The United States in Poor Things is chiefly a geopolitical idea: a vast Anglo-Saxon nation whose rising strength, Dr. Hooker predicts, will extend the imperial order already established by Britain. The conversation in Odessa gives this forecast a pointed setting. Rather than depicting the country directly, the novel makes it present through travel, political argument and competing visions of who will rule the world.

Geography, travel and report

Dr. Hooker describes himself as a retired missionary returning from China to the United States by the most pleasant and roundabout route he can find. He had reached China fifteen years earlier by the direct Pacific route; his homeward journey, by contrast, is presented as a deliberately circuitous passage. When Harry Astley presses him about possible routes through Siam, India, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Turkestan or Siberia, Hooker declines to specify the route. The exchange establishes the United States as the destination of his travels, but leaves the intervening journey partly out of view.

Hooker says that a few far-seeing American citizens asked him to report on aspects of Central Asia, which he characterizes as the world’s largest remaining field of heathenism. The claim links his former missionary work to an explicitly political and commercial contest. Astley asks whether the American government or chambers of commerce paid for an armed escort, but Hooker does not answer that question directly. Instead, he accuses Britain of having carved up the rest of the planet and points to its recent seizure of Egypt, once claimed by France and by the Egyptians themselves. His account makes American activity abroad appear not as isolated exploration but as part of a competition among powers for influence and territory.

A forecast of American power

At breakfast, with Bella Baxter present as Mrs. Wedderburn, Hooker explains his prediction by claiming that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have begun to control the world because they are more intelligent, industrious, Christian and democratic than other peoples. He presents their superiority as divinely arranged, arguing that it gives them greater command over what he calls their animal instincts. The United States, in this account, is not a departure from British imperialism but its larger transatlantic successor: a nation whose strength is only beginning to unfold.

Hooker’s forecast is specific in scale and time. Britain, he says, has conquered more than a quarter of the planet in a little over two centuries; the United States, a vaster Anglo-Saxon nation, will, he predicts, dominate the rest of the world before the twentieth century ends. He imagines the future as another century of fighting, but rejects the description of that fighting as warfare. British invasion of Egypt and American intervention in Mexico or Cuba are instead framed as policing and civilizing actions. In his promised outcome, people across the world will be able to pursue their occupations peacefully under Anglo-Saxon law. The future he describes is therefore both a prediction of American ascendancy and a justification of imperial rule.

Dispute over empire and civilization

Astley does not accept Hooker’s confidence without qualification. He allows that the prediction may prove possible if subject peoples learn nothing from their rulers, but counters with Japan’s apparent ability and Germany’s industrial strength, which he says has almost overtaken Britain’s. His response challenges the idea that global hierarchy is fixed: the countries Hooker would place among the pupils may acquire capacities that unsettle the rulers’ position.

Hooker answers by dividing the imperial task between Britain and the United States. Britain, he says, can deal with the Prussians, while the Japanese are for the Americans; he dismisses the possibility that the Japanese could become masters by asserting that their skulls are too small. He concedes that the German cranium is comparable to his own and Astley’s, then invents another distinction, alleging that it lacks flexibility. Such claims make the speech’s racial ranking conspicuous as an argument maintained against evidence that threatens it. If Japan displays intelligence and Germany industrial power, Hooker does not reconsider the hierarchy; he finds new grounds for preserving it.

Narrative significance

The United States thus enters the conversation as both a real destination and an imagined future center of power. Hooker’s account of returning home and reporting on Central Asia gives the country a personal connection to travel and overseas observation; his breakfast speech enlarges that connection into a program for global domination. The shift from missionary conversion to a language of policing and administration does not remove the coercion from his vision. He openly says that the supposedly inferior peoples must first be thrashed into submission, while redescribing the violence as benevolent instruction.

The scene also places American expansion beside British responsibility rather than treating it as a separate political story. Hooker condemns Britain for taking Egypt even as he predicts that the United States will assume an even wider command. Astley’s measured objections expose the speech’s dependence on an unstable account of racial and industrial superiority, and Hooker’s final appeal to Anglo-Saxon law shows how that account turns domination into a promise of peace. The country’s significance here lies less in a depicted American landscape than in the debate over the imperial future that its name is made to carry.