How many american protectorates

Yet even when it came to Hawaii, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. So, on the morning of his speech, he made another edit.

An American island, where American lives were lost — that was the point he was trying to make. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there.

This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail. 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. Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called racial epithets, subjected to dangerous medical experiments and used as sacrificial pawns in war.

They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not. What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed. Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the US.

L ooking beyond the logo map, however, could be hard for mainlanders. The national maps they used rarely showed the territories. Even the world atlases were confusing. In fact, the core business of the sovereign state is to protect and defend her protectorate, whereas a colony is entirely under the mother country and is considered as part of that country.

All the activities of a colony are controlled by the sovereign country. Furthermore, in a colony, a number of citizens of the sovereign state are free to move to the territory under them without obtaining travel documents. The sovereign state can have an amicable and friendly relationship with the protectorate. In this instance, the terms and obligations are usually favorable to the protectorate.

The sovereign state strives to maintain and protect the protectorate for prestige reasons. The sovereign state imposes favorable obligations to the protectorate, to maintain it, and probably to prevent another sovereign state, considered an enemy, from obtaining the protectorate. Thus, where the sovereign state and the protectorate have an friendly relationship, the sovereign state is usually out to protect its protectorate, probably because the protectorate is vulnerable in one form or another.

The protectorate is usually allowed to have foreign relationships only with the protecting power. In case another state is interested in have any dealings with the protectorate, it must first pass through the protecting power. The protecting power then decides to give the other state a go-ahead or deny it. Similarly, the protectorate is not supposed to defend itself from military attacks. In case of military attacks, the protectorate depends on the protector for defense.

A sovereign state usually obtains a territory and declares it as her protectorate for personal or mutual benefits. The protectorate agrees to get into the relationship with the sovereign state in exchange for protection or any other thing it may need. Alternatively, the sovereign state is usually just out to offer some help to the protectorate.

The crisis is resolved when the Soviet Union removes the missiles in return for the withdrawal of U. Between January and October , when all commercial flights between Havana and Miami are suspended, , persons flee the island for the United States. The boatlift leads to the establishment of an air bridge between Varadero and Miami, known as "Freedom Flights" in the United States.

Congress approves the Cuban Adjustment Act, allowing Cubans to be admitted for permanent residence in the United States. Department of State adds Cuba to its list of states sponsoring international terrorism. In turn, the United States agrees to admit up to 20, Cuban immigrants per year. Havana responds by suspending the immigration agreement with the United States and family visits to Cuba.

Congress enacts the Torricelli bill Cuban Democracy Act of , increasing trade sanctions against Cuba by prohibiting U. Coast Guard detains 30, Cubans attempting to leave the island during the balsero rafter crisis. They are initially detained at the U. In September, Havana and Washington sign an agreement whereby the United States will issue 20, immigrant visas annually to Cubans, and in return Cuba pledges to control undocumented immigration.

Cubans arriving on U. In October, the U. Bush administration announces new restrictions on U. In December, U. President Obama announces major changes in U.

In July, the United States and Cuba restore diplomatic relations and open embassies in their respective capitals. In August, the first commercial flights between the United States and Cuba since are reinstated.