Land Management as a Tool of Control in the American Colonial Philippines

This paper argues that the founding principles upon which American colonial control was built in the Philippines were deeply rooted in efforts to transform archipelagic space into private property. This aspiration could look orderly on paper, but its enactment was far more difficult, more violent, and more intertwined with local relations of power than these administrative plans would suggest. Importantly, these goals were neither new to the Philippines nor exceptional vis a vis contemporaneous global colonial projects. The Spanish state certainly passed fewer laws and opened fewer agencies to promote land distribution than the Americans would, but it maintained an interest in putting Philippine land into private hands for extraction and for transformation into agricultural landscapes. In 1891, for example, Felipe Canga-Argüelles y Villalba secured a large concession from the crown in a majority Indigenous region, allowing him unfettered logging, mining, and agricultural rights to over 200 hectares. Unable to find enough workers—he complained bitterly about his inability to recruit Chinese labor—Canga-Argüelles failed to establish the plantation that he imagined.

Plans to address how private interests might access adequate labor power to realize the profits they imagined were less prominent aspects of the initial spate of legislation and regulations. These included U.S. colonials’ push to undermine existing forms of communal land use and ownership also functioned as policies that could push peasants in seemingly peripheral areas into capitalist relations of power. The Philippine Commissions passed laws to turn what they deemed “public” land into the property of the state and thereby dispossess Indigenous people in an effort to remake, dominate, and produce opportunities for profit. While these legal designations changed overnight, their consequences were extremely uneven. This paper offers three anecdotes about struggles over space and ownership in Mindanao in the 1910s.