Book Review

Asia

The American colonial Philippines—the period of formal U.S. political rule over the islands from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) to 1946—has long been a neglected field of historical research in both the Philippines and United States. For Filipino historians, U.S. rule, which relied heavily on elite Filipino collaboration, confounded narratives of the rise of independence-based Filipino nationalism. For U.S. historians, colonial rule in the Philippines was obscured by national-exceptionalist claims that the United States was not a colonial empire and by the inattention of military and diplomatic historians cleaving to U.S. metropolitan actors and archives. Along with other recent work, Michael Salman's revealing study of discourses of slavery and emancipation in the early twentieth-century Philippines suggests that this topic is beginning to attract the scholarly attention it deserves.	1
Salman identifies slavery and emancipation as the central means by which both U.S. and Filipino actors came to comprehend U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Slavery and emancipation, as he puts it, "became points of social, cultural, and political conflict in a series of intertwined American and Philippine histories" (p. 20). In locating these points, Salman's work simultaneously contributes to three different but related areas of historical inquiry. First, it provocatively extends to Southeast Asia historical debates about the politics of emancipation that have heretofore been firmly and almost exclusively anchored in the Atlantic world. Second, it undertakes a cultural history of U.S. colonial rule that highlights competing definitions of and negotiations between ruler and ruled, whereas most prior studies have focusd primarily on more conventional political and administrative history. Third, implicitly but perhaps most significantly, it puts the Muslims of the southern archipelago, and the animists of northern Luzon, at the center of Philippine history. These regions, Salman argues, with their "non-Christian" peoples, were the crucibles in which notions of what it was to be "Filipino," and what it was to be "colonial," were forged.	2
The book is organized chronologically, from the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 through the 1916 Jones Act, which "Filipinized" the colonial state and promised eventual independence. Even before the advent of a colonial state, Salman argues, "[a]ntislavery ideology and the history of abolition shaped Americans' debate on U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines" (p. 28). Drawing on earlier works, he shows how the ranks of anti-imperialist leadership included abolitionists and how these figures made public sense of U.S. colonialism in light of questions of slavery and freedom. When, in 1899, the United States negotiated the Bates Treaty with Moro datus in the southern islands, promising nonintervention with "slavery," it further fueled anti-imperialist arguments that colonialism was contrary to progress, freedom, and morality. Salman then provides a nuanced social history of slavery within the political structures of the southern Philippines; in the interests of indirect rule, U.S. officials represented these systems as "mild," to be eliminated gradually through promises of compensation and U.S. protection for runaways. "The problem," Salman notes astutely, "lay in resolving the contradiction between antislavery commitments and the imperative of colonial order so that one did not fully negate the other" (p. 115). As the U.S. colonial state consolidated, its officials increasingly redrew slavery as "harsh," passing "anti-slavery" laws that touched off ten years of Moro-U.S. warfare.	. . .