Sublime

Martial law in Hawai‘i lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands. Yet Hawai‘i’s military commanders repeatedly refused to relinquish control. The secretary of the interior started calling it the “American ‘conquered territory’ of Hawaii.”

white supremacy,

As the president of the tire manufacturer B. F. Goodrich warned, without rubber the United States “could offer only 1860 defenses against 1942 attacks.” Without rubber—it wasn’t a hypothetical scenario. On December 7/8, 1941, Japan, worried about its own access to rubber and other critical raw materials, expanded its war beyond China and moved on t

European armies had evolved into highly specialized machines to fight each other – but not to fight military forces whose ‘strategic doctrine’ was radically different. This was painfully apparent in the encounters between British troops and Native Americans in the 1750s.

In the Americas, the human cost of Europe’s maritime imperialism was largely borne by the indigenous Amerindians and imported slaves. Overland expansion in the Old World faced tougher resistance and a harsher environment. So here the price of the Occidental breakout was a domestic regime of deepening social and political oppression, whose effects w