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history from the point of view of the territories.

What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.” He aims to correct this state of affairs by telling U.S. As Immerwhar writes, people in the territories were “shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. imperial rule was defined at various times by neglect, patronizing racism, and brutal military campaigns. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa, comprising millions of colonial subjects. assembled a sprawling overseas empire, which grew to include the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S. From the early 19th century through the 20th, the U.S. But if the United States had been sleeping, it was only a brief nap after a vigorous workout. Triumphalist accounts of the U.S.’s rise to superpower status usually begin with World War II: Pearl Harbor roused the sleeping giant to save the world from fascism. “One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been,” the historian Daniel Immerwahr writes in his introduction to How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, his new book on the United States’ overseas empire. Only an American such as myself could be so totally oblivious to their own country’s imperial past. Kipling was posing himself as an emissary from the older and wiser imperial power with advice for the upstart on how to deal with their new brown people: “Take up the White Man’s burden - / Send forth the best ye breed - / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.” The victory had announced America as a world power to be reckoned with, complete with overseas colonies.

won the Philippines from the Spanish in the Spanish-American War in 1898.

I had never seen the full title before: “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.” I had always thought it was a racist relic of the British empire! But no, Kipling wrote it after the U.S. A few years ago I was preparing to write a magazine profile of Rodrigo Duterte, who had then recently been elected as president of the Philippines, when I came across “The White Man’s Burden,” Rudyard Kipling’s famous ode to imperialism, in a history book.