Abstract
Postcolonial analysis illuminates continuity in the history of US colonialism. The counterinsurgency war waged by the United States at the turn of the century in the Philippine archipelago, though not a settler project, was nonetheless a colonial project. The argument for viewing the “Spanish-American War” and the “Philippine Insurrection” as discontinuous rests on a disavowal of the prior history of settler colonialism. By relegating Indian removal to domestic history, thus keeping it quarantined from the broader history of US foreign relations, a colonialist historiography has obscured the fundamental continuities of US empire building.1
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Notes
Myriad histories continue to frame the Spanish-American War as discontinuous, as if it were the nation’s first foray into imperialism. See, for example, Chapter 9, “The Birth of an American Empire, 1898–1902,” in the recent military history by Allan Millett, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607–2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012). It remains a common practice to begin surveys of diplomatic history with the Spanish-American War as the fulcrum of empire.
See, for example, Jerald A. Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 4th ed., 2012).
Julian Go, “Imperial Power and Its Limits: America’s Colonial Empire in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin Moore, eds., Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York: The New Press, 2006), 204.
Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories Under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 4.
Paul Kramer concludes, “The estimate of 250,000 Filipino war deaths appears conservative” whereas Julian Go declares “no less than 400,000 Filipino lives” were lost in the war. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 157; Go, “Imperial Power and Its Limits,” 212. In Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Michael H. Hunt and Stephen I. Levine aver, The best guess is that between 1899 and 1903 the death rate exceeded normal mortality by 750,000. This figure reflects war-related hardships such as severe food shortages and outbreaks of diseases such as malaria, dysentery, typhoid, smallpox, and cholera that shortened the lives of adults, raised infant mortality, disrupted pregnancies, and reduced fertility. These effects persisted well into peacetime.(58)
Both Brian M. Linn and John M. Gates offer well-researched studies published more than a generation apart that emphasize the success of US Army pacification and civic action programs in ultimately winning the Philippine War. These authors trumpet the success of the army’s counterinsurgency campaign while marginalizing the indiscriminate violence of the war as aberrant rather than intrinsic to the colonial project. In a more recent work, Linn condemns “non-specialists” for perpetuating “clichés,” “dogma,” and the “myth” that violence, torture, and devastation lay behind the US war effort. Linn frames his own interpretation as objective scholarship whereas he finds it “distressing” that “many Americans, particularly in academia, interpret the Philippine War through an ideological perspective developed during the 1960s,” which we are left to infer renders them automatically discredited. See Brian McAllister, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 324–328;
and John M. Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1899–1902 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).
David Brody, Visualizing Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 61.
Kramer, Blood of Government, 103–104; David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 68.
Linn, Philippine War, 42–52; Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 12–16; Kramer, Blood of Government, 111–112.
Servando D. Halili, Jr., Iconography of the New Empire: Race and Gender Images and the American Colonization of the Philippines (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2006), xi, 61, 67.
Susan K. Harris God’s Arbiters: Americans in the Philippines, 1898 to 1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 180.
Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980), 810–831; Linn, U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in Philippine War, 23.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: (Vol. I) From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, 1769–1776 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995; 1889), 90, 92;
Roosevelt quoted in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 363.
Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 5; Kramer, Blood of Government, 139, 122.
Russell Roth, Muddy Glory: America’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the Philippines, 1899–1935 (Hanover, MA: Christina Publishing House, 1981), 54–55;
Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), 154; Kramer, Blood of Government, 144–145.
Roth, Muddy Glory, 21, 74; Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of and Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 5–6; Linn, Philippine War, 224.
Resil B. Majares, The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899–1906 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), 133–157.
Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 199–201; Linn, Philippine War, 306–321.
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 204; Louise Barnett, Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 65; Linn, Philippine War, 310–312.
Kramer, Blood of Government, 135; Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 147.
May, Battle for Batangas, 149; Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of and Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 15.
Patricio N. Abinales, “The U.S. Army as an Occupying Force in Muslim Mindanao, 1899–1913,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 416; Kramer, Blood of Government, 217.
Eva-Lotta E. Hedman and John T. Sidel, Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Post-colonial Trajectories (New York: Routledge, 2000), 7; McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 125.
John T. Sidel, Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 146.
Kathleen M. Nadeau, The History of the Philippines (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 60, 69–71.
Robert Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Hedman and Sidel, Philippine Politics and Society in Twentieth Century, 42.
On Indonesia see Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development in U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008);
the literature on the Vietnam War is massive; for an excellent recent overview see Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini, eds., Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Second Indochina War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Ibid., 1, 20; Patricio N. Abinales, “Notes on the Disappearing ‘middle’ in Post-authoritarian Philippine Politics,” in Shiraishi Takashi and Pusuk Phongpaichit, eds., The Rise of Middle Classes in Southeast Asia (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2008), 176–193.
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© 2013 Walter L. Hixson
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Hixson, W.L. (2013). “Things Too Scandalous to Write”: The Philippine Intervention and the Continuities of Colonialism. In: American Settler Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374264_8
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