In the wake of its victory over the declining Spanish Empire in 1898, the United States of America was faced with a political and moral problem. Specifically, the territories it had acquired under the Treaty of Paris - the largest of which were Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico - were inhabited by over 10 million people, or the equivalent to 12% of the US population at the time. As Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greate