Regrettably, pursuing this highly militarized, “pointillistic” empire has had some dire consequences for the US. I'm a professor at the University of California San Diego and I'm assigning this for a graduate class.

In fact, ‘the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad’ (Vine, 2015). This insightful, excellent book, with its new perspective on an element of American history that is almost totally excluded from mainstream education and knowledge, should be required reading for those on the mainland.

I suspect this little fact might come as something of a surprise most of the 95% of the world that are not citizens of the US. The histories of Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and other places under the protection of the US government often proved anything but cheerful.

A large section on the effects on colonies of post-World War II developments in transportation, communication, and technological standardization seems more relevant to the empires of such colonial powers as Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, which saw their colonies as being of economic value, than to the United States, which Immerwahr indicates saw its territories as more of a burden than an opportunity, with, perhaps, the exception of the guano islands, which were largely abandoned when guano was no longer needed for American agriculture. In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. An association with the US has undoubtedly raised the floor of material conditions in these places, but it has also imposed an unjust glass ceiling that most people around the US either do not know about or continue to ignore.It encourages a shift in perception from the traditional idea of the US to considering and understanding the impact that American expansionism had upon the occupied territories. The book starts from the earliest days of the USA and follows its various imperial ambitions and realisations up to the present day. The author discusses the water cure in this – something I read about years ago in a much more brutal account than is given here – with US soldiers literally jumping onto the stomachs of their prisoners after they had bloated them with water. In total there are five chapters devoted to the topic of globalisation and trade, and this makes it especially useful for any Geography student. By focusing on the processes by which Americans acquired, controlled, and were affected by territory, Daniel Immerwahr shows that the United States was not just another “empire,” but was a highly distinctive one the dimensions of which have been largely ignored.

The growth and decline of the British Empire, and the Roman Empire, are well documented but the American Empire less so. America had territory in the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, Alaska, American Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Irate, Washington set out to put things right, crossing the Appalachians himself on a sort of landlord’s vengeance mission. In contrast, people in Puerto Rico have been citizens since 1917 (just in time to be drafted into World War I).When it was discovered that hook worm was widespread in Puerto Rico, it was suggested that the high population density of such a "degenerate" people was the cause and that a culling of the population was the only cure. And then something curious happened after WWII: for the first time in the history of the world, a world power gave up its territories. When combined with increased global trade, synthetics development (discussed below) and other ‘empire killing’ technology it ‘rendered colonies unnecessary’ (279). Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country. Read Immerwhar's book, and don't listen to the apologists of US imperialism which is still an active force that contradicts the US' professed values and that needs to be actively dismantled.