Civilizational Imperatives

This chapter refers to John Bates, who received directives from Manila to emphasize the benefits of new educational forms to Sultan Kiram in 1899. It details the assignment of select Americans to impart constant valuable information among the Tausūg in industrial and mechanical pursuits through the medium of schools. It also looks at Bates's studies on regional colonial histories during his time on Jolo, noting in his reports that the British in Malaya curbed piracy and slavery through the establishment of industrial schools. The chapter highlights the public schools in Mindanao-Sulu that operated in an ad hoc fashion between 1899 and 1903. It notes the character and resources of schools that varied greatly by community although they were technically run by the Department of Public Instruction in Manila, such as the small pandita schoolhouses in some areas.

Conclusion

This chapter mentions Arthur S. Pier, who wrote American Apostles to the Philippines that celebrated many of the men responsible for colonial development in the Muslim South, such as Leonard Wood and John Pershing. It highlights tales of heroic civilizing feats in the book that were accomplished in the face of local resistance and anti-imperialist naysaying. It also mentions the book “The Brethren” that makes a case for U.S. extraterritorial power, which includes an essay exploring U.S. colonialism relative to other empires. The chapter explains how the United States borrowed from and bettered upon European models. It refers to authors that contended trusteeship and decolonization were natural outcomes of a four-decade march toward freedom in the Philippines.

Imagining the Moro

This chapter explores the ways Americans understood the Muslim South and its inhabitants. It discusses the construction of “the Moro” that arose from eclectic sources, such as translated Spanish books, North American frontier expansion, imperial readings of Islam, ethnographic study, and the cultivation of regional expertise. It identifies governors, district administrators, missionaries, and businessmen-instrumentalized ideas in structures they created in the South. The chapter reviews the establishment of new laws, modernization of Moros through education, introduction of Western forms of market capitalism, and induction of sedentism that became paramount to the colonial state. It explores the production of racial and territorial knowledge on the Philippines' southern frontier.

Courtrooms, Clinics, and Colonies

This chapter cites civilizing fantasies that became civilizational imperatives through a spectrum of state-building projects that were aimed at refashioning the Southern Philippines. It mentions that Governor Tasker gave rhetorical justification to the erasure of tradition resulting from a new status quo by reducing the heterogeneous cultures of the South into a single debased scape. It also describes the precolonial Moro as a pirate, slaver, polygamist, gambler, thief, religious fanatic, and murderer who was averse to productive labor, disinclined to sanitary living, and indifferent to the public good. The chapter investigates how the civilizing mission was practiced in the colonized spaces of Mindanao-Sulu. It discusses the colonial mind that standardized notions of progress and modernity, which mapped gradients of civilization across time and space.

Introduction

This chapter recounts the story of Americans and Moros in colonial Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. It ranges from 1899, when U.S. military forces relieved the Spanish garrison at Zamboanga, to 1941, when Japan invaded the Commonwealth of the Philippines. It also considers the Spanish legacy in Mindanao-Sulu and American precolonial contacts with the region. The chapter elaborates the minor role of Muslim-majority areas in many histories of the American Philippines and explains the historiographical absence that perpetuates trends originating in American and Christian Filipino colonial imaginaries. It points out how the South's position as a politically and culturally subordinate space in an emerging nation-state created the preconditions for its marginalization in the literature on the U.S. colonial empire.

Moros in America

This chapter talks about Moros and Americans negotiating an increasingly globalized world beyond colony and metropole. It mentions a vernacular dime novel about the St. Louis World's Fair published in 1904 titled Uncle Bob and Aunt Becky's Strange Adventures at the World's Great Exposition. It also describes how overseas colonies appeared to a skeptical metropolitan public and how cultural producers appropriately portrayed the America's foreign subjects. The chapter mentions the U.S. newspapers that followed the Moros closely as they met with presidents, performed for midwestern crowds, took in the Manhattan skyline, and embraced collegiate life. It cites the Moros' appearance in assorted fictions, such as comic operas, children's adventure stories, radio serials, and motion pictures that manufactured Muslim colonial subjects and presented them in varied ways to a curious public.

Imperial Interactivities

This chapter considers the role of diverse interactivities in shaping the encounter in Mindanao-Sulu. It recounts how the region maintained its own culturally hybrid character despite its portrayal as a colonial backwater as it was facilitated by links to maritime Southeast Asia and the wider Muslim world. U.S. actors moved within European colonial circles. It also cites multiscalar connections that underwrote imperial power in the Southern Philippines beyond the obscuring language of American exceptionalism. The chapter highlights how the United States took possession of the Philippines from Spain during a period of rapid Euro-American territorial expansion, where imperial formations simultaneously competed with and drew from one another. It details the interaction of U.S. colonials in Mindanao-Sulu with other imperial powers as it encountered preexisting connections that stretched between and through localities, colonies, regions, and empires.

Tropical Idylls

This chapter examines the pleasures and anxieties of American colonials as they negotiated landscapes significant with hazard. It reviews the writings of Charles Ivins and others that contain vivid depictions of how schismatic notions of the tropics and their inhabitants shaped colonial rule. It also describes the social environment of Mindanao-Sulu that laid bare the tension between the integrationist claims of the tutelary colonial state and the continued operation of racially exclusionist structures. The chapter mentions Outlook magazine journalist and playwright Atherton Brownell, who fawned over Zamboanga as a model of cleanliness and tropical picturesqueness. It notes empire builders in Mindanao-Sulu that looked to preestablished discourses on tropical architecture, sanitation, and urban planning for inspiration.

Corrective Violence

This chapter discusses how military and civilian officials folded massacre and confinement into the pedagogical language of the civilizing mission, which parses the violence that accompanied and facilitated colonial modernization schemes. It describes communities like Zamboanga and Dansalan wherein Moro Province officials engaged in urban planning and reproduced leisure norms found elsewhere in the colonized world. It also looks at the Moros's resentment of their exclusion from regional politics and their threat to destroy communications infrastructure and burn schoolhouses if the exclusionary practices continued. The chapter recalls Governor-General Leonard Wood's own experiences leading the Moro Province two decades prior as he took special interest in the uprising. It recounts the confrontation in Lanao that typified long-established patterns of violence between Moros and the colonial state.