Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire, recently published to much fanfare, takes as its starting point what Immerwahr calls a “conceptual filing error.” Born from his surprise at visiting the Philippines and encountering streets “named after US colleges” and university students speaking “virtually unaccented English,” the book contends that while most people have heard of the “big wars” the United States has waged, “the actual territory” of US empire “often slips from view.” In response to this alleged invisibility, Immerwahr has produced a new popular history of US empire, one focussed on officially annexed US colonies and military bases, as well as the states that lie beyond the “logo map” whose outlines are the continental United States (14–15). The book's first section quickly sketches the story of US westward expansion, mostly through the story of Daniel Boone, then moves on to more satisfying chapters detailing the annexation of the uninhabited Guano Islands, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as the resistance to annexation in the latter two cases; the section ends by recounting World War II battles over Pacific islands. The second half of the book examines the postwar period, contending that the United States “gave up territory” in this period because it “honed an extraordinary suite of technologies,” from screw threads to synthetic rubber, that allowed it to construct a “pointillist empire” of communication and infrastructural networks (17).