When a student from Washington, Los Angeles, New York, or Texas is asked which territories make up or have made up the United States, the vast majority tend to answer the fifty states that lie between Mexico and Canada. That’s all. It is a well-established geographical concept that, however, coexists with the widespread idea throughout the world that said country is an “empire”, which exercises economic, military and cultural power throughout the world. But what about the islands, atolls, archipelagos, and states that Americans have ruled, dominated, and inhabited overseas in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries?
During the four decades that the United States owned the Philippines, from 1898 until the end of World War II, its government did not even include them on the maps. A striking characteristic of all the overseas territories that belonged to what they say is the most powerful country in the world is that they were not talked about either, as if the government in Washington wanted to hide that their power extended beyond the borders delimited by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico and Canada. The rest, which has included over more than two centuries millions of square kilometers and millions of inhabitants, is as if they had not existed.
As Daniel Immerwahr explains in his recent book ‘How to hide an empire: History of the United States’ colonies’ (Captain Swing, 2023): «This is how most people imagine that country today, perhaps with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. Political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the ‘logo map’, because if the country had one, that would be its silhouette. The drawback, however, is that this is not right. Its silhouette does not coincide with the legal borders of the country.
The historian warns that this map has not only left out, until recently, Hawaii and Alaska, which acquired statehood in 1959, but many others that even standing Americans did not know were territories like California or Ohio. Also missing is Puerto Rico, which, although it is not a state, has been part of the country since 1899; and the Philippines, omitted during the first half of the 20th century. «When have you seen a map of the United States in which Puerto Rico is included? What about American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, or any of the small islands that the United States has annexed over the years?” adds Immerwahr.
islands and atolls
The same could be said of many other islands that the United States currently owns in the Pacific, of which practically no one is aware today. For example, the Aleutians, Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Wake, Guam, and Kingman Reef, as well as Johnston and Palmyra Atolls, all with their own governments dependent, to a greater or lesser degree, on Washington. And others in the Caribbean beyond those mentioned, such as Navassa Island, Serranilla, Bajo Nuevo (also known as the Petrel Islands) or the most famous of Key West.
The inhabitants of this kind of “hidden empire”, as Immerwahr describes it, either intentionally or out of neglect, have never really known what to call their territories. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States took over most of them – from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, passing through Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii and Wake – their status was clear. They were, as Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson shamelessly put it, colonies. However, that imperialist spirit, as Spain or Great Britain had been before, did not last long. From the White House, they soon made an effort to hide it or redefine it.
Within a decade or two, the word “colonialism” became taboo in the country. In fact, in 1914, when World War I was beginning, an American official wrote: “The word ‘colony’ must not be used to express the relationship existing between our Government and the peoples who depend on it.” Next, he suggested the term “territory”, according to the historian Rebecca Tinio McKenna in her book ‘American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of US Colonialism in the Philippines’.
an uneven country
These should include the almost one hundred islands that, from 1840 until the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States had seized in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean. It is true that many of those scattered possessions, mentioned above, fell into oblivion, despite the fact that some were of vital importance. This was the case, for example, with Howland, an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific, with an extension similar to that of Central Park, which was a strategic point for aviation due to its runway. The Japanese were aware and did not hesitate to bomb it one day after attacking Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii in World War II.
“The logo map leaves out all of that, both the large colonies and the pin-sized islands. And it has something else that leads to deception. It implies that the United States is a politically uniform space: a union in which the states join voluntarily and on an equal footing. But it is not true and never has been. From the day the independence treaty from Great Britain was ratified until today, it has always been a collection of states and territories. A country divided into two parts, with different laws for each one of them”, emphasizes Immerwahr.
The government in Washington never seemed to care that, before 1940, the so-called American colonies scattered around the world had almost twenty million inhabitants. That means that, even if the United States tried to hide it or paid much less attention to it, one in eight Americans lived outside the mainland between Mexico and Canada, most of them in the Philippines. And all of them made up what some called the “Greater United States” at the beginning of the 20th century.
The pride of the British and Spanish
“Those little blobs, like Howland Island and others like it, are the foundation of America’s world power. They serve as military staging areas, launch pads, storage sites, lighthouses, and laboratories. They constitute what I call a ‘pointillist empire’. Today, that empire spans the entire planet. However, none of this (neither the large colonies, nor the small islands, nor the military bases) has left much of a mental imprint on the mainland of the country. One of the most peculiar features of the US empire is the extent to which it has always been ignored,” Immerwahr explains in his essay.
It is curious why, while Great Britain and Spain were proud of their empire, the United States tried to hide it or ignored it. The reason, according to the historian, is that this country has always considered itself a nation-state and did not want to be anything else. Born into an anti-imperialist rebellion, it has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Third Reich and the Japanese Empire in World War II, to the communist empire of the Soviet Union, which grew with dozens of satellite states around the world during the the Cold War.