American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines tells the story of U.S. colonialists who attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to build an enduring American empire in the Philippines through the production of space. From concrete interventions in infrastructure, urban planning, and built environments to more abstract projects of mapping and territorialization, the book traces the efforts of U.S. Insular Government agents to make space for empire in the Philippines through forms of territory, map, landscape, and road, and how these spaces were understood as solutions to problems of colonial rule. Through the lens of space, the book offers an original history of a highly transformative, but largely misunderstood or forgotten, imperial moment, when the Philippine archipelago, made up of thousands of islands and an ethnically and religiously diverse population of more than seven million, became the unlikely primary setting for U.S. experimentation with formal colonial governance. Telling that story around key figures including Cameron Forbes, Daniel Burnham, Dean Worcester, and William Howard Taft, the book provides distinctive chapters dedicated to spaces of territory (sovereignty), maps (knowledge), landscape (aesthetics), and roads (circulation), suggesting new and integrative historical geographical approaches. This book will be of interest to students of Cultural, Historical, and Political Geography, American History, American Studies, Philippine Studies, Southeast Asia/Philippines; Asian Studies as well as general readers interested in these areas.

In Civilizational Imperatives, Oliver Charbonneau reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, Charbonneau argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for US military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to US settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange—accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike—gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. Civilizational Imperatives is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.

Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and “civilizing” a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. In the process, he traces a significant transformation in the thinking of colonial doctors and scientists about what was most threatening to the health of white colonists. During the late nineteenth century, they understood the tropical environment as the greatest danger, and they sought to help their fellow colonizers to acclimate. Later, as their attention shifted to the role of microbial pathogens, colonial scientists came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct. A vivid sense of a colonial culture characterized by an anxious and assertive white masculinity emerges from Anderson’s description of American efforts to treat and discipline allegedly errant Filipinos. His narrative encompasses a colonial obsession with native excrement, a leper colony intended to transform those considered most unclean and least socialized, and the hookworm and malaria programs implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, Anderson is attentive to the circulation of intertwined ideas about race, science, and medicine. He points to colonial public health in the Philippines as a key influence on the subsequent development of military medicine and industrial hygiene, U.S. urban health services, and racialized development regimes in other parts of the world.

In 1898 the United States declared sovereignty over the Philippines, an archipelago of seven thousand islands inhabited by seven million people of various ethnicities. While it became a colonial power at the zenith of global imperialism, the United States nevertheless conceived of its rule as exceptional—an exercise in benevolence rather than in tyranny and exploitation. In this volume, Julian Go and Anne L. Foster untangle this peculiar self-fashioning and insist on the importance of studying U.S. colonial rule in the context of other imperialist ventures. A necessary expansion of critical focus, The American Colonial State in the Philippines is the first systematic attempt to examine the creation and administration of the American colonial state from comparative, global perspectives. Written by social scientists and historians, these essays investigate various aspects of American colonial government through comparison with and contextualization within colonial regimes elsewhere in the world—from British Malaysia and Dutch Indonesia to Japanese Taiwan and America's other major overseas colony, Puerto Rico. Contributors explore the program of political education in the Philippines; constructions of nationalism, race, and religion; the regulation of opium; connections to politics on the U.S. mainland; and anticolonial resistance. Tracking the complex connections, circuits, and contests across, within, and between empires that shaped America's colonial regime, The American Colonial State in the Philippines sheds new light on the complexities of American imperialism and turn-of-the-century colonialism. Contributors. Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso, Paul Barclay, Vince Boudreau, Anne L. Foster, Julian Go, Paul A. Kramer

In 1904, renowned architect Daniel Burnham, the Progressive Era urban planner who famously “Made No Little Plans,” set off for the Philippines, the new US colonial acquisition. Charged with designing environments for the occupation government, Burnham set out to convey the ambitions and the dominance of the regime, drawing on neo-classical formalism for the Pacific colony. The spaces he created, most notably in the summer capital of Baguio, gave physical form to American rule and its contradictions. In American Imperial Pastoral, Rebecca Tinio McKenna examines the design, construction, and use of Baguio, making visible the physical shape, labor, and sustaining practices of the US’s new empire—especially the dispossessions that underwrote market expansion. In the process, she demonstrates how colonialists conducted market-making through state-building and vice-versa. Where much has been made of the racial dynamics of US colonialism in the region, McKenna emphasizes capitalist practices and design ideals—giving us a fresh and nuanced understanding of the American occupation of the Philippines.

Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

DIVInterdisciplinary collection placing the U.S. imperial project in the Philippines within a global, comparative framework./div

After years of occupying a vexed position in the American academy, Philippine studies has come into its own, emerging as a trenchant and dynamic space of inquiry. Filipino Studies is a field-defining collection of vibrant voices, critical perspectives, and provocative ideas about the cultural, political, and economic state of the Philippines and its diaspora. Traversing issues of colonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, and nationalism, this volume examines not only the past and present position of the Philippines and its people, but also advances new frameworks for re-conceptualizing this growing field. Written by a prestigious lineup of international scholars grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperial power, the essays examine both the genealogy of the Philippines’ hyphenated identity as well as the future trajectory of the field. Hailing from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors revisit and contest traditional renditions of Philippine colonial histories, from racial formations and the Japanese occupation to the Cold War and “independence” from the United States. Whether addressing the contested memories of World War II, the “voyage” of Filipino men and women into the U.S. metropole, or migrant labor and the notion of home, the assembled essays tease out the links between the past and present, with a hopeful longing for various futures. Filipino Studies makes bold declarations about the productive frameworks that open up new archives and innovative landscapes of knowledge for Filipino and Filipino American Studies.

The Treaty of Paris in 1898 initiated America’s administration of the Philippines. By 1905, Manila had been replanned and the city of Baguio built as expressions of colonial sovereignty and as symbols of a society disassociating itself from its hitherto “uncivilized” existence. Against this historical backdrop, Ian Morley undertook a thorough investigation to elucidate the meaning of modern American city planning in the Philippines and examine its dissemination throughout the archipelago with respect to colonial governmental ideals, social advancement, and the shaping of national identity. By focusing on the forces of the early years of American colonial rule, Cities and Nationhood offers a historical paradigm that not only re-grounds our grasp of Philippine cities, but also illuminates complex national identity movements and city design practices that were evident elsewhere during the early 1900s. Cities and Nationhood places the design of Philippine cities within a framework of America’s distinct religious and racial identity, colonial politics, and local cultural expansion. In doing so, it expands knowledge about city planning—its influence and role—within national development by providing valuable insights into the nature of Philippine society during an era when America felt morally compelled to enact progressive civilization by instruction and example. Producing a new understanding of the role of America’s colonial mission, the City Beautiful modern of urban design and Philippine cities, and the inclusions and exclusions designed into their built forms, the author addresses two fundamental intellectual matters. First, the work recontextualizes the planning history of Philippine cities. Analysis of the ideals of nationalism and civility at a key period in Philippine history shifts scholarship on the plans of Philippine cities. Second, the book offers an example of how studies of city design can profitably embrace additional geographical, cultural, and chronological territories in order to rethink the abstract and tangible meaning of arranging urban places after major governmental changes and identity transitions have occurred.

An overview and analysis of the role of English in the Philippines, the factors that led to its spread and retention, and the characteristics of Philippine English today.