Improving on the Civilising Mission?: Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines

Itinerario

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 44-66

  Adas, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84990925033     PISSN: 01651153     EISSN: 20412827     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0165115300023500     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Taft to J.G. Schmidlapp, 15 June 1900, William Howard Tafi Papers, Series 3, Reel 30, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
2. There were, of course, good reasons for these concerns. But they had more to do with an absence of European or American immunities to radically different disease environments than to innate racial characteristics or the heat, humidity and miasmatic conditions that were usually the focus of discourses on the ill-health of Anglo-Saxons and other ‘white races’ in the tropics. See especially the work of Philip Curtin, including The Image. of Africa (Madison 1965) chapter three
3. Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York 1989)
4. Disease and Empire (Cambridge 1998).
5. Also highly informative on European explanations for their high mortality rates and ill-health in the tropics is David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley 1993), especially chapters one and two.
6. Benjamin Kidd, The Control of the Tropics (London 1898).
7. William Griffis, ‘America in the Far East; II The Anglo-Saxon in the Tropics’, The Outlook 60/15 (December 1898) 903–904.
8. Of the extensive literature on American diplomatic duplicity and military operations, Leon Wolff's Little Brown Brother (New York 1960)
9. Stuart C. Miller's more recent Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven 1982) remain the most revealing.
10. The most detailed treatment of the costs in terms of disease and famine of the violent occupation of the islands can be found in Ken DeBevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton 1955).
11. On Kipling's poem as a response to America's colonial takeover, see Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 189–190.
12. On Root, see Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root I (New York 1939) 300
13. Luke Wright, ‘The Situation in the Philippines’, The Outlook, 12 September 1903, 111.
14. Charles Elliot, The Philippines to the End of the Military Regime (Indianapolis 1917) 59–60
15. Carl Crow, America and the Philippines (Garden City, New York 1914) 241
16. Francis Harrison, The Comer-Stone of Philippine Independence (New York 1922) 331, 338–339
17. Leonard Wood, ‘A Word about the Philippines’ in: Report of the Thirty-Third Annual Lake Mohonk Conference on the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, 20–22 October 1916, 153.
18. The phrase was used by Norbert Lyons, the associate editor of the American-owned Manila Daily Bulletin to characterise the first decade and a half of United States colonisation in the islands. See, ‘Some Observations on Race Contact’, in the Lake Mohonk Conference Report, 148.
19. Wright, ‘Situation in the Philippines’, 111.
20. Elliot, End of the Military Regime, 80–83
21. Harrison, Comer-Stone of Independence, 54–59
22. Lyons, ‘Race Contact’, 148–149.
23. Harrison, ComerStone of Independence, 325.
24. ComerStone of Independence., 326, 329–330, 338–339.
25. Report of the Special Mission to the Philippines (Manila 1921) 12.
26. David Prescott Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, 10 April 1917, Box 34.
27. Wright, ‘Situation in the Philippines’, 111.
28. W.H. Taft, ‘Some Results of Our Government in the Philippines’ in: Campbell Dauncey ed., The Philippines: An Account of their People Progress, and Condition (Boston 1910) 35.
29. Harrison, ComerStone of Independence, 320.
30. J.A.A. van Doom, De Laatste Eeuw van Indië: Ontwikkeling en Ondergang van een Koloniaal Project (Amsterdam 1994) 83–85.
31. From his instructions to the second Philippine Commission, reprinted in W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands (Boston 1928) 442.
32. Report of the Taft Philippine Commission in Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900 I (Washington D.C. 1901) 122–224.
33. For samples of American contempt for their Spanish predecessors, see Wright, ‘Situation in Philippines’, 114–115
34. Jacob G. Shurman, Philippine Affairs (New York 1902) 26–27
35. L. Donald Warren, Isles of Opportunity (Washington D.C. 1928) 63–64.
36. Harrison, Comer-Stone of Independence, 337–339.
37. For sample expressions of American pride in the scientific nature of their colonial initiatives drawn from widely disparate projects and departments, see Shurman, Philippine Affairs, 67 (legislation relating to economics and finances)
38. an anonymous article on ‘Versatility of the American Army’, Army and Navy Journal, 7 September 1912, 6 (psychology and policies towards the ‘pagan’ and primitive peoples of ‘the southern islands’)
39. Elliot, End of the Military Regime, 54–59, quoted portion page 59.
40. Harrison provided perhaps the most important exception in this regard, but see also Crow, America and the Philippines, 241–242.
41. Daniel Headrick's The Tentacles of Progress (Oxford 1988) provides a useful overview of these processes.
42. For important, historical accounts with reference to specific colonial sites, see (for British India), the essays in: Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar eds, Technology and the Raj (New Delhi 1995)
43. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body (Berkeley 1993)
44. E.M. Whitcombe, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India (Berkeley 1972)
45. (for the Nether-lands Indies) Van Doom, De Laatste Eeuw van Indië, especially chapters four to seven
46. H.W. van den Doel, De Stille Macht: Het Europese Binnenlands bestuur op Java en Madoera, 1808–1942 (Amsterdam 1994) chapter five
47. (for French Indochina) Frédéric Hulot, L'Indochine - Le Yunnan: Le chemins de fer de la France d'Outre-mer I (Saint-Laurent-du-Var 1990)
48. Pham Cao Duong, Vietnamese Peasants under French Domination (Berkeley 1985) especially 9–23, 136–151
49. Anne Marcovich, ‘French Colonial Medicine and Colonial Rule: Algeria and Indochina’ in: Roy McLeod and Milton Lewis eds, Disease, Medicine, and Empire (London 1988) 103–117.
50. Jacob Shurman, ‘Our Duty to the Philippines’, The Independent 51, 28 December 1899, 3466–3467.
51. Charles Burke Elliot, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government: A Study in Tropical Democracy (Indianapolis 1917) 271.
52. For sample expressions of diese sentiments by Elliot's administrative predecessors, see James F. Smith's 1908 ‘Message of the Governor-General to the Philippine Commission and the Philippine Assembly’, in the Harrison Papers, Container 42, especially pp 1–7
53. W. Cameron Forbes, the Secretary of Commerce and Police ‘Extracts from Letter of the Secretary of Commerce and Police’ in: W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands (Boston 1928) volume I, 408–409; volume II, 455–458.
54. Elliot, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government, 277–278.
55. For a more detailed analysis of the centrality of engineering imagery and leadership in America's colonisation of the Philippines, see Michael Adas's forthcoming study on The Technological Imperative: Social Engineering and America's Civilizing Mission, chapter five.
56. From a rather large literature on the history of the engineering profession in the United States in this period, perhaps the most insightful and broadly conceived remain, Edward Layton's Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland 1971)
57. David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford 1977).
58. On diese trends in the academic disciplines, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge 1991)
59. on the increasing confidence that social science theories could be applied to human societies, John M.Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill 1994).
60. One of the few serious explorations to date of the significance of these measures in American colonization and Filipino responses to them can be found in Vicente L. Rafael's essay on ‘White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonisation of the Philippines’ in: Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham 1993) 185–218.
61. And, as George W. Stocking Jr and Henrika Kuklick have shown, in the Pacific islands more generally as well as in sub-Saharan Africa-, where development was also seen to stopped at the savage level of existence. See, Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York 1987) chapter seven
62. Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge 1991), especially chapter four.
63. Rodney J. Sullivan, Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C. Worcester (Ann Arbor 1991).
64. Barrows to Dean C. Worcester, 7 April 1902, Barrows Papers, Box 1.
65. Robert W. Rydell, All the World's A Fair (Chicago 1984) chapter six.
66. On these divergent strategies, see the studies in Norman G. Owen ed., Compadre Colonialism: Studies in the Philippines under American Rule (Ann Arbor 1971)
67. Peter W. Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921 (Cambridge Mass. 1974)
68. compared, for examples, to Van den Doel, Stille Macht, chapter six; Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley 1985) chapter eight
69. Michael Adas, ‘The Reconstruction of Tradition and the Defense of the Colonial Order’ in: Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp eds, Articulating Hidden Histories (Berkeley 1995) 291–307.
70. Elliot, End of the Military Regime, 54–55.
71. End of the Military Regime., 58–60.
72. Wright, ‘Situation in the Philippines’, 111
73. Taft to Captain Charles T. Barker, 13 July 1901, Taft Papers, Series 3, Reel 33
74. Elliot, End of the Commission Government, iii
75. Roosevelt, The Philippines: A Treasure and a Problem (New York 1926) 15
76. Gilbert (quoted passage), The Great White Tribe in Filipinia (Cincinnati 1903) 302–303.
77. The late-nineteenth century French debates over assimilation and shift to association are discussed at Jength in Hubert Deschamps, Les mélhodes et les doctrines de la France du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris 1953)
78. Raymond Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York 1961).
79. Van Doom, Laatste Eeuw, chapter six; David W. Del Testa, ‘Paint the Trains Red’: Labor, Nationalism and the Railroads in French Colonial Indochina, 1898–1945 (Ph.D. dissertation in progress, University of California at Davis) chapter one
80. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford 1959)
81. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca 1989) chapters three and five.
82. Eduardo Lachica, Huh: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt (Manila 1971) chapters two and three
83. Philippines, Bureau of Agriculture, A Half-Century of Philippine Agriculture (Manila 1952)
84. Norman G. Owen, Prosperity Without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines (Berkeley 1984).
85. The fullest study of this prolonged agrarian crisis remains F.A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier (New York 1945).
86. J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and the Netherlands Indies (Cambridge 1948).
87. For samples of official stress on the central importance of market mechanisms in the ‘development’ of the Philippines, see William Howard Taft, Present Day Problems (Freeport 1908) 26–27
88. Elliot, End of the Commission, 300ff
89. Forbes, Philippine Islands, 8.
90. See, for example, Report of the (3rd) Philippine Commission I (1903) 59–60.
91. Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines (Westport 1980), especially chapter three.
92. See, for example, Para Villanueva de Kalaw, ‘The Filipino Woman in the Past and Present’, The Philippine Review 2/12 (December 1917).
93. Reynaldo Clemena Ileto, Payson and Revolution (Manila 1979)
94. David Sturtevant, Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840–1940 (Ithaca 1976)
95. Lachica, Huk, and Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion (Berkeley 1977).
96. Though he implicitly argues for a much broader impact that his small sample of doctors and patients warrants, this underside of the American colonial venture has been explored in interesting ways by Warrick Anderson in ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown’, American Historical Review 102/5 (1997) 1343–1370.
97. See also, De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, passim.
98. Report (3rd) of the Philippine Commission, 31–32
99. Crow, America and the Philippines, 58–60.