’Twixt the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

2018 ◽  
pp. 140-165
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Marine Environment ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Deep Blue ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Naval Operations ◽  
Strategic Imperative ◽  
The Devil

This chapter examines the full emergence of hydrographic surveying, charts, and knowledge of the marine environment as a strategic imperative that underpinned American empire broadly and naval operations specifically during the Spanish-American-Philippine War, 1898-1902. The emergence of a modern steam-powered, steel-hulled fleet complemented new ideas about the United States’ role in the world and the size of its navy in the writings of the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. During the War with Spain, a close look at the operations of the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Cuba highlights the significance of the marine environment amid a poorly-charted, circuitous and dangerous coastal waters and the necessity of accurate knowledge of these waters for tactical, operational, and strategic reasons. The Navy found itself similarly ill-prepared in the Philippines. This chapter argues that the practice of naval operations and warfare during this war showed the marine environment to be a dangerous natural enemy, every bit as if not more fearsome than the largely inept Spanish enemy. The Americans won the war rather easily and with great consequence for America’s imperial ascendancy, but the conflict had also made clear that American sea power did not rest far from knowledge of the sea itself.

Indian Fighters in the Philippines

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-447
Author(s):  
Stefan Aune
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Distance ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Native People ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Imperial Culture ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
Indian War

This article explores the connections between the violence that accompanied U.S. continental expansion in the nineteenth century and the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States following the Spanish-American War. Perhaps geographic distance has served to mask the temporal proximity of these linked periods of U.S. expansion, because this is a connection that has remained largely unexplored in the historiography. Rather than viewing 1898 as a caesura marking the separation between the continental and global phases of American empire, this article explores continuities through an examination of the interaction between imperial culture and military violence. Some U.S. soldiers in the Philippines drew directly on their experiences in wars with Native people, while others narrated their time in the Philippines as an “Indian war” and validated their actions by discursively positioning themselves and their troops as “Indian fighters.” The Indian Wars were translated, through the actions, imaginations, and writing of U.S. soldiers, politicians, and journalists, into a flexible discourse able to travel across space and time. These frontier resonances became one of several structuring narratives that sought to racialize Filipinos in order to justify the war and occupation.

U.S. Security Strategy and Southeast Asia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin C. Ott
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Manila Bay ◽  
The U.S

With the exception of the Philippines, America’s strategic interest in and engagement with Southeast Asia begins with World War II. Prior to that “Monsoon Asia” was remote and exotic—a place of fabled kingdoms, jungle headhunters, and tropical seas. By the end of the nineteenth century European powers had established colonial rule over the entire region except Thailand. Then, as the twentieth century dawned, the Spanish colonial holdings in the Philippines suddenly and unexpectedly became available to the United States as an outcome of the Spanish-American War and Admiral Dewey’s destruction of the decrepit Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. This chapter examines the strategic pivot in Southeast Asia and the role China plays in affecting the U.S. position in this region.

Making War upon the Chart

2018 ◽  
pp. 166-201
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Western Pacific ◽  
American Empire ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Western Pacific ◽  
Hydrographic Surveying

This chapter examines the place of charts and hydrographic surveying in the consolidation of a formal American empire after 1898 and the central place of environmental knowledge in the broader strategic debates concerning American empire in the post war period, 1899-1903. It follows the work of surveying vessels off Cuba and the Philippines, the emerging role of the Hydrographic Office and its leaders, and the strategic debates among officer-students at the United States Naval War College and the Navy’s top leadership in the General Board of the Navy in recognizing and debating the importance of the marine environment generally and the specific strategic features of various harbors and coastlines from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific. The chapter argues that charts, hydrographic surveying, and a larger cartographic discourse were central to the geography of American empire, particularly in projecting American sea power into the Western Pacific and the Caribbean.

“I Am Already Annexed”: Ramon Reyes Lala and the Crafting of “Philippine” Advocacy for American Empire

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-446
Author(s):  
Theresa Ventura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Empire ◽  
American Citizen ◽  
Political Patronage ◽  
Race Formation

AbstractThis article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.

What Price Sugar? Land, Labor, and Revolution

2008 ◽  
Vol 81 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

[First paragraph]Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States. Bernard Moitt (ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. vii + 203 pp. (Cloth US $ 65.00)Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. (Paper US $ 22.50)These two books illustrate the fascination that sugar, slavery, and the plantation still exercise over the minds of scholars. One of them also reflects an interest in the influence these have had on the modern world. For students of the history of these things the Schwartz collection is in many ways the more useful. It seeks to fill a lacuna left by the concentration of monographs on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that we know less about the history of sugar than we thought we did. Perhaps in no other single place is such a range of information on so wide an area presented in such detail for so early a period. Ranging from Iberia to the Caribbean and including consumption as well as production of sugar, with a nod to the slave trade and a very useful note on weights and currencies, this volume is a gold mine of information. It considers (briefly) the theoretical meaning as well as the growing of this important crop, contrasting its production in Iberia with that on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, colonized by Iberian powers, and continuing the contrast with São Tomé, off the coast of Africa, and on to Brazil and the Spanish American empire before ending with the British in Barbados. In the transit, it of necessity considers and complicates the meaning of “sugar revolution” and shows how scholars using that term do not always mean the same thing. John McCusker and Russell Menard, for example, tackling a cornerstone of the traditional interpretation of the development of sugar, argue that there was no “sugar revolution” in Barbados; economic change had already begun before sugar’s advent, though sugar may have accelerated it, and yet sugar production was transformed on the island. They also undercut, without quite denying, the significance of the Dutch role in the process. Schwartz, while questioning, lings to the traditional expression if not the traditional outlook, seeing in Barbados “the beginning of the sugar revolution” (p. 10).

“What Are the Philippines Going to Do to Us?” E. L. Godkin on Democracy, Empire and Anti-imperialism

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 711-727 ◽  
Author(s):  
MYLES BEAUPRE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
American Empire ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
American Experiment ◽  
Liberal Thought

From his position as editor of theNationfrom 1865 until 1899, E. L. Godkin steered one of the liberal standard-bearers in a transatlantic network of cosmopolitan liberals. From this position he helped define nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism. However, while Godkin fitted in the mainstream of liberal thought in 1865, by the time he retired he occupied the conservative fringe. Godkin never made the transition from a nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism to a newer nationalistic democratic liberalism because democracy failed him. Instead of peace, commerce, and learning, democracy created an American Empire rooted in war, protectionism, ignorance, jingoism, and plunder, culminating in the Spanish–American War. Godkin's critique of American imperialism was thus based on his pessimistic but perceptive reading of the flaws of American democracy. Godkin believed that the rise of “jingoist” democracy had doomed the American “experiment” and thought that the nation had slipped into the historical, degenerative cycle of empire. By tracing Godkin's increasingly bitter warnings about the dangers of democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, we can catch a glimpse of a dying worldview that questioned the ability of democracy to act as a moral force in the world.

Arc of Containment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
The Cold War

This book recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from the Pacific War through the end of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with pre-existing local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism into U.S. hegemony. Between the late 1940s and 1960s, Britain and its indigenous collaborators in Malaya and Singapore overcame the mostly Chinese communist parties of both countries by crafting a pro-West nationalism that was anticommunist by virtue of its anti-Chinese bent. London’s neocolonial schemes in Malaya and Singapore prolonged its influence in the region. But as British power waned, Malaya and Singapore’s anticommunist leaders cast their lot with the United States, mirroring developments in the Philippines, Thailand and, in the late 1960s, Indonesia. In effect, these five anticommunist states established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of containment that encircled China and its regional allies. Southeast Asia’s imperial transition from colonial order to U.S. empire, through the tumult of decolonization and the Cold War, was more characteristic of the region’s history after 1945 than Indochina’s embrace of communism.

Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart White
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Santiago De Cuba

The Spanish-American War is best understood as a series of linked conflicts. Those conflicts punctuated Madrid’s decline to a third-rank European state and marked the United States’ transition from a regional to an imperial power. The central conflict was a brief conventional war fought in the Caribbean and the Pacific between Madrid and Washington. Those hostilities were preceded and followed by protracted and costly guerrilla wars in Cuba and the Philippines. The Spanish-American War was the consequence of the protracted stalemate in the Spanish-Cuban War. The economic and humanitarian distress which accompanied the fighting made it increasingly difficult for the United States to remain neutral until a series of Spanish missteps and bad fortune in early 1898 hastened the American entry to the war. The US Navy quickly moved to eliminate or blockade the strongest Spanish squadrons in the Philippines and Cuba; Spain’s inability to contest American control of the sea in either theater was decisive and permitted successful American attacks on outnumbered Spanish garrisons in Santiago de Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Manila. The transfer of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, to the United States in the Treaty of Paris confirmed American imperialist appetites for the Filipino nationalists, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, and contributed to tensions between the Filipino and American armies around and in Manila. Fighting broke out in February 1899, but the Filipino conventional forces were soon driven back from Manila and were utterly defeated by the end of the year. The Filipino forces that evaded capture re-emerged as guerrillas in early 1900, and for the next two and a half years the United States waged an increasingly severe anti-guerrilla war against Filipino irregulars. Despite Aguinaldo’s capture in early 1901, fighting continued in a handful of provinces until the spring of 1902, when the last organized resistance to American governance ended in Samar and Batangas provinces.

The Methodist Response to Philippine Nationalism, 1899–1916

1978 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenton J. Clymer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Peace Negotiations

Although the United States had extensive commercial contacts with the Spanish-owned Philippine Islands early in the nineteenth century, interest in them declined sharply by the 1890s. But with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and Commodore George Dewey's defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila the Philippines reappeared on the American horizon. At the peace negotiations the United States demanded, and received, the islands.

Childhood's Imperial Imagination: Edward Stratemeyer's Fiction Factory and the Valorization of American Empire

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Rouleau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Series Fiction ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Successful Author ◽  
Adventure Novels

Numerous studies have appeared in recent years that deal with the reasons and rationalizations that accompanied America's overseas acquisitions in 1898. This article uses juvenile series fiction to examine how the nation's youth—boys in particular—became targets of imperial boosterism. In the pages of adventure novels set against the backdrop of American interventions in the Caribbean and the Philippines, Edward Stratemeyer, the most successful author and publisher of youth series fiction, and other less well-known juvenile fiction producers offered sensationalistic dramas that advocated a racialist, expansionistic foreign policy. Stratemeyer and others offered American boys an imaginative space as participants in and future stewards of national triumph. Young readers, the article argues further, became active participants in their own politicization. An examination of the voluminous fan mail sent to series fiction authors by their juvenile admirers reveals boys' willingness, even eagerness, to participate in the ascendancy of the United States.

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