Vine’s account of the relationship between U.S. bases and imperial expansion and war making takes readers on a journey across time and space, resituating U.S. history in the world. As the third and most globally and historically ambitious book emerging from his early ethnographic research on the U.S. base at Diego Garcia, and its subsequent crossover Base Nation: How U.S. Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, this latest work expands his analysis in both scope and scale.1 It also synthesizes the rich historiography and interdisciplinary scholarship on base studies, U.S. imperialism, and U.S. histories of war.
The United States of War merges Vine’s ethnographic expertise with deep, broad based histories, chronicling the construction of early fortifications that eased settler expansion across an international continental landscape inhabited by Indian nations to the most recent proliferation of bases in Africa in the twenty-first century (302). Within this longue durée of...