Empire

As the title suggests, How to Hide an Empire is heavily involved in the task of identifying and defining the evolution of U.S. imperialism. While the book affirms that the United States is, unequivocally, an empire, it offers a number of possible interpretations of what it means to be an empire. In the end, Immerwahr suggests that while empire is heavily based upon the control of land, its influence is not limited to territorial acquisitions.

In the introduction, Immerwahr offers the reader multiple possible ways of understanding the word “empire.” He acknowledges that some, like the famed American sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, insisted that “black people in the United States looked more like colonized subjects than like citizens” (14). In other words, from this perspective the United States could be considered an empire strictly in terms of the ways in which it treats...