My first praise: this book is utterly fascinating and captivating. It’s an examination of the ways in which the USA has been an empire, is still an empire, and also, at times, has rejected the notion of empire and colonialism. Indeed, this book isn’t just a chronicle of how the US came to exert control over far-flung islands in the Pacific.

It’s inherent in the United States’ abject ambivalence regarding its role as an imperial superpower.

Daniel Immerwahr makes it pretty clear that any ignorance of the status of these islands, or the history of Hawai’i and Alaska, isn’t just a failure of the education system. But I’m not going to spend my entire review dissing the American education system. Did you know that the US owned the Philippines from 1898 to 1946? I didn’t! To be fair, I at least have the excuse that I’m Canadian, not American. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States is all about the overseas territories and possessions of the United States of America. Even when you’ve done your best to be diligent and check your biases, at the end of the day, there is just so much history! There’s just so much of it, and it’s just so subject to interpretation depending on the evidence available, the lens you use for that evidence, and your own biases. These days I read history books because I’ve discovered since leaving school that history is actually really, really difficult to learn. I heard about this book on Twitter, I think, and read an excerpt (basically the introduction of the book) in The Guardian, and I was immediately sold.

Daniel immerwahr how to hide an empire