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Reviews
| The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. By Paul A. Kramer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xii + 538 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $69.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
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Since the Organization of American Historians (OAH) called for the internationalization of U.S. history in 2002, a new literature on transnational history has emerged. One of the most important of these new works is Paul Kramer's The Blood of Government, a book that moves easily—and often brilliantly—across geographic and disciplinary boundaries to probe the dynamics of racial formation in the context of U.S. Empire. |
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Focusing on the Philippines during the period of U.S. colonial rule, Kramer explores how dynamically racial ideologies adapted at different historical moments. Most innovatively, Kramer shows how events in both the United States and the Philippines shaped these ideologies across what he calls "transpacific space" (p. 428). Drawing on a rich array of sources from archives in both the U.S. and the Philippines, Kramer crafts a truly transnational study of empire in which forces in the metropole and colony carry equally explanatory weight. |
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Race is at the heart of Kramer's study. Unlike previous scholars who have assumed that U.S. colonialists merely exported racial ideologies to the colonies, Kramer demonstrates how the conditions of empire gave rise to new racial formations. Through letters of U.S. soldiers in the Philippines, Kramer shows the racialization of Filipinos as uniformly degenerate in justification of the Philippine-American War. After the war, a different racial ideology was needed to legitimate civilian rule in which the U.S. Philippine Commission relied on support from Filipino elites. In this period, Kramer shows how U.S. colonialists disaggregated Filipinos into Hispanic Christians and indigenous non-Christians to justify employing some Filipinos and not others. U.S. efforts to form new racial ideologies involved what Kramer calls "fiesta" politics in which the U.S. governor held elaborate colonial balls where U.S. officials danced with the wives of leading Filipino elites (illustrados) to prove that Filipinos were "brothers and not serfs" (p. 185). This kind of "inclusionary racism," Kramer claims, represented not only a shift from wartime racial politics but also a departure from racial hierarchies in the United States (p. 192). Through this and other examples, Kramer argues, "It was not simply that difference made empire possible: empire remade difference in the process" (p. 3). |
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Kramer makes equally important contributions in his examination of racialized conceptions of Filipinos in the metropole. In the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, he uncovers early evidence of domestic white anxiety about Filipinos (p. 276). When Filipino soldiers were found strolling the fair grounds in the company of young white women, white supremacist mobs responded violently. This conflict reflected the collision of metropolitan and colonial racial ideologies. While U.S. officials in Manila practiced an inclusionary racial politics that sought to include and assimilate Filipino elites, whites in St. Louis, more familiar with the racial order of the Jim Crow South, sought only to exclude Filipinos. Ironically, it was these racial fears—later mobilized by nativists lobbying Congress for the exclusion of Filipino immigrants—that led Congress to grant the Philippines eventual independence (p. 423). |
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The Blood of Government is impressive for how it connects different fields of historical inquiry: racial ideologies and colonialism, cultural and political history, the United States and the Philippines. Yet such breadth occasionally leaves the reader wanting more context in one field before connecting to another. Regarding the 1904 World's Fair, for example, Kramer might have explored the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Williams of January in that year, which declared Filipinos and Puerto Ricans to be "U.S. nationals." White fears of Filipinos at the fair were surely heightened by that decision, which allowed Filipinos legally to enter the U.S. without restriction. Kramer might also have compared U.S. colonialism in the Philippines to that in Puerto Rico, a limitation he acknowledges in the introduction. But such questions do not diminish Kramer's achievement. By treating the Philippines and the United States as one "global field," The Blood of Government fulfills the goal set out by the OAH and is sure to be a touchstone of transnational history for years to come.
Robert McGreevey
Brandeis University
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