From One Empire to Another: The Influence of the British Raj on American Colonialism in the Philippines

I ask how far, and in what ways, the Americans looked to the British Empire, in India and in nearby Malaya, for precedents, examples, and models of governance as they established their rule in the Philippines in the years from 1898 to 1912. The Raj loomed over the entire enterprise.  The very first report (1900) of the U.S. Philippine Commission incorporated a twenty page “Memorandum on the Administration of British Dependencies in the Orient.”  Yet British practices could not so easily be adopted.  Indeed, for much of what the Americans sought to do in the Philippines the British Empire was an example of what should NOT to be followed.   Much, to be sure, was shared.   In the Moro province, for instance, the Americans endeavored to model themselves on British ‘indirect rule’ in Malaya; they shared with the British fundamental racial beliefs, including a commitment to an “Anglo-Saxon” superiority; and, like the British, they were enthusiastic advocates of ethnographic classification, and with it a paternalistic affection for ‘savage’ or ‘non-Christian’ tribes.  Yet the Americans were never comfortable with either the ideologies or the practices that shaped the Raj.   The central argument of this paper explores the contradictions enforced upon the Americans alike by their republican ideology and by the fact that the Filipino people were Christian and partially Europeanized.  Thus, despite its cost in trained manpower the Americans ruled while refusing to establish a proper colonial civil service.   Above all, they prided themselves that they would provide an American style primary education for the masses, not merely a few elite schools.  Kipling asked the Americans to “take up the white man’s burden”.   They did so, but only to demonstrate that, while all colonialisms are the same, they are also all different.