Over the last decade or so, intellectual historians in and beyond the US field have deepened their engagement with the historical profession's “transnational turn.” This welcome development should hardly be a surprise; after all the turn, which began for Americanists in the late 1990s, owed a good part of its erudition and its energy to some of the most distinguished intellectual historians of that time. Thomas Bender convened four conferences at NYU's La Pietra villa—itself part of some intellectual-history footnotes in the early twentieth century—and also made major scholarly and organizational contributions to the field.Footnote ¹ Two of the most frequently cited works that made the case for the “internationalization of US history”—avant la lettre—were by similarly preeminent intellectual historians Daniel Rodgers and James Kloppenberg.Footnote ² Other scholars, like David Hollinger, encouraged such work in their students before undertaking a more robustly transnational approach themselves.Footnote ³ A wealth of scholarship in recent years has not just continued this tradition but expanded it, with intellectual historians individually and collectively pursuing their subjects across geographic borders as well as methodological boundaries. Two recent edited collections showcase work by scholars (mostly mid-career or younger) and contemplate the possibilities and the limits of different scales and methods of investigating the past in its broadest contexts.Footnote ⁴

The fruits of these recent trends are visible in recent monographs by intellectual historians that take the transnational as their central subject, including the two under review here: Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire (2019) and Or Rosenboim's The Emergence of Globalism (2017). Both books examine conceptions of world order in the first half (or so) of the twentieth century. Both books are by intellectual historians, and each in its own way illuminates the place of territorial empire in what turned out to be its last moment as an organizing principle for the world. The books, of course, also differ substantially, not least in genre. Rosenboim provides an informed and informative intellectual history that engages a variety of scholarly subfields. Immerwahr, in contrast, offers a readable, often informal, account aiming to reach a general audience well outside the academy; judging by radio and print media since its appearance in April 2019, it has succeeded handily on this score.

While only Immerwahr's book is explicitly about empire, together with Rosenboim's it offers an opportunity to think through the trajectory of ideas about empire in the last century, especially within the two powers that dominated their respective eras, Britain and the United States. The books permit in particular a careful examination of the decline of European empires and the rise of American power in the middle decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵ This succession accompanied a significant shift in the world order itself: what power meant in the international system, and what constituted empire and imperial control. Rosenboim's and Immerwahr's historical subjects addressed these concerns about imperial transitions and transformations directly and indirectly; the books therefore document the transition from one empire to another, and from one type of empire to another.

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Daniel Immerwahr's dissertation-cum-first book was familiar to intellectual historians in both topic and approach. Rooted in ideas about American communities, it explored American efforts at local development in the first decades of the Cold War.Footnote ⁶ Thinking Small is an elegant book that effectively challenges the easy reduction of American development policy to Walt Rostow's five-step plan for industrialization—often described in shorthand as “high modernism.” Highlighting the role of rural programs like Community Development, Immerwahr traces what Jess Gilbert calls a “low modernism” favored by social scientists, diplomats, and policy makers.Footnote ⁷ Deftly moving from ideas to practices (and occasionally back again), the book expands on familiar terrain for intellectual historians. Thinking Small won two book prizes for intellectual history.

How to Hide an Empire is far more expansive in time period, topic, and audience than this first book. Published by a leading trade press, How to Hide an Empire is written with verve, a knack for the telling detail, and very little sense of stylistic ceremony. It contains dozens of small chapters, most of them vignettes organized around one episode or individual. The history of ideas, which drove the narrative of Thinking Small, is less visible in How to Hide an Empire. Many, if not most, chapters address policies and practices, with ideas playing a minor role. Methodologically, the book might define the outer boundary of what Sarah Igo helpfully called “free-range intellectual history”—or perhaps it demonstrates what happens when free-range livestock escapes the enclosures trying to confine it.Footnote ⁸

The core argument of How to Hide an Empire is that the United States has, for most of its history, held territories not granted the same rights and privileges as states. The subtitle—“A History of the Greater United States”—invokes a book title from the first decades of the twentieth century to show how the territories and peoples under American rule encompassed those outside the states. These territories fell into a variety of different categories, each with its own legal regime: colonies, territories, uninhabited (and usually uninhabitable) guano islands, military bases, and so on. The inhabitants of these non-state holdings, mostly not of European descent, faced legal and practical limits born of a system structured around but not delivering full political rights for its citizens. The contradictions might be summed up by the Supreme Court's contortions to explain the exceptions: residents of Puerto Rico were, the Court declared in Downes v. Bidwell (1901), “foreign in a domestic sense” and thus unable to claim Constitutional protections.Footnote ⁹

In recounting the history of these territories—in which about 19 million people lived on the eve of the Second World War—Immerwahr shows how territories like Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, not to mention many small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, were brought under American control while kept outside a political/legal system guaranteeing democratic rights. Thus Immerwahr hammers home the point that the United States met the narrowest definition of empire as requiring territorial control—while its political leaders, intellectuals, bureaucrats, judges, and justices, and even many of its more skeptical writers, insisted on precisely the opposite. Historians and others might use “American empire” to include forms of non-territorial control, but Immerwahr wants first and foremost to draw his readers’ attention to land in possession.

Such a focus on territorial control might seem curious in 2019; rich and engaged scholarly literatures, as Immerwahr well knows, have explored the nature and antinomies of American imperialism in a variety of forms extending well beyond official territorial rule. Starting in the late 1950s, William Appleman Williams and his students in the “open-door school” focused on economic expansion and had little to say about the territorial possessions of the United States; the American empire that caught their attention was about economic domination, not territorial control.Footnote ¹⁰ Later, pathbreaking work of scholars of American studies like Amy Kaplan inaugurated a productive era of scholarship by looking at forms of cultural production that shaped and were shaped by American empire.Footnote ¹¹ Other scholars connected core institutions of intellectual life—disciplines and universities—to empire.Footnote ¹² The agendas for studies of American empire, then, have expanded dramatically, with scholarly momentum coming from a variety of sources, including innovative studies like Kristin Hoganson's Fighting for American Manhood, Mary Renda's Taking Haiti, and Paul Kramer's Blood of Government.Footnote ¹³ Since then, Kramer has been particularly focused on theorizing American empire, publishing challenging and intellectually rich programmatic essays. Central to Kramer's vision has been his claim that the distinction between “formal” (i.e. territorial) and “informal” empire did more analytical harm than good; among other things, focusing on territorial control “introduced new problems of exceptionalism” by giving the impression that American imperial power could be reduced to its territorial holdings.Footnote ¹⁴ Perhaps, then, not surprisingly, Kramer has been a strong and vocal critic of Immerwahr's approach, launching a blistering criticism of the latter's lecture-turned-article that preceded the book.Footnote ¹⁵

In the introduction to How to Hide an Empire, Immerwahr acknowledges the multifarious forms of power discussed in this new scholarship but quickly returns his focus to the territories themselves (13–14). In this way, he is not so much claiming that territorial control is the only meaningful form of imperial power, but sidestepping that debate. Even if, he suggests, we stick to the strictest, narrowest, and most legalistic definition of empire, the United States qualified (and indeed still qualifies). In any case, Immerwahr does not insist on such a formal/informal distinction, briefly acknowledging these other possible meanings of empire before returning to his emphasis on territorial control. There are serious analytical (and, as Kramer insists, political) issues at stake here. If the instruments of what Kramer calls “the imperial” do not distinguish between formal and informal empire, then what possible use could there be for maintaining that distinction?

Kramer's scathing response to Immerwahr's work, based on an ungenerous reading and ending with the unorthodox use of bibliography as a weapon of intellectual combat, sparked many hallway conversations at academic conferences, a petition of protest that circulated over email, and eventually a published response from Immerwahr.Footnote ¹⁶ But it does not reckon with the internal logic of How to Hide an Empire taken on its own terms; indeed, by virtue of timing it could not. In the book itself, Immerwahr tracks the transformation of the “colonial empire” into what he calls (borrowing from historian/cartographer Bill Rankin) a “pointillist” one (18).Footnote ¹⁷ Immerwahr traces this change to the 1940s, attributing it to the confluence of technological change, World War II, and the origins of the Cold War. By the 1950s, he argues, territorial control “didn't mean what it used to” (296).

In a handful of smart and engaging short chapters, How to Hide an Empire describes a few “empire-killing technologies” that rendered territory less relevant for the projection of power. Many of these technologies are familiar: long-distance communications, for instance, supplemented and/or supplanted roads and highways as channels of US power. Likewise the spread of English as lingua franca worked to the advantage of the United States and its mostly monolingual inhabitants. Immerwahr clearly and aptly demonstrates the importance of international standards through accounts of the specifications for screw threads on the one hand and the widespread adoption of a standard shape and color for stop signs on the roads (the “empire of the red octagon,” as the chapter title has it) on the other. These chapters, in Immerwahr's phrase, contributed to the “replacement of colonization with globalization”—which, Immerwahr qualifies immediately afterwards, was a new vector for American power (315).

Yet calling these new forms of international power “globalization” takes more of a position about the definition of “empire” than Immerwahr suggests at the book's start. Some of the issues here revolve around terminology. To say, as Immerwahr does, that the US did not “abandon empire” but instead “reshuffled its imperial portfolio” (343) is to emphasize territories. Yet this imperial portfolio, as Immerwahr shows, is not limited to land, whether in the form of “large colonies” or of “tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn all over the globe” (343). The imperial portfolio was also about standards (screw threads and stop signs); to call these “empire-killing technologies” is to limit the definition of empire to territorial control. After all, the stop sign, and screw thread standards, could “kill” an empire only if it was a territorial one. Immerwahr is, of course, quick to identify the power imbalances built into seemingly neutral or technical decisions—and here Diana Lemberg's new work on English language offers further instances—but seems to rejects the label “imperial” to describe them.Footnote ¹⁸ Standards, language, communications networks—all of these were tools of American power that were not “colonial,” in that they did not require substantial territorial holdings. Yet it is precisely this dynamic of seemingly neutral institutions that redounded to American advantage—not by accident, as Immerwahr rightly notes, but by design. And it is precisely this meaning that scholars like Kramer consider “imperial.” The differences between these definitions of empire are analytically significant, and a debate about them could be meaningful and fruitful; unfortunately, such points were buried by the tenor and vehemence of Kramer's attack.

From the perspective of intellectual history, these “empire-killing technologies” present a curious irony. The stop sign, the screw thread, and global English are joined by laboratory-produced nitrogen, as Immerwahr relays with characteristic cleverness and insight (57–8). Once the synthesizing process moved from laboratory experimentation to factory production in the years following World War I, the pursuit of guano across the oceans lost its urgency, thus saving generations of workers from the dreadful conditions of harvesting bird excrement. More to Immerwahr's point, this obviated the purposes behind acquiring guano islands. As stand-alone pieces, Immerwahr's chapters on “empire-killing technologies” are incisive and well told. And they are, by some measure, the parts of How to Hidean Empire that most directly work with the tools of intellectual historians and historians of science and technology. Yet they are also the ones that bring his book into precarious interpretive territory—all the more so because the book offers so little by way of explicit reflection on the nature of imperial power. So those places where Immerwahr employs his training and talents as an intellectual historian are also the places where intellectual historians’ penchants for self-reflection and pursuit of underlying meaning are not always in evidence.

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If Immerwahr's subjects hid an empire, the subjects in Or Rosenboim's original and perceptive book The Emergence of Globalism engaged in a different sort of hide-and-seek. Rosenboim's book, to be sure, looks beyond empire, analyzing a variety of thinkers interested in reconceptualizing a global “political space” in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Rosenboim's book delivers a compelling rebuttal to those focusing only on globalism in its economic instantiations. Her subjects imagined different forms of “globalism” in political terms, so the economists appear in large part because they offered useful perspectives on conceptions of global politics. The book is organized conceptually rather than chronologically, thus providing a helpful inventory of a variety of ideas about a new world order, but at the cost of highlighting changes over time. Rosenboim describes her subjects as “public intellectuals,” by which she means “academically trained experts who engaged in public debate in order to influence popular opinion and decision makers” (15). She appears less interested in their impact outside the realm of ideas; those looking to understand how these debates reverberated in town halls or halls of power will need to look elsewhere.

Most chapters deal with a handful of individual thinkers grouped together. Some of those groupings follow her subjects’ organic engagements with one another, while other groupings are imposed by the author. This leads to some stimulating and unexpectedly revealing juxtapositions: Friedrich Hayek is considered, predictably enough, alongside fellow conservative economist (and onetime LSE colleague) Lionel Robbins—but also alongside the socialist economist and reformer Barbara Wooten (chap. 5). The result shakes up our more conventional political categories, though it also risks omitting important debates that might impinge on thinkers’ visions of a reconfigured political space. For instance, seeing Hayek treated for his connection to “liberal federalism” offers a refreshing change from more typical accounts that trace genealogies of neoliberalism. At the same time, though, Rosenboim leaves aside his contributions to the socialist calculation debate (broadly speaking, between planning and markets). Even though Hayek's economic ideas have been the subject of many scholarly works, Rosenboim passes up the chance to tie these ideas to the views of global political space that she so effectively recovers and analyzes.Footnote ¹⁹

Hayek, furthermore, is only one of many figures in The Emergence of Globalism who were émigrés or temporary sojourners in Britain and the United States: Raymond Aron spent the war years in London, Luigi Sturzo and Jacques Maritain were part of the “democracy in exile,” Hungarian chemist turned social scientist Michael Polanyi arrived in England as Nazis took power in 1933. The point here is not to question the inclusion of such figures in a category called Anglo-American discourse; each of them was deeply engaged in the discussions in their new (if, in the case of Aron, temporary) homes. But it is to ask what the contours of “American” and “British” thought were. Rosenboim offers helpful and concise capsule biographies encompassing personal, intellectual, and professional peregrinations. These sketches can help readers understand how a certain kind of “globalism” was lived—and not just discussed—in the 1930s and 1940s North Atlantic. But more guidance from Rosenboim on her subjects’ peripatetic lives and the relationship between their movements and their ideas would have been welcome.

As Rosenboim follows her subjects around London, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere, she maintains a resolute focus on individuals and ideas, in the process relegating institutions to the background. Two institutions appear with particular frequency in her accounts: the University of Chicago and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (commonly known as Chatham House) in London. The University of Chicago was a relatively diffuse institution, and an economist there (like Hayek after his departure from London in 1950) might rarely cross paths with political scientists (like Charles Merriam) or members of the Chicago Committee to Frame a World Constitution Draft (like Richard McKeon or Giuseppe Antonio Borgese). On the other hand, Chicago's Hyde Park was a small place with a distinctive intensity and plenty of intellectual energy. Did the university's formal and informal structures shape the course of any of these conversations? Did the proximity of so many brilliant intellectuals yield any particular convergence of ideas or reveal any differences? Such questions apply all the more to Chatham House, a central London gathering place for policy makers and those hoping to influence them. Given the premium that it placed on sharing information and ideas, Chatham House deserves attention in its own right, and not just as the place where many of Rosenboim's subjects happened to meet. Was there a distinctive Chatham House or Chicago approach to the idea of a global political space? How did these and other institutions shape conversations about global political space?

These institutions, of course, housed other thinkers whose ideas were adjacent to, or even overlapped with, those discussed in the book. Notions of a democratic order, and of the relationship between science and democracy, for instance, are rightly central to The Emergence of Globalism, and yet the book does not engage the works of two stalwarts of American intellectual-history syllabi who ruminated at length on these topics—John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. Dewey appears in passing as a mentor to Richard McKeon, who headed the Chicago Committee (171–2). Walter Lippmann makes a handful of appearances—fewer, it should be noted, than the Parisian colloque that bore his name. True, neither Dewey nor Lippmann produced a broader theory of global politics, yet their exclusion leaves ideas about global politics in an isolated sphere; the “political space” seems curiously disconnected from related strains of thought that inhabited some of the same institutional spaces. If this disconnection reflects accurately the isolation of conversations about “the global,” then that is in itself an interesting observation worthy of further attention.

And then there is the question of empire. In the very moment when these ideas are under discussion, in the 1930s and 1940s, the major European empires were facing existential threat. The immediate danger, of course, came from the Axis powers, which challenged metropole and colony alike. The military conflict also laid bare the ideological, political and especially the economic pressures on continued imperial rule. The decades under discussion in Rosenboim's book saw a steady march of events in both the British and French empires: while the British-based thinkers in Rosenboim's book contemplated a global future, bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectuals in London were buffeted by challenges to imperial rule—anticolonial protests, legal machinations, legislative responses, imperial conferences, and the like. To be sure, empire, and particularly the British Empire, does make an appearance in The Emergence of Globalism. The book devotes a chapter to visions of imperial federation, persuasively arguing that adherents of federation were reinstating imperial hierarchies under a different name (127–8). George Orwell's review of a book by one of the imperial federalists pointed out in sharp language that the federalist vision doled out political power and opportunity according to an imperial system of racial hierarchy (120–21).

And yet it is striking just how rarely empire comes up for discussion in Rosenboim's account. Her subjects are so busy envisioning a new world order, whether organized around states, regions, economic welfare, science, or religion, that they do not devote much attention to the existing world order in which empire remains the central organizing principle. To paraphrase Thorstein Veblen's description of anti-Bolshevism at the Versailles Conference: empire is “not written into the text” of Rosenboim's subjects’ works, but might well have been “the parchment upon which the text was written.”Footnote ²⁰ Some of Rosenboim's subjects did refer back to empire, but it is striking how much, in her generous phrase, Rosenboim's subjects imagined new global politics “without necessarily reflecting directly on imperialism” (280).

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The comparison between Rosenboim's subjects and Immerwahr's is a telling one. The discourses on global politics so thoughtfully explicated in Rosenboim's book date from the highest stage of British imperialism yet managed to evade the question of empire. Her subjects, in other words, gazed toward a global future while generally failing to reckon with an imperial present. Immerwahr's subjects, in contrast, were generally more intentional in hiding the American empire. Many of Immerwahr's well-told vignettes make this point. My personal favorite is a post-Pearl Harbor exchange between mapmakers and a group of middle-schoolers. The students asked why Hawaii (and other American possessions) appeared in the atlas as foreign; a Rand McNally employee conceded that “Hawai'i belongs to the United States,” but insisted that it was “not an integral part of this country” and “was foreign to our continental shores.” The students were not satisfied, and rightly so (12). While Immerwahr's subjects directly (or evasively and incorrectly) denied the concept of territorial possession, many of Rosenboim's intellectuals apparently did not see the relevance of empire for their global visions.

Taken together, How to Hide an Empire and The Emergence of Globalism suggest many observations about intellectual historians’ ongoing contributions to the study of empire and its transformations. First, these books confirm existing historical chronologies and arguments about the end of empire. In spite of their novel ideas and approaches, Immerwahr and Rosenboim maintain their focus on the 1940s, and for familiar reasons. Immerwahr focuses on World War II itself, with American “globe-spanning” technologies rendering substantial territorial holdings unnecessary. Irrespective of the persuasiveness of this argument, which Anders Stephanson has called into doubt, the focus remains squarely on the 1940s in both accounts.Footnote ²¹ While recent scholarship has identified important intellectual and institutional antecedents to globalization in the interwar years, the 1940s remain the crucial decade for empires, whether European or North American.Footnote ²²

Second, Rosenboim's book demonstrates the value of questioning and contextualizing the common teleology in which territorial empire ineluctably declined and was replaced by global networks. She documents the breadth and the depth of alternative conceptions of global politics in a way that lays to rest the notion of the inevitability of a celebration of markets known to many of its critics as “neoliberalism.” This point is supported, in its broad outlines, by more granular studies of concepts of the global like Stephen Wertheim's impressive dissertation on US strategic thinking in the period just before Pearl Harbor. Similarly, Adom Getachew's extraordinary new book shows that many far outside the Anglo-American world were reconceiving of politics and international relations in profoundly different ways—and with more direct attention to the impacts and legacies of empire.Footnote ²³ And studies of anticolonial movements have also outlined possible internationalisms to challenge the notion that the state inevitably would succeed empires as an organizing principle.Footnote ²⁴

Third, as the differences between these books suggest, unfolding the ideas of empire and the empires of ideas will be an extended process that merits more attention from intellectual historians. From histories of “public intellectuals” like Rosenboim's, to Immerwahr's stimulating jaunt through the discrepancy between exceptionalist language and imperial realities, intellectual historians have much to offer studies of empire. There will, of course, be no one approach to deepen historical understanding of the place of empire in twentieth-century thought. Institutional studies, disciplinary accounts, intellectual biographies—and many other approaches besides—will each contribute to this ongoing discussion.Footnote ²⁵

How to Hide an Empire and The Emergence of Globalism thus help us outline the place of empire in two key sites of the twentieth-century world. But there is still much to do to decolonize (in the broader sense) even just Anglo-American intellectual life in the twentieth century. Immerwahr has documented the evasions and convoluted illogic that “hid” the American empire, and catalogued some of the political and cultural consequences of that act. Rosenboim, for her part, has ably documented a vibrant set of debates about global political spaces—debates took place in the capital of European imperialism but nevertheless avoided or evaded the question of empire. Tracing simultaneously the presence as well as the absence of empire, in short, offers a fruitful way forward as intellectual historians navigate the transnational and global turns.