The American Promotion of Settler Colonies in the Early 20th-Century Philippines

The United States’ 1898 annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam meant that for the first time the US had acquired territories that it did not target for white settlement. The Insular cases established the legal basis of US rule over places that would not become states, demarcating them from the white settler colonial spaces in North America and Hawaii. But, in the Philippines, settler colonialism remained relevant even when it wasn’t white settlers who would colonize these new terrains. Indeed, American lawmakers and administrators attempted to adopt the technologies of settler colonialism originally formulated on the mainland – in the form of laws, surveying practices, and “scientific” innovations – and implement them in the Philippines. They used settler colonial practices drawn from the home front to lay the terrain of possibility for the unification and consolidation of American colonial rule abroad.

This paper will demonstrate that the American state used resettlement and internal “colonization” as tools for the reinvention of colonial geographies and the pacification of people. The American colonial state sponsored the movement of Christian Filipinos from ostensibly “overpopulated” areas into the majority-non-Christian South. This offered the promise of ownership to poor and landless peasants from the North. It was also used as part of an effort to pacify and assimilate the islands’ frontier spaces and people into a seemingly coherent nation. This promise, of course, never came to fruition in a global political economy oriented toward the extraction of wealth and the production of disposable populations on the colonial frontier. Furthermore, people indigenous to the Philippines’ southern islands disrupted American and elite Filipinos’ efforts to build large scale agroecologies in the spaces they occupied. These projects also hit up against the limits of possibility defined by the “tropical” environment within which they were initiated.