<i>How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States</i> by Daniel Immerwahr (A Book Review)

“Is the United States an empire?” is a persistent question, but it’s not the only one Daniel Immerwahr’s book How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (2019) concerns itself with. Its driving force is the titular question: How did the US hide their empire? “This book’s main contribution is not archival, bringing to light some never-before-seen document,” Immerwahr cautions his reader, “it’s perspectival, seeing a familiar history differently” (16). The book is a history of American imperialism and the Greater United States from a strongly overseas perspective: Immerwahr’s archival eye is fixed on the American “territories,” mainly, but not exclusively, Guam, the Philippines, the Guano Islands, and Puerto Rico—an American absence summarized in the title to chapter fifteen: “Nobody Knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.” Immerwahr centers his analysis around the act of hiding, but he devotes as much attention to vanishing as a closely related idea. In order to hide things, they must vanish. Hiding things too well means forgetting where they are and, eventually, forgetting we own them. This, Immerwahr argues, is the case with the US overseas territories. As the idea of a nation grew in prominence, “the colonies Elena Furlanetto University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany