In their
article “Empires and the Reach of the Global,”[1] historians
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton lay out a theoretical structure for
studying not only empires, but global histories. They argue that by
understanding the global not as “a preexisting category”[2]
but as a concept used to understand imperial spaces, historians can position
empires “in relationship to an emergent and even halting or unfinished set of
processes…”[3]
By not taking global for granted, they can better understand the conditions in
which empires and other global processes emerged without assuming that they
have a natural affinity. Additionally, this allows the historian to see how
imperialism looked extremely different from different points in space and time.
Rather than simply examining the political or economic history of imperialism,
this approach forces the historian to look at cultural histories, such as colonial
home life, or histories of technology, such as communication or transportation.
In his 2006 monograph, historian Paul Kramer engages in the type of imperial
history that Ballantyne and Burton call for. By using the ever protean concept
of race as a lens for understanding empire not only in the Philippines under
American rule, but also as it was understood under Spanish rule, and as
Filipinos were understood in the US, he is able to show how the imperial
history of the Philippines was characterized by struggled over sovereignty and recognition, and where race was the central factor in both the colonization and the decolonization of the Philippines.
In
The Blood of Government,[4]
Paul Kramer writes a history of US imperialism in the Philippines, that
focuses not on the political or economics of colonialism, but rather on the
politics of race. He begins by discussing the Philippines under Spanish rule,
where many of the elite Christian Filipinos hoped to be assimilated into the
Spanish culture and government until they realized that rampant racial
exclusions would prevent that. They then began a nationalist movement, which
was temporarily interrupted by the Spanish-American War in 1898. However, when
it became apparent that the United States was not going to let the Philippines
rule themselves, especially after the brutal Philippine-American War, this
movement strongly reemerged. Rather than simply being victims of the United
States, this movement gave Filipinos considerable influence in their future as
the actively resisted American rule both militarily, and in cultural and
political spaces. Notably, Kramer argues that the racism practiced by American
soldiers during the war was not simply a transplant of racial ideas from the
United States under Jim Crow, but rather was largely created out of the complex
politics of race found within the colonial dynamic. In fact, Filipinos
themselves were largely split into two races, one of Christians who were
evolving into self-rule, with colonial administrators arbitrating their racial
progress, and one of non-Christians who needed to be ruled by the United States
with no role for Filipino elites. However, though these separate categories
provides a justification for colonialism, as such separate groups could not
adequately rule themselves, colonial officials also grouped the two categories
together when it suited them, bemoaning their unified savage reliance on
guerilla warfare, for instance. This racial tension came to its zenith during
the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition which sought to again justify
colonization by showing a group of native Igorots in an exhibit about the
process of civilization. This enraged several Filipino elites who argued that
an exhibit like this did not accurately represent the people of the Philippines.
In the United States, however, many Americans had different concerns about the
race and the Philippines. With colonization, there was a large influx of
Filipino immigrants. This caused fears of an Asian invasion, where Filipinos
would not only compete for jobs with white Americans but also seek to escort
and more with white women. These feelings contributed to the eventual creation
of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934, which provided for self-government for
Filipinos and independence from the United States. In this way, in Kramer’s
account, ideas of race, manifested in varying ways, were central to every step
of the imperial project.
Using
race as a lens fits Kramer’s work neatly within Ballantyne and Burton’s ideal
of a global imperial history. For them, questions of race and ethnicity “are
crucial to this project…because they were utterly instrumental to how empires
unfolded,” especially as they are “implicated in the inequalities and power
struggles of colonialism.”[5]
Rather than assuming that the Philippines was some sort of global space, he
shows how discussions of race actually molded its interactions with Spain, the
United States, and even racial discourse within its own populations. Though
this method of imperial history definitely gives voice to the Filipino
population, which is often simply victimized in these types of colonial
history, the idea that the global is a constructed vestige of imperialism is
somewhat problematic. It ignores the idea that there is a physical world where
people are not the only agents in historical change and where the global, in
the form of the environment or other things out of human control[6]
matter a great deal, beyond imperial constructs.
[1]
Ballantyne, Tony, and Antoinette Burton. “Empires and the Reach of the Global.”
In A World Connecting: 1870-1945, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg. First
Edition. Belknap Press, 2012.
[2]
Ibid., 300
[3]
Ibid., 301
[4]
Kramer, Paul A. The
Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines.
The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
[5]
Ballantyne and Burton, 304
[6]
See any text on Actor-Networks or Agential Realism. The following text is a good start.
Barad, Karen. “Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions
in Understanding Scientific Practices.” In Biagioli, Mario (ed.). The Science Studies Reader. NY:
Routledge. 1-11
