How to Hide an Empire

As he saw it, the true problem with the economy was neither the injustice of capitalists nor the impatience of workers, but the inefficiency of objects. So much time and money were wasted on things that just didn’t work. Solve that problem, Hoover thought, and there’d be more than enough to go around. Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind

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Some fifteen thousand Japanese soldiers and hundreds of Guamanians died. In retaking Guam, the U.S. military laid waste to Guam’s capital, bombing and shelling every major structure in the town: the museum, the hospital, the governor’s residence, the courthouse. The war destroyed some four-fifths of the island’s homes. The United States then intern

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The stop sign can be added to the list of empire-killing technologies. Taken together, they have had a formidable effect. Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication netw

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The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them. Osama bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” in 1996, after the Dhahran bombing. On the face of it, this seemed an absurdly imbalanced war: an exile living in a cave complex in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, taking on

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It’s helpful to look in the other direction. Global English isn’t really, in the end, the product of a few big decisions made in Washington or London. It’s the product of a billion or so smaller ones made all around the world. Those billions of decisions have been, to be sure, profoundly influenced by the predominant position of the United States i

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In Axis lands, the U.S. invasion was not metaphorical, but actual. In Europe, U.S. troops briefly occupied parts of Italy and then, at the war’s end, gained jurisdiction over sectors of Germany and Austria. The United States also took over the southern half of Korea (the Soviet Union held the northern half). Most dramatically, the war placed the wh

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So they formed armies, armies beyond the control of any outside power. There was Mao Zedong’s Red Army in China, the Burma National Army, the Indian National Army, the Viet Minh, the Lao Issara (Free Laos), the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, and the Hukbalahap in the Philippines. Some had grown under Japan’s protection, others were born of th

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Of all the dots on the map that the United States would claim, few were as initially unpromising as Dhahran. The site itself was a blank spot in the desert. The nearest town, Khobar, wasn’t much more—a “few mud huts,” one observer wrote. And Dhahran was situated in Saudi Arabia, a monarchy not known for welcoming outsiders. Yet Saudi Arabia had oil

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The island of Saipan is one of the most staggeringly beautiful places on earth. It’s got it all: blue skies, clear water, lush vegetation, warm beaches. It also, starting in the 1990s, boasted a huge garment-manufacturing center. The workers came from China, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, lured by promises of high wages. But they found themselves

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