Restoring Asia to the Global Moment of 1898

In the majority of the traditional Philippine and American literatures on this period, the tumultuous turn of the twentieth century surrounding the Philippine Revolution, Spanish-American War, and transfer of imperial sovereignty over the Philippines from Spain to the US lacks acknowledgment of the larger regional setting of Asia. Anthony Hopkins’s American Empire’s recent move to bring the larger insular American empire into a single focus is novel and deeply important, and one hopes that transnational and comparative histories around the moment of 1898 across Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines will proliferate, but the immediate, regional Asian setting of this moment in Philippine history—and American history—should also be restored. Japan’s importance in the Philippines begins earlier, and can work to make legible the Asian setting to the dying days of the Spanish empire in the Pacific, to the imperial world stage that had by then swallowed the region, and to the anti-colonial nationalist Propaganda Movement and Philippine Revolution, among others in the region. This talk explores the global moment surrounding 1898 to see the way in which, even for the established Western imperial powers of Southeast Asia, the spectre of Japan, an Asian contestant to modern world power, was rapidly transforming their understanding of the region they bestrode—and revealing to them an emerging geography of political affinity then stitching together pockets of Asia.