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They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.
Yet a striking feature of the overseas territories was how rarely they were even discussed. Those mental maps imagined the US to be contiguous: a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico and Canada.
That is how most people envision the US today, possibly with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it?
In , the year Japan attacked, a more accurate picture would have been this:. In this view, the place normally referred to as the US — the logo map — forms only a part of the country. A large and privileged part, to be sure, yet still only a part. It is the right size — ie, huge. The Philippines, too, looms large, and the Hawaiian island chain — the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps — if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.
This map also shows territory at the other end of the size scale. In the century before , the US claimed nearly uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Some claims were forgotten in time — Washington could be surprisingly lax about keeping tabs.
The 22 islands included here are the ones that appeared in official tallies the census or other governmental reports in the s. I have represented them as clusters of dots in the bottom left and right corners, although they are so small that they would be invisible if they were drawn to scale. The logo map is not only misleading because it excludes large colonies and pinprick islands alike.
It also suggests that the US is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another.
But that is not true, and it has never been true. From its founding until the present day, the US has contained a union of American states, as its name suggests. But it has also contained another part: not a union, not states and for most of its history not wholly in the Americas — its territories.
What is more, a lot of people have lived in that other part. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in , the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly 19 million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines.
That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the US lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in 12 was African American. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black. My point here is not to weigh forms of oppression against one another. In fact, the histories of African Americans and colonised peoples are tightly connected and sometimes overlapping, as for the African-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery also engulfed the territories. It has been a territory since that act passed. It has often been mentioned as a new state, but no serious effort has been made by Congress. Virgin Islands to its territories. In , Guam became a territory pursuant to the Guam Organic Act of The people of the Islands have by referendum voted to join with Guam, but in , Guam rejected the proposal. American Samoa has no organic act, and as such is considered unorganized.
Despite that, American Samoa has remained connected to the United States. In addition to the five major territories, the United States has a number of other territories that are uninhabited. Territories are not states and do not have full recognition that states enjoy.
Notwithstanding not being states, each territory can send a delegate to the House of Representatives. With the exception of American Samoa, whose residents are U. Citizens of the territories can vote in primary elections for president, but they cannot vote in the general elections for president. Sanchez Valle , U. From day one the United States has included both states and territories, with the territories treated differently.
In , when the Philippines was a U. Today, around four million people live in the U. In your book, you lay out three acts of American history. Can you briefly summarize them? But if you pay attention to territory, it starts to look a little different. As soon as the U. The second, which overlaps a little bit chronologically with the first, is overseas colonization, which is really easy to miss if you grew up in the mainland. Very quickly after the United States does all of its contiguous territorial expansion within North America, it starts claiming overseas territories.
In fact, some of them never do. The third act is where we are today. But it also has another form of territorial extent, which is military bases overseas, outside of its borders and strewn across the planet. You argue that the U.
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