, though, Immerwahr signals that he is “preaching to the choir.” He isn’t writing to convert jingoists to anti-imperialism, or even to inform jingoists of the facts about imperialism. He doesn’t expect jingoists to read the book at all. To an old-fogey-minded person like me, that is disturbing.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
All right, I’ll try to set aside my own neuroses. What the book does brilliantly is to inform the anti-imperialist general reader of even more facts about imperialism. Out-of-the-way facts. There is nearly nothing about, e.g., the annexing of Florida and Texas. Theodore Roosevelt, the man, is discussed, but there’s surprisingly little about the U.S.’s early meddling in Cuba (the notorious Platt Amendment is briefly mentioned but not named). Of course, Cuba never was U.S. territory; but then neither were Liverpool (U.K.) or Australia, and they get coverage. There is a lot about the U.S.’s heavy-handed rule over and simultaneous neglect of such places as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Aleutian, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islands; and there’s a whole chapter on the annexation of unpopulated “guano islands.” (And then, near the end, there’s another, James Bond-themed chapter about these and other islands.) The emphasis is on regions outside the “logo map,” the map of the contiguous forty-eight states. There is much discussion of maps. Reading the book is like going to one of those websites with topsy-turvy or weirdly-distorted maps that highlight neglected features of the world.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A back-cover blurb says:
There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining – simultaneously vivid, sardonic, and deadly serious.This blurb is not something to fault Immerwahr for, but it also bothers me. It suggests that it’s a virtue of historical scholarship to render other histories obsolete or at least seriously deficient, as if the goal were one-upmanship. Go ahead, look at new books and scan the introductions and blurbs. It’s as if these scholars were laboring to lure people over to the newest, hippest thing – which is ironic when the subject is the past. (Besides, by the time of the writing, the hip idea usually isn’t new: we in the target audience are well aware that People Were More Racist, Sexist, etc. than Most of Us Imagined.)
Anyway, what the blurb says is false. This book doesn’t make other histories of U.S. expansionism obsolete. As I’ve noted, it doesn’t try to tell us much about, e.g., the acquisition of Florida and Texas. For all the nice points it makes about the influence of U.S. military bases upon, e.g., the Japanese economy, it says next to nothing about whether there was similar influence upon the South Korean economy. I could go on.
The book is, however, immensely entertaining. A lot of the vignettes are awesome.