“The Kind of Justice They Understand”: Vectors of Imperial Violence and American Colonialism in the Islamic Philippines, 1899–1942

My paper explores violence and transcolonial connectivity during the American occupation of the Islamic Philippines (1899-1942). Searching for points of comparison to guide policy towards their new Muslim wards (commonly referred to as ‘Moros’), American colonials looked not only to their own nation’s recent history of frontier violence, but also to European antecedents. Some Americans advocated British and Dutch methods for dealing with recalcitrant Muslim populations, including the burning of villages and the public display of executed offenders. A variety of colonial actors compared American usages of force and detention against those of other empires and borrowed where they saw fit. Carceral institutions established by the Spanish were revived, and district governors modeled labor schemes after those used by the Dutch on Java. Beyond the comparative and adaptive, colonial violence ‘experts’ circulated through the region, using know-how developed elsewhere to destroy native resistance. In sum, this piece suggests that transcolonial logics of violence helped shape the coercive elements of American rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South.