黑料传送门

This book is the Japanese translation of Daniel Immerwahr’s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). In addition to winning the Robert H. Ferrell Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, it has received numerous reviews and high praise, with some calling it the greatest work on U.S. diplomatic history since William A. Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (originally published in 1959). Although academic in nature, its engaging style, crafted for a general audience, made it a bestseller. It was selected as one of The New York Times’ Top Books of 2019 and one of the Chicago Tribune’s Ten Best Books of 2019, earning widespread recognition across the United States. Translations have also been published in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, attesting to its strong international acclaim.
 
For a long time, scholars in U.S. political and diplomatic history have debated whether the United States can be considered an “empire,” and if so, when and how its imperial character began, transformed, or ended. The prevailing view I recall hearing as an undergraduate student was that the United States was a republic, born from independence from the British Empire. Even as it expanded westward, the nation was said to have preserved its republican form by incorporating territories as equal states. The acquisition of the Philippines—a former Spanish colony—after the so-called “Spanish–American War” of 1898 was treated as an exception. Furthermore, since the Philippines gained independence after World War II, the United States was said to have remained, in essence, non-imperial.
 
In a society where the denial of U.S. imperialism had long dominated, Immerwahr’s book—asserting that the United States was an empire from its inception and exposing even the ways it hid that imperial nature—must have come as a thunderbolt. The book argues that the most distinctive feature of the U.S. empire lies not in the size of its territories or colonies but in the very ways it concealed them. While there was a brief period after 1898 when imperial enthusiasm surged, giving rise to maps of a “Greater United States” that included island territories such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico, most U.S. actors depicted in this book—although they implicitly acknowledged their nation’s imperial nature—found it uncomfortable and turned away from it with almost comical insistence.
 
Another fascinating aspect of this book is how powerfully it illuminates the continuing relevance of these issues today. Conventional world history often claims that the age of empires ended with the wave of decolonization after World War II. However, Immerwahr shows that it is not the case. Even without formal territories, new and subtle forms of global domination—and of hiding empire—emerged. In this sense, the U.S. empire did not end; it merely transformed. For anyone studying postwar international politics, this is a book that should not be missed.
 

(Written by KAMI Hideaki, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2025)