Disavowal, Adaptation, Mimicry: European Empires and US Colonialism in the Philippines

A wealth of scholarship surveying, analyzing, and critiquing the United States’ colonization of the Philippines has appeared in the past two decades, with important new contributions expanding our knowledge of how colonial rule functioned; how the islands’ peoples experienced and responded to the myriad incursions of empire; the ways political, administrative, and military cultures evolved; and how colonialism shaped education, labor, law, and health in the archipelago. Some of it expands beyond Southeast Asia to consider the Philippines as a nodal point in an emerging trans-Pacific empire, probing connections within the United States’ imbricated colonial and domestic domains. This paper elaborates on these works by considering how we might think beyond the colony, the nation, and the empire and understand the twentieth-century colonial Philippines as a composite creation, produced both within the U.S. imperial sphere and through a constellation of transregional and transimperial exchanges. In particular, it focuses on the relationships between U.S. colonial imaginaries / practices and territories colonized by European empires in Southeast Asia. This extended beyond inheritances from Spain to encompass British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese colonies, which served as (negative and positive) comparative templates, economic partners, and reservoirs of colonial expertise. Considering U.S. rule in the Philippines through the lens of the “new imperialism” of the late-19^th / early-20^th centuries destabilizes familiar narratives of imperial self-production. Moving beyond a U.S.-Philippines binary, the paper reintegrates the American period into a wider story where European colonial repertoires of power overlapped and drew from one another. In doing so, it suggests more capacious ways of understanding how American empire was produced and maintained.