The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines

The Blood of Government

The Blood of Government

Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines

Paul A. Kramer

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2006 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Eric M. Brooks

Set in Jenson and Seria Sans by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kramer, Paul A. (Paul Alexander), 1968–

The blood of government: race, empire, the United States,

and the Philippines / by Paul A. Kramer.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-2985-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-2985-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5653-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8078-5653-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Philippines—History—1898–1946. 2. United States— History—1865– 3. Race relations—Philippines. 4. Race relations— United States. I. Title.

DS685.K73   2006

959.9’03–dc22    2005031380

A portion of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901–1905, Radical History Review 73 (Winter 1999): 74–114, and is reprinted here with permission.

cloth 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

paper 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother and father,

JUDY & OSCAR KRAMER

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION Sliding Scales

Race, Empire, and Transnational History

CHAPTER 1 Blood Compacts

Spanish Colonialism and the Invention of the Filipino

CHAPTER 2 From Hide to Heart

The Philippine-American War as Race War

CHAPTER 3 Dual Mandates

Collaboration and the Racial State

CHAPTER 4 Tensions of Exposition

Mixed Messages at the St. Louis World’s Fair

CHAPTER 5 Representative Men

The Politics of Nation-Building

CHAPTER 6 Empire and Exclusion

Ending the Philippine Invasion of the United States

CONCLUSION The Difference Empire Made

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1921 political cartoon in the Philippine Free Press 20

Hand-drawn map of the Pacific by José Rizal 45

Photograph of ilustrados José Rizal, Marcelo H. Del Pilar, and Mariano Ponce 49

1886 painting El Pacto de Sangre by Juan Luna 60

Display of Igorots from Madrid’s 1887 Philippine Exposition 70

Illustration from the short story Itamo, the Insurrecto 107

Anti-imperialist cartoon in the New York Herald, July 3, 1898 118

Photograph of trench filled with bodies 126

Photograph of the water cure being administered by U.S. soldiers 142

Photograph of U.S. missionaries visiting Filipino prisoners of war 172

Photograph of U.S. and Filipino officials at an elaborate ball 187

Political cartoon from Public Opinion, June 1902 193

Photograph of William Howard Taft, Leonard Wood, and U.S. schoolteachers with Filipino children 202

Maps of Northern Luzon circa 1907 210

Photograph of the Bud Dajo massacre of 1906 219

Photograph of Daniel Folkmar supervising Filipino prisoners in Bilibid prison 231

Draft of Felix Resurrección Hidalgo’s painting Through Peace and Liberty 255

Bird’s-eye view of the Philippine exhibit at the St. Louis world’s fair 259

Photograph of American visitors with Moros and Igorots at the St. Louis world’s fair 267

Photograph of the Visayan exhibit with a solitary American spectator 270

Photographs depicting the Filipino of yesterday and of today from the World’s Work, August 1904 272

Illustration of the Color Line Problem at the Fair from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 3, 1904 277

Portrait of the first Philippine Assembly 303

Photograph of A Modern Primary School Building from Dean Worcester’s Philippines, Past and Present 311

Photograph of a Typical Scene in a Trade School 315

Photographic series depicting the Educational Value of the Constabulary 321

Photograph of a headhunter as A Possible Office-Holder 367

Photograph in the March 1913 Filipino People depicting a Typical Filipino Home 373

Map of exclusionary zones in U.S. immigration law, 1928 399

Photograph of a Positively No Filipinos Allowed sign in Stockton, California, 1930 405

Photograph of Esther Schmick and Perfecto Bandalan in the Watsonville Evening Pajaronian, December 1929 409

Photograph of University of the Philippines student protest from the Manila Times, January 31, 1930 429

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book were made possible by the generosity of a number of fellowship programs that allowed me the time to research and write. My thanks to the Smithsonian Institution, the Fulbright Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Bentley Historical Library, the Andrew Mellon and Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Fellowship programs at Princeton University, and the Dean’s Summer Incentive Grant program at Johns Hopkins University. Archivists and librarians too numerous to count helped me identify the materials used in this book. I am especially appreciative of the staff of Hopkins’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library, particularly history bibliographers Jeannette Pierce and Thomas Izbicki, and Sharon Morris in government publications. The Eisenhower’s dedicated interlibrary loan office allowed me to greatly broaden this project’s source base, and staff members have been endlessly patient.

Scholars and friends have been generous with their hospitality during the travels I have undertaken while completing my research. My thanks to Josep Fradera for his hospitality in Barcelona. I owe special thanks to the History Department of Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines. I am especially indebted to Merce Planta and Marco Lagman for their welcome, and to Megan Thomas for many thought-provoking coffees at Ateneo. Noelle and Leal Rodriguez were the best companions I could have ever hoped to have.

I have also had the great benefit of a supportive academic environment. Since arriving at Hopkins, I have learned enormously from my colleagues in the History Department. I am especially grateful to all the participants in the department’s seminar and to the students in my graduate classes, from whom I’ve learned a great deal. I owe special thanks, for their professional guidance and moral support, to Dorothy Ross, David Bell, Judy Walkowitz, Ron Walters, and Gabriele Spiegel. The smooth functioning of the department in which I work has been due to the energy of the History Department’s staff: Lisa Enders, Megan Zeller, Ayana Teal, Eva Gonzalez, the late Sharon Widomski, and Shirley Hipley. My thanks also go to Clayton Haywood and Jamie Bakert for their technical assistance. Harry Marks and James Goodyear, who played key roles in my becoming a historian, have also been supportive colleagues. A number of individuals at Hopkins played crucial roles in the book’s final completion. Manuel Cabanilla carefully scanned the images, Rachel Hadler diligently located and helped me secure their copyrights, and Catherine Jones patiently helped with the bibliography.

I have been the beneficiary of many readers’ wisdom and critical imagination. The insightful comments of Eileen Scully, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Benedict Anderson challenged and guided me as I shaped this work. Dan Rodgers was an engaged and supportive adviser while I was at Princeton and remains an inspiration to me as a scholar and teacher. I have been fortunate in having the opportunity to present my research in a number of illuminating workshop settings; my thanks in particular go to Vicente Rafael and David Szanton, Rebecca Scott, and Ann Stoler. I have also learned much from suggestions made by commentators at a number of conferences, including Mary Renda, David Roediger, Susan Schulten, and Robert Vitalis. My thanks to Etienne Balibar for his illuminating summer course at Cornell on theories of race and to the class’s engaging students. For their moral support and dialogues with me on this book’s themes, I’m grateful to Martha Hodes, Amy Kaplan, Carl Nightingale, John Plotz, and Emily Rosenberg. For their careful, challenging readings of this manuscript, in whole and in part, I’m grateful to Benedict Anderson, Vicente Rafael, Michael Cullinane, Reynaldo Ileto, and Richard Meixsel, as well as to its anonymous readers. For their care and attention in the publication process, I thank Charles Grench, Amanda McMillan, and John Wilson at the University of North Carolina Press, and Maricor Baytion and Esther Pacheco at Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Finally, and most important, I’m grateful to friends and family without whom I could not have completed this project. For their support and friendship, I thank Takashi Yokoyama, Alfonso Leyva, Benjamin Peck, Matthew Shum, Matthew D’Agostino, Rebecca Plant, Sacramento Rosello, James Mokhiber, Victor Osorio, Adilia Sosa, Susan Grossman, Tina Huang, Jonathan Roberts, Joel Walker, Paul Cohen, and Claudia Zatta. Thanks to all my friends in the dance world, especially Susan Leiter and Barbara Bernstein. I am especially grateful to Dirk Bönker, who, as friend, reader, and critic, has helped me craft my ideas here more than anyone else. Melinda Turner has enriched my life with her generosity, playfulness, and salsa in ways that I can only begin to thank her for. My sister and brother, Amy and Andy Kramer, have been endlessly supportive. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Judy and Oscar Kramer, for their love, kindness, and inspiration. This book is dedicated to them.

The Blood of Government

Introduction

Sliding Scales

Race, Empire, and Transnational History

On January 9, 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge, Republican of Indiana, stood before the U.S. Senate, defending a war on the other side of the world that refused to end by American command. The previous November, Gen. Elwell Otis had declared victory and an end to major combat operations in the Philippines, where American troops were struggling to impose U.S. sovereignty on the forces of the Philippine Republic. Over the next months, however, much to the frustration of U.S. generals and the McKinley administration, resistance would both vanish and intensify as Filipinos adopted a guerrilla strategy to fight off the invaders. Beveridge was uniquely suited to justify the war before the Senate and anti-imperialist critics, having built his early reputation on thundering rhetoric in defense of American empire. Campaigning in Indianapolis on September 19, 1898, for example, he had turned the recent U.S. victory against Spain in the Caribbean into a mandate for global liberation. America’s mission-field would be a world contracted by electricity and steam. Distance and oceans are no arguments, he asserted. The seas did not separate us from lands of our duty and desire but bound Americans to them. A half century earlier, California had been more inaccessible from the eastern United States than was the present-day Philippines, where U.S. troops had captured the city of Manila from Spanish forces the previous month. For Beveridge, Americans had world duties as a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes. He urged his countrymen to broaden [the] blessed reign of freedom until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind. As for criticism that we ought not to govern a people without their consent, Beveridge asked his audience, Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them?¹

Filipinos had not, in fact, greeted the Americans as liberators. When Beveridge addressed the Senate in early 1900, nearly a year into the bloody conquest of the Philippine Islands, he did so as an expert who had himself beaten the oceans argument and traveled through the islands, guided by U.S. military commanders. In this second address, his sense of the Philippines’ centrality to the United States’ export trade to Asia was heightened, as was his rage at seeing our mangled boys on the battlefield, wounded indirectly by anti-imperialism, or what he called American assaults on our Government at home. As the war’s terrors unfolded and its manifold costs were debated, Beveridge attempted to locate the invasion beyond dissent. Its true meaning, he stated, was deeper than any question of party politics, than any question of the isolated policy of our country, deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental, he asserted. It is racial. Sublimating conquest into liberation meant making race. The American cause was nothing less than that of the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples whom God had prepared for a thousand years to become the master organizers of the world, possessors of what he had called, in the 1898 address, the blood of government. The enemy had also become more focused in Beveridge’s imagination as Filipino guerrillas disappeared into villages and forests. He urged his colleagues to remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans but with Malays corrupted by hundreds of years of savagery, other hundreds of years of Orientalism, and still other hundreds of years of Spanish character and custom. What alchemy, he asked, will change the oriental quality of their blood and set the self-governing currents of the American pouring through their Malay veins? In a time of empire-building, blood and government were intimately connected. Newly drawn and challenged lines of race would separate and bind those who ruled and those who were ruled.²

This book is a transnational history of race and empire in Philippine-American colonial encounters of the early twentieth century, a history of the novel connections and transformations exemplified in Beveridge’s addresses. It is, on the one hand, a history of the racial politics of empire, of the way in which hierarchies of difference were generated and mobilized in order to legitimate and to organize invasion, conquest, and colonial administration. Where many prior accounts have emphasized the functionality of race to empire, often as colonial discourse, the present work highlights race as a dynamic, contextual, contested, and contingent field of power. It is, on the other hand, a history of the imperial politics of race, of the way that empire-building interacted with, and transformed, the process of racial formation. Where historians have often seen colonial racial formations as exports or projections of prior, domestic ones, the present work argues for the necessity of examining metropole and colony in a single, densely interactive field in which colonial dynamics are not strictly derivative of, dependent upon, or respondent to metropolitan forces. This work argues, moreover, that these two histories—of the racial remaking of empire and the imperial remaking of race—are not separable. It was not simply that difference made empire possible: empire remade difference in the process.

Understanding these processes requires situating them within a rapidly changing global field. The last half of the nineteenth century saw a transformation in the character and intensity of global integration: following an array of distinct crises, what had formerly been predominantly regional strategies of self-reproduction became fundamentally intertwined.³ Nowhere was this accelerating connection felt more strongly than in the colonial world. The early modern Atlantic empires had inaugurated world-spanning networks of commerce and geopolitical rivalry. But in the wake of the Euro-American conquests of the nineteenth century, both metropolitan and colonial elites found themselves even more intensely connected in a single, vertical field of global politics, with actors in each setting irrevocably internal to quests for power, authority, and legitimacy in the other. Colonialism wove metropolitan and colonial imaginaries together in myriad ways, with its wide-ranging participants aware that their destinies in part resided elsewhere. Along the multiple nodes that linked colonizing and colonized societies, simultaneous glances upward and downward along novel axes of power formed new symbolic economies of hope, terror, and identification.⁴

Among the formerly disparate regions of the world whose histories became permanently inseparable during this period were the Philippines and the United States. Contacts between these two societies had been sporadic before the end of the nineteenth century: with little trade or migration between them, each was virtually, if differently, unknown to the other.⁵ The force that ushered in their joint twentieth century pushed from the Caribbean, when U.S. intervention in Cuba against Spain in 1898 was accompanied by the launching of the United States’ Asiatic Squadron to Spain’s largest Asian colony. The U.S. defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay and the military occupation of Manila in the middle of that year placed the histories of U.S. empire and Philippine sovereignty on a collision course. The two nations’ histories would subsequently be fired together in years of brutal warfare and take the violent shape of their crucible. Over the next half century and well beyond it, neither would the Philippines and the United States ever be closed to the other nor would their connection be cut off from the rest of the world. In highly differential ways, oriented to steep gradients of power, each would become part of the other’s remaking.⁶

Specifically, this book is about the transnational politics of race and empire. The two categories were never external to each other in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Empire meant exercising sovereignty and power over peoples denied the rights that were increasingly coming to define the modern nation-state: it meant inventing ideologies to calibrate inclusion in these expanding and hierarchical polities. Among others, race was an epistemology suited to constructing the political exceptions that would qualify and delimit these states’ universalistic claims. Race intersected with modern state institutions: by the late nineteenth century, its scientism and the developing apparatus of the modern administrative state were mutually implicated. Race helped give shape to the modern bourgeois family upon which imperial self-definitions were commonly constructed, anchoring the differential powers of women and men in moral, biological, and world-historical frameworks. Where industrial capitalism was brutally reworking relations of power and production, race was capable of mobilizing class-organized workers behind imperial projects of state. In the colonial world, race would justify and structure vertical, authoritarian state-building, denigrating its very collaborators. Its gradations of humanity would also facilitate ultimate forms of exclusion: the extreme violence upon which those states would often be constructed.

This book is about the articulation of race and empire in the making of Philippine-American colonial history. Like works that precede it, it argues that race as a mode of power and knowledge was a core element in the making of formal colonialism in the Philippines.⁷ But breaking from earlier accounts, it suggests that the intersections of race and empire were contingent, contested, and transnational in scope. Race was the site of intense struggle in Philippine-American colonial history, between Filipinos and Americans, between actors in metropole and colony, between actors inside and outside the colonial state. This struggle was, at its narrowest, transpacific in scope, involving participants not only in the United States and the Philippines but in Europe and its colonial outposts. These struggles were never detached from their political contexts: rather, the colonial racial-formation process was intimately tied to broader shifts in colonial politics, which it decisively shaped and by which it was shaped in turn.

The result of these struggles was a novel racial formation whose specific contours and texture emerged from a particular local convergence of transnational forces, rather than the export of U.S. racial idioms and institutions or the installation of generic colonial discourses. Its earliest moment was the encounter between American and Filipino forces with the U.S. occupation of Manila in mid-1898; with the outbreak of war in early 1899, more than three years of imperial conquest structured U.S. racial visions of Filipinos as both tribally fragmented—and thus incapable of self-government—and as racially united in support of savage guerrilla warfare. Following the unpersuasive declaration of war’s end, a civilian colonial state under the Philippine Commission and collaborating Filipino elites organized itself around new forms of knowledge-production, including the generation of novel racial formations. Self-consciously breaking with the army’s brutal and homogenizing race war, the commission and its allies constructed a new racial state organized around an aggressively optimistic colonialism of capacity. In it, progressive, future-oriented visions of Filipino evolution, maturation, and tutelary assimilation toward self-government under indefinite U.S. control converged to make sense of, and calibrate, the often tense terms of Filipino-American collaboration. This was an inclusionary racial formation that both invited and delimited Filipino political agency in colonial state-building. Its undefined timetables—qualified by rhetorical benchmarks and promises of progress—helped legitimate and exceptionalize Philippine-American colonialism before American, Filipino, and international publics.

At the heart of the new racial formation was the bifurcation of the Philippine Islands’ population into Christian and non-Christian peoples. This boundary line had deep roots in the Spanish colonial period, when it had marked one of the central hierarchies of Spanish colonial society, along with mestizaje (blood mixture) and territorial nativity. As U.S. colonial rulers attracted Hispanicized Filipino elites, both groups articulated a widening gap between the islands’ civilized peoples and its non-Christians. Under U.S. colonial rule, this distinction was installed at multiple levels of the colonial state and territorialized in the form of special provinces: a Mountain Province to correspond to the animist highlanders of Luzon, and a Moro Province for the Muslim populations of the southern archipelago. Unlike the semielected governments of Christian provinces, these provinces would be administered exclusively by appointed U.S. politico-military commanders and would long remain under exclusive U.S. control. Politically, the bifurcation of Christians and non-Christians helped persuade U.S. audiences that the war was over by rhetorically reducing Philippine savagery to the non-Christian population alone. It held out to U.S. colonial officials rich resources for a politics of divide and rule: when colonial rule was seriously challenged in the metropole in the mid-1910s, for example, these officials would recast themselves as the protectors of non-Christians from Hispanicized Filipinos and of Filipinos from non-Christians. Bifurcation also promised Hispanicized Filipino elites their own internal colonial subjects. U.S. colonialists, disparaging the very Hispanicized elites with which they collaborated, had maintained that they were perpetually incapable not only of their own self-government but of the government of non-Christians. Filipino nationalists would counter with nationalist-colonialist assertions of their duties and capacities to rule over non-Christians: they would prove their very readiness for self-government, alongside other measures, through the elaboration of an internal empire.

While the racial politics of colonialism would, in this way, fundamentally shape emerging Filipino nationalism, it would also have an impact upon U.S. national and racial identities. While Americans held out fantasies that colonialism would involve one-way Filipino assimilation, the Philippines was becoming absorbed into U.S. history at the same time. At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, the colonial regime organized an enormous tableau meant to place the Philippine occupation —and its subjects—at the core of a narrative of continuous U.S. national-imperial progress. If the display was meant to showcase Filipino capacities to be assimilated—along bifurcated lines—it was also meant to inspire confidence in the United States’ own capacities to assimilate Filipinos without losing its racial integrity. The regime’s inclusionary racial formation—necessary to the functioning of Filipino-American collaboration—would, however, collide with more exclusionary domestic racial institutions. At St. Louis, it would be rejected by racist white mobs that assaulted Filipino troops for their overly assimilated courtship of white women. More significantly, the mass labor migration of male Filipino workers to the mainland United States in the late 1920s and 1930s—based upon their rights as U.S. nationals—posed these inclusive and exclusive racial formations directly against each other. Where the regime saw Filipino migration as assimilation by other means, organized nativists represented it as an invasion by Asiatics, who must be excluded from the United States, even at the price of Philippine independence itself.

This book, then, is about the imagined community of empire. It is about the mutual imbrication of American and Philippine nation-building across almost four decades of transnational encounters. Asymmetrically and reciprocally, the process by which each emerging national community came to imagine and bind itself unfolded inside the other. At the core of this interconnection was the protean project of justifying and organizing U.S. sovereignty over the Philippines, a project that was widely resisted in both the Philippines and the United States. This project—and opposition to it—led not only to articulations of difference between Filipinos and Americans but also to proliferations of difference among them, forms of difference that were new to both societies.⁸

Connecting Histories

This section offers three different, but overlapping, ways the larger work will represent Philippine-American history as both imperial and transnational history. They will be presented as three prophetic voices, each of which directly confronted questions of race and empire, and each of which opened Philippine-American history outward and joined it to other continents of historical experience. As might be expected, they annexed this history to their ongoing concerns. But together, they demonstrate possibilities for the connection of Philippine, American, and world histories. Writing in 1889–90, Filipino intellectual and activist José Rizal y Alonso situates Philippine history within larger transnational frames in a foresighted essay. On the eve of the Philippine-American War in February 1899, British imperial poet laureate Rudyard Kipling locates the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines within the contemporary world of European colonialism. More than a year into that war, black intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois folds an account of the ongoing colonization of the islands into a worldwide survey of the color line. Each of these voices suggests that while it was geology’s work to make the islands, it took politics and ideology to make their histories insular.

Of the many histories that flow together into the present one, the least insular in many ways is the trajectory of Philippine history. The inhabitants of the islands had long been involved in extensive regional trade that linked them commercially and culturally to other islands and to mainland Asia before the coming of Spain. By definition, Philippine history as such was the product of Spanish conquest: far in advance of their own dominion, Spanish imperialists had framed together and narrated a single archipelago under the name of their monarch. While it did not curtail older regional connections, Spanish colonization reoriented them in crucial ways. The galleon trade that the Spanish inaugurated between China and Mexico undermined earlier networks of interisland and regional trade. While its frontiers remained ragged until long after Spanish dominion had ended, the Philippines came into being oriented toward Europe, the Atlantic, and an emerging world economy.⁹ This orientation inexorably made its way into early Spanish historical accounts of the islands. Philippine historiography in its first forms, organized around narratives of colonization, was inescapably global: as it had in the Americas, Spain had conquered the Philippines in order to bring its heathen inhabitants into the fold of Christendom in ways that reflected everlasting glory on Spain. In arguing first for Filipino rights and later for Philippine independence, Filipino nationalists would redraw the global map of Spanish colonial historiography.

No one engaged in this project as energetically as the Tagalog physician, scholar, and activist José Rizal. Rizal’s own path revealed in microcosm how profoundly global Philippine history had become by the late nineteenth century. Like many among his class and generation, Rizal had sought educational and political opportunity in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, escaping an increasingly repressive environment in the islands.¹⁰ Collectively, he and others, in effect, annexed Europe as the Philippine archipelago’s one free island, a place where modern education might be pursued, new selves invented or discovered, and Spanish colonialism challenged and reformed. Rizal’s attempt to resituate Philippine history in the world occupied much of his political and intellectual work; one of its sharpest expressions was his prophetic 1889–90 essay The Philippines a Century Hence. Rizal began by imagining a Philippine history before Spain and, therefore, a history that might have escaped Spain. The islands’ peoples, whose civilization Rizal would detail in his 1890 translation of Antonio de Morga’s chronicle, had become incorporated into Spain through violence and disruption. The islands had been depopulated, impoverished, and set back, and its peoples had forgotten their writing, their songs, their poetry, their laws. Indeed, they had become ashamed of what was theirs and national in order to admire and praise what was foreign and incomprehensible.¹¹ Here, Rizal’s historiography, with its confident separation of the national from the foreign, sought Filipino rights through historical insulation.

But Rizal was also profoundly aware that Filipino solidarities were themselves the product of broader forces. Developments in communication, especially the advent of steamers and telegraphs, meant that the inhabitants move from one island to another, and naturally communication and the exchange of impressions increases. Scarcity of schooling forces the youth of all the islands to gather and to learn to get to know each other. Journeys to Europe were the furthest extension of this process, for abroad the inhabitants of the most distant provinces seal their patriotic feeling. All of these travelers, from sailors to the wealthiest merchants, upon contrasting the sight of modern liberties and the misfortunes of home, embraced and call each other brothers. Above all, Spanish disdain for the islands’ peoples had forged them together. What he called the general affront against a whole race by the enemies of reform had wiped away the ancient enmities between different provinces.¹²

The overseas travel that Rizal in part credited with the making of Filipino nationality also allowed him to criticize Spanish colonialism from without, drawing on contemporary colonial models from elsewhere. I am studying all the books that have been published regarding colonies, with the goal of bringing myself up to date on colonization, he wrote to the anthropologist A. B. Meyer at the same moment.¹³ While Spanish reactionaries argued against Filipino representation in the Cortes, he observed, the French colonies had delegates. In the British Empire, Parliament was debating representation for its Crown colonies, and other colonies already enjoy a degree of autonomy. Spain’s own colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico, had had representation for decades. Ultimately, it was a reading of world history that allowed Rizal to deliver a thinly veiled warning. History did not record any lasting dominion exercised by one people over another, of different races, of strange ways and customs, and of opposed and divergent ideals. As it was impossible to destroy the inhabitants gradually, if pushed to war, the Philippines would gain its freedom. World history showed that colonies established to serve the politics or commerce of a metropolis, all conclude by becoming independent. Most striking, Rizal suggested that if this were to come to pass, it would not only jeopardize Spain’s remaining colonies in Africa but her very independence in Europe. Collapsing empires might quickly become colonies in their own right.¹⁴

While Rizal deployed European empires against Spain, how would they intrude on his history before-the-fact of Philippine independence? Following what he anticipated would be heroic and stubborn conflicts, the Philippines could rest assured that neither England, Germany, France, nor Holland would dare to take up what Spain was unable to hold. The islands would be saved by the colonial division of Africa, which would soon completely absorb the attention of the Europeans; the immense territory offered by the Dark Continent, untouched, undeveloped, and almost undefended, was far more enticing than a group of poor and hostile islands. In the context of Asia, Britain was already lord of the Orient, with Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; Germany avoids all foreign complications; the French spirit did not shine in zeal for colonization; Holland was content to keep the Moluccas and Java. Nor would the Philippines be threatened by Asian powers. China would consider herself fortunate if she succeeds in keeping herself intact; Japan was far more interested in Korea and under diplomatic pressure from Europe, such that it would not think of outside affairs until she is freed of it.¹⁵

There remained one other power to consider, in many ways the least relevant to Philippine history to that point. Perhaps the great American Republic, wrote Rizal, . . . may some day dream of foreign possessions. Admittedly, it seemed unlikely: in 1890, the U.S. presence in the Philippines was minimal, represented by a handful of merchants and the sporadic visits of naval vessels. An isthmian canal had not opened in Central America, nor was the territory of the States congested with inhabitants. Colonization of this kind was contrary to her traditions. But the United States’ interests lie in the Pacific, and the country had no hand in the conquest of Africa. From the European perspective, the United States would make a troublesome rival if she should once get into the business. For this reason, Europe would likely prohibit U.S. aggression, for they know very well that the appetite is sharpened by the first bites.¹⁶

If one way to connect Philippine-American history outward is by exploring the Philippines’ transnational history, a second involves connecting the history of U.S. empire to contemporary European colonialisms. The United States’ first empire had been continental in scope, a territorial empire achieved through the violence of a genocidal state and of white settlers against Native Americans, and one that opened up vast land and natural resources for industrial capitalist exploitation. Employing the resources and infrastructure of this first empire, the United States had by the late nineteenth century begun to construct a second, overseas commercial empire of exports, built under the protection of the U.S. Navy, that reached as far as East Asia. Links between both U.S. empires and European states were dense and complex, involving economic competition, naval rivalry, and struggles over geopolitical spheres of influence. At the same time, Americans continued to turn to European precedents for guidance and inspiration. Even as the United States came into its own as a transcontinental and overseas empire, some Americans continued to see themselves as colonial—defined as a kind of parochial dependence—with respect to European and especially English patterns.¹⁷

In 1898, the two colonialisms flowed together, as Americans setting out to conquer overseas territories turned to the British Empire for inspiration. Specifically, those who advocated the colonial annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines argued that the United States was justified in doing so by deep racial-historical links of common Anglo-Saxon heritage. As the world’s predominant empire, the British Empire had demonstrated that Anglo-Saxons had both a right and a duty to conquer large portions of the earth’s surface; in embarking upon similar tasks, then, the United States was merely fulfilling Anglo-Saxon responsibilities dictated by its racial-historical character. British observers did not hesitate to point out that American Anglo-Saxonism was compromised by immigrants and its imperial potential undermined by overly democratic traditions and inexperience at overseas rule. American imperialists responded, in turn, by seeking British advice, approval, and models of colonial rule in what might have been called a colonial manner. Throughout the period of American rule in the Philippines, U.S. colonial officials would circulate in the British colonial world, follow British imperial developments closely, and selectively adapt elements of British imperial policy: U.S. colonial imperialism, then, was colonial in two senses.¹⁸

Such colonialism tended to draw uninvited advice. It came in February 1899, on the very edge of the Philippine-American War, in a work that immediately gave birth to one of the most long-lived metaphors for colonialism in the twentieth century. It was penned by Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of the British Empire. In biographical terms, Kipling was densely entangled in Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxonist communities who defined their racial membership in explicitly imperial terms.¹⁹ As Filipino-American tensions were reaching critical pitch in the islands and the U.S. Senate debated the annexation treaty, Kipling published a poem in McClure’s, The White Man’s Burden, that generously offered the Americans counsel. If Rizal’s essay demonstrated the degree to which Philippine history was world history, Kipling’s poem suggested how deeply entangled Philippine-American colonial history would be with the history of European colonialism. The work ricocheted throughout the colonial world, its title quickly becoming one of the central catchphrases and rationales of empire in general, as well as the locus of sustained critique.

The poem urged Americans to take up the responsibilities and sacrifices of what Kipling imagined as Pan-European imperial manhood. He urged Americans to Send forth the best ye breed to the Philippines, although the specific imperial mission with which they were charged was fruitfully vague. What was sharply focused was Kipling’s sense—against the criticisms of both British and U.S. anti-imperialists—that empire meant boundless sacrifice rather than greed and self-aggrandizement and, as such, was an endeavor positively foolhardy in its morality. Among the deepest sacrifices empire entailed was the almost panoptic scrutiny that it subjected its exponents to. The silent sullen peoples of the colonies were busy weigh[ing] your God and you, while other empires would—no doubt uncomfortably—search your manhood and deliver their dear-bought wisdom, / The judgment of your peers. This judgment was presumed to be disappointed: at its feverishly self-righteous core, the poem named the lot of the imperialist as one of radical underappreciation, a toil of thankless years, earning The blame of those ye better / The hate of those ye guard.²⁰ While coupling the U.S. and European colonial projects, Kipling lent both a tragic boundlessness: empire was a martyrdom of infinite regress.

A third way to connect Philippine-American history outward is through the global history of antiracist mobilization. The transnational geography of race-making was at the core of both Rizal’s and Kipling’s respective prophecies. For Rizal, it was Spain’s imperial racial formations that had helped forge Filipino solidarity; for Kipling, it was panimperial whiteness that grounded a global vision of empire as uplift. Race’s transnationalism was nothing new to their age. It had, for example, been one of the key structures organizing the Atlantic economies and societies out of which the United States had emerged, particularly through the racialization of African slave labor and the conquest of indigenous peoples in North America. Crossed by slave ships until the early nineteenth century, the Atlantic Ocean bridged transoceanic debates over race, labor, and empire with little respect for national borders. Following emancipation, race would continue to be debated in a free labor context, characterized by accelerating industrial transport and communication. By the early twentieth century, race was an organizing principle in a global commerce of ideas and institutions that spanned literary, academic, and political spheres.

One of the forces powerfully internationalizing race during this period was empire. Imperial rivalry involved distant societies in deeper interaction and dialogue than ever before, even as this competition was being conducted in increasingly convergent and mutually intelligible terms. Within the Euro-American world, imperial powers often rationalized their conquests by linking national destinies to broader, shared Pan-European racial solidarities. These solidarities were especially evident in the colonial world, where diverse and otherwise rancorous Europeans and Americans often invented commonalities precisely as they confronted nonwhite opponents. At their most ambitious, these visions sublimated the competition of European powers, the United States, and Japan into a single, outward-moving frontier of civilization. They also necessarily involved a transnational and interimperial dialogue over the character and fate of those caught on the other side of that line. While the definitions of self and other that emerged from these racial dialogues were highly varied, and tailored to historical contingencies, they increasingly made empire part of their content and took place on a widened, interimperial terrain.

These developments were clear to some contemporaries. When W. E. B. Du Bois declared prophetically in 1903 that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, he was quick to clarify that this meant the relation of the darker to the lighter races in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.²¹ In his 1900 address as president of the American Negro Academy, Du Bois had explored the space between America and the islands of the sea in detail. While some considered our race question . . . a purely national and local affair, for Du Bois, a quick global survey revealed that, in fact, the color line belts the world. (Indeed, in the original formulation of his famous prophecy, the color line was to be the world problem of the 20th century.) Du Bois then traced the somewhat uneven path of that belt for his audience. The race question was playing out in colonial Africa, the centre of the great Negro problem, where Du Bois had some praise for English colonial rule. Asia also contained congeries of race and color problems. It was the continent of the unbridled injustice of conquerors toward the conquered—of advanced toward undeveloped races—of swaggering braggadocio toward dumb submission, although Du Bois applauded English education in India and found in Japan’s recent entry into the ranks of modern civilized nations the greatest concession to the color line which the nineteenth century has seen. In Latin America the color line had been less clearly drawn, although the condition of the dark masses there was far from satisfactory.²²

For Du Bois, the race questions of the United States and those of the world were becoming inseparably belted together by imperial processes. What Du Bois called the expansion and consolidation of nations was leading to countless repetitions of American conditions—the inclusion of nations within nations—of groups of undeveloped peoples brought in contact with advanced races under the same government, language and system of culture. The same conditions were being confronted by German Negroes, Portuguese Negroes, Spanish Negroes, English East Indians, Russian Chinese, [and] American Filipinos. This last reference was especially important. Du Bois identified the most significant recent development in the United States as our ownership of Porto Rico, and Havana, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines, which constituted the greatest event since the Civil War. The space between America and the islands of the sea was collapsing, and with it, former boundaries between the race questions of the United States, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. For Du Bois, this meant a doubling of the colored population of our land, one that would make brown and black people . . . a third of the nation. What is to be our attitude toward these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them? he inquired. Du Bois urged that it be one of deepest sympathy and strongest alliance. Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian, he enjoined, must stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities.²³ For better or for worse—Du Bois was hopeful—imperial history had annexed the world to the Negro problem and vice versa.

Insulating Empire

These voices from the past, with their varied global scales, contrast strikingly with what has been, until relatively recently, the comparative insulation of Philippine-American colonial historiography.²⁴ This fact requires different Philippine and American historiographic explanations. In the Philippine case, the American colonial period has frustrated the traditional narrative of rising Filipino nationalism that provides much of the structure for nineteenth-century Philippine historiography. In this literature, the last three decades of Spanish rule are narrated as a series of crises that ultimately provoke a recognition of Filipino nationality, one that is ultimately expressed in the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine Republic. By contrast, historians of the American colonial period are faced with the reality of nationalism without revolution or, for nearly four decades, the achievement of independent statehood. Thus, the period is represented as one in which true nationalism was suppressed—hence the failure to secure the independent state that must be the outer form of nationalism—and false, official forms brought forward to displace authentic ones. The class politics of nationalism play an important role in these narratives: Filipino elites, who both led the revolution and entered the subsequent American colonial state, are said to betray authentic Filipino nationalism rather than to pursue nationalism—and their own interests—within U.S. colonial structures. The Philippine-American colonial period has been bracketed in the teleology of Philippine nationalism: anything else risks the blurring of official nationalism and what is imagined as its untainted opposite.

Within U.S. historiography, the insulation of Philippine-American colonial history is part of a broader project of American national exceptionalism.²⁵ Since its advent, U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines has frustrated accounts of American uniqueness: ushered in with a war that looked much like Europe’s colonial wars, it involved the United States in colonial state-building and international politics of a kind undertaken by European great powers during the same period.²⁶ Historians were able to rewrite the history of continental empire in North America as expansion, a term that starkly separated it from European imperialisms. But expansion was predicated on white settler colonialism: in the Philippines, by contrast, narratives of civilization through white settlement met their limits. It did not help that U.S. imperialists themselves turned to European and especially British precedents for inspiration, guidance, and justification. The question, then, became how to reassert an American national-exceptionalist narrative that could account for this history. In this effort, historians have traditionally drawn directly on the accounts of U.S. imperial actors themselves. Following their lead, they have minimized the Philippine-American War as an insurrection, the shadowy aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. The war’s historians also depicted it (as U.S. generals had) as one not of cruelty but of restraint and benevolence. Those who focused on the postwar period emphasized not continued violence, authoritarian state-building, and economic exploitation but projects of school construction, public health, and Filipino participation that were presumably their opposites. But the imperial architecture of national exceptionalism went far deeper, relying on the temporal exceptionalism of the 1890s, the analytic subordination of formal to informal empire, and the minimizing of American contacts with European colonial empires. Exploring each of these in turn is necessary to opening up the space for the present work.

The insulation of Philippine-American colonial history has been achieved in part through forms of temporal exceptionalism, especially regarding the 1890s. This account was especially important to some early diplomatic and political histories of what was comfortingly called the United States’ imperial moment and remains influential in recent cultural histories.²⁷ In these accounts, the United States acquired its overseas colonial empire after 1898 in a fit of fever-mindedness. The 1890s was a time of psychic crisis, wrought from the accumulated stress of industrial depression, corporate concentration, labor and populist radicalism, and the end of the frontier. Colonial empire was the natural outlet and resolution of these tensions, whose release was manifested as jingoism, a term that vanishes analytically from later historical time.²⁸ It was an exceptionalist stage set for an exceptionalist drama: the 1890s needed to be a unique decade because it had to explain and repair an apparent rupture in the fabric of American historical uniqueness. While the exceptionalist chronology of U.S. imperialism was challenged on many fronts—especially by the New Left historians—it is striking that the narrative of the empire-inducing crises of the 1890s continues to inform even the most interesting of the new cultural histories of U.S. imperialism. Whatever their other strengths, these histories also comfortingly, if unpersuasively, limit U.S. empire to a set of exceptional and unrepeatable events in a distant past.

The New Left historians challenged the temporal exceptionalism of the 1890s: the work of William A. Williams and Walter LaFeber, for example, showed that U.S. empire developed over a long arc that simply reached a new height in the late nineteenth century. Where the driving force of U.S. empire was the ongoing quest for overseas markets, the 1890s did not need to be a particularly exceptional decade for explanatory purposes.²⁹ At the same time, New Left historians deinsulated Philippine-American colonial history to some degree by embedding it in the broader history of informal empire in the late nineteenth century. The Philippines was conquered, in these accounts, to provide a crucial stepping stone to Asia and the fabled China market, making it merely one strategic point in the global fabric of informal empire.³⁰ But having integrated the Philippines into wider currents of U.S. and world history, the New Left historians simultaneously insulated them: just as the Philippine Islands were geopolitical stepping stones to Asia, they were analytical stepping stones to other historical problems. The informal empire that was their focus subordinated the United States’ formal empire and exceptionalized it. The Philippines was the anomaly that proved the rule of U.S. open door imperialism; Philippine history did not matter in and of itself but only in so far as it bore weight in the larger architecture of informal empire.

While narratives of informal empire integrate Philippine-American history in longer trajectories, it is telling that nearly all works that specifically approach Philippine-American colonial history treat the year 1898 as a sharp temporal border. Historical consciousness follows the flag. In U.S. accounts, which have traditionally focused on military and diplomatic actors and events, the Philippines has been, for analytical purposes, invented by Dewey’s arrival at Manila Bay. Philippine historical consciousness also follows its flags. Within Philippine historiography, 1898 saw the advent of Philippine independence in the form of the short-lived Philippine Republic, the principal end point in the teleology of Philippine nationalism. As the present work hopes to show, crossing between Philippine and U.S. histories means crossing 1898 to reveal the myriad ways that what is bounded as the Spanish colonial period flows into the American colonial period that followed in its wake.

Along with the insular 1890s and subordination to informal empire, Philippine-American colonial history has traditionally been insulated from the history of contemporary European empires for purposes of comparison and connection. In its most extreme form, the claim has been made that the United States was not comparable to European empires. The formal/informal divide has often been employed to make the United States stand out typologically from European cases; in this sense, the New Left historians were national-exceptionalists, seeing the United States’ informal empire as unique and sharply contrasting with Europe’s contemporary formal empires. Where attempts at intercolonial comparison have been made, they have often served to further insulate U.S. imperialism by exceptionalizing it. Rather than an exception by type, the United States becomes an exception by pattern of rule: U.S. colonialism was ambivalent, tutelary, or even democratic, in contrast to a European colonialism presumably its opposite. Historians have projected this exceptionalism backwards onto their historical actors, who are said to have completely rejected European precedents in the making of their colonial empire. This obscures the uncomfortable fact that U.S. imperialists often took inspiration, in complicated ways, from the world’s other empires, especially the British Empire. Exposing some of these connections between empires, as this work hopes to do, will hopefully enhance understandings of the historical construction of exceptionalism. Imperialists themselves had powerful investments in, and machineries to produce, persuasive national-exceptionalist narratives of colonial rule. Indeed, many of the tropes that dominate historical writing on these themes to this day are artifacts of the history they purport to describe. Breaking with national-exceptionalist accounts of U.S. empire, in other words, enables an understanding of the ways in which national-exceptionalist ideologies were themselves produced on imperial terrain.³¹

Race and the Politics of Recognition

At the historical intersection of race and empire was a politics of recognition. While physical force always lay behind claims of imperial sovereignty, recognition was a logic of legitimation with hegemonic potential, requiring at least two distinct, contracting parties of differential power. Within the realm of recognition, the relations of power between them were defined not by the hegemon’s outright political exclusion of the less powerful but by its ability to establish and adjust standards or criteria for inclusion. In this way, the politics of recognition was not only formally inclusionary but participatory: it required the subordinates to acknowledge, learn, and demonstrate their assimilation of the standards of the more powerful in order to gain certain powers and resources, defined perpetually as revocable privileges rather than inalienable rights. While the hegemon was, in theory, compelled to cede some power when its criteria were absorbed and realized, under the politics of recognition it would, by definition, never cede the authority to evaluate, to interpret or change standards, or to adjust the relationship between those standards and the granting or withholding of power. Indeed, the subordinate party’s acknowledged success in achieving these criteria affirmed and strengthened the hegemon’s evaluative power.

In the colonial setting, imperial powers stood to gain a degree of legitimacy from the politics of recognition, rationalizing processes of collaboration by providing formal criteria for political participation and inclusion and, in at least some cases, a timetable for the devolution of power that could make the empire’s illusions of impermanence plausible. Where successful, it also directed resistance by colonized people toward channels already made safe by the regime: political opposition could be directed toward the gathering of evidence or proof that the regime’s standards had been achieved; this removed any single standard from the arsenal of disenfranchisement but simultaneously affirmed its larger logic. But colonized peoples were not left powerless by the politics of recognition. Its very existence spoke to the limits of physical force and the necessity for legitimation. While imperial powers retained the power to recognize, it was the actual or potential resistance of the colonized that compelled them to recognize. The politics of recognition was especially attractive to collaborating elites who could both follow its stipulations and employ them to accelerate or delay the counterimperial transfer of sovereignty in ways that bolstered their own power. While imperial powers could arbitrarily alter their criteria for recognition, these alterations made them vulnerable to charges of tyranny or hypocrisy not only among the colonized but in the broader international arena in which the empire’s own recognition was at stake.³²

The politics of recognition hinged on the maintenance of justifiable hierarchies of difference that legitimated varying degrees of disenfranchisement. Among the most powerful and flexible of those hierarchies in the modern world, if far from the only ones, were hierarchies of race. Race has long been a staple of the historiography of U.S. empire.³³ But much of this literature reinforces rather than undermines the insularity of Philippine-American history, in at least two ways. The first of these might be called the historiography of export or projection, which claims that Americans simply applied racial formations drawn from the domestic United States, especially those directed against Native Americans and African Americans, to the world beyond the United States. Export describes historical actors as having been able to recognize difference wherever they went, failing to account for their frequent bewilderment, argument over, and reinvention of difference in new contexts. Where historians have begun to explore the contextual, contingent, and plural character of racial formations in the United States, the metaphor of export suggests that race is discrete, uncontested, impervious to context, and unchanging in historical time. It sets historians to work looking for familiar patterns and processes drawn from domestic contexts, ironically cleaving, in the very act of transnational departure, to U.S. history’s traditional boundaries. Export has particular difficulty accounting for historical change: where U.S. racial politics in the 1880s and 1890s was undergoing revolutionary transformations, from Jim Crow to the Dawes Act to Chinese exclusion, for example, historical change is made to stop at the water’s edge in 1898. Not unlike late nineteenth-century notions of the frontier as a moving line of unchanging civilization, export imagines the world outside the United States as a set of open ports, virtually uninhabited by historical agents, malleable to Americans’ static perceptions and desires. That much of this literature casts itself as critical of empire only sharpens the irony of its essentially imperial framework. Promising to connect U.S. history outward, export, in practice, insulates it.³⁴

This 1921 cartoon in the Philippine Free Press offers an ironic, modernist critique of race within the context of Philippine-American colonial history. It represents the Philippines as a skeptical observer of diverse U.S. portrayals of Filipinos, specifically as a critical reader of the Republican-sponsored anti-independence report by Leonard Wood and William Cameron Forbes, one who does not recognize himself in the regime’s past images. The cartoon suggests that by that time Filipino critics had developed a sharp, self-conscious sense of the imperial politics of recognition, as well as a sense of their own power to assess and engage with U.S. colonial representations and to earn the nervous solicitation of colonial officials. From McCoy and Roces, Philippine Cartoons.

If export makes colonial racism the mere projection of domestic projects, a second approach, colonial discourse, involves nearly the opposite problem, that of reducing any colonial racial formation to the outcropping of generic, archetypal racial formations found elsewhere in the colonial world. Colonial discourse has already received diverse criticism. Its ahistorical character—the tendency to prefer long arcs of continuity over disjunctures, discontinuities, and contingencies—has long been one source of such criticism. Some have criticized its homogenization of what were diverse imperial actors and contradictory agendas both within colonies and between metropoles and colonies. Others have highlighted its flattening of divisions between racial modes in the interest of representing stark, dualistic hierarchies of self/other and colonizer/colonized.³⁵ Still others have emphasized its frequent functionalism: colonial discourse is often represented as the organic expression of a seamless imperial project of military conquest, political control, and economic exploitation. Necessary to this functionalism is its analytic exclusion of colonized peoples whose engagement—in whatever complexes of collaboration, resistance, and mediation—is deemed analytically unnecessary. Given the long-term tendency toward national exceptionalism in U.S. historiography in general, and accounts of empire in particular, a colonial-discourse model might seem to open up space for an interimperial historiography, but it in fact closes down such options: if export collapses colony into metropole, colonial discourse collapses colony into colony, precisely preventing the historical reconstruction of interimperial connections. If colonies spontaneously gave rise to the discourses they required, this obviates the need to reconstruct the complex dialogues and exchanges that gave distinct colonial discourses their common elements.

In contrast with both these perspectives, this work proceeds from the assumption that race is irreducibly a system of power, and that as a result, the process of race-making takes its shape from, and in turn lends shape to, specific socially and historically constituted political projects. As a means of organizing power, what has made and continues to make race effective is precisely its protean and opportunistic character. While never strictly derivative of them, race is deeply embedded in other hierarchical categories of difference, such as gender and class, upon which it relies and to which it in turn lends strength.³⁶ Indeed, its political force at any moment in historical time derives from what Ann Stoler has called its tactical mobility, the ease of movement between its own terms and a political culture’s other explanatory structures.³⁷ What might be called its historical mobility, or social reproduction, can only be sustained through a continual and contested process of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have called rearticulation, in which racial idioms are translated into other evolving cultural terms, racializing those terms in the process.³⁸ Both kinds of mobility—tactical and historical—make possible race’s malleable, contingent, and contextual character, allowing it to reach and haunt the densest connection points in a political culture.

This sense of the contingencies of race suggests the limits of both export and colonial discourse for comprehending the imperial construction of race and the racial construction of empire. In the novel contexts of empire, new forms of race developed, often destabilizing existing racial formations in the process. While imperialists often sought to represent global power as the seamless expansion of the nation, empire in its formal and informal varieties often meant rupture and discontinuity. Never unitary even in its national frames, race-making in imperial settings was shaped by confrontations with new cultural groups, in unprecedented types of encounters, which raised original and often troubling questions about the character of the nation itself. Among other tasks, it had to organize and justify practices of rule, marking often unstable hierarchies that could legitimate, and calibrate, degrees of disenfranchisement and violence. While older racial idioms sometimes played a role in capturing these new realities, they frequently did so in translation, owing their eventual forms as much to newly developing host languages of difference as their older guest languages. Other occasions saw the self-conscious abandonment of earlier modes of race and the construction of entirely new racial ideologies and practices. The result was a multilevel pluralism of colonial