Eric’s Reviews > The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines > Status Update

"Tensions of Exhibition" (Ch 4) starts with horrific story of American anthropologists creating plaster casts of the heads of Filipino prisoners and collecting Filipino bones for the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase exposition of 1904. Live Filipinos were displayed as well, with American crowds drawn traditional non-Christians, much to the chagrin of colonial officials and Hispanicized Filipino elites.

Dual Mandates: "By 1903, the Philippine Commission...had established its expertise as the rationale for its rule...[T]he civilian leadership had developed a new vision of Filipinos, casting them not as a 'savage' bloc to be routed and suppressed as a whole but as a divided population of 'little brown brothers' deserving of American benevolence and tutelage" (226). Divided Hispanicized Filipinos from "non-Christians."

"...U.S. sovereignty was purchased mostly in the lives of Filipinos, especially through losses to epidemics...American troops had brought with them diseases uncommon in the islands; 'hikes' and interisland naval transport spread these as well as illnesses contracted in the islands between formerly isolated Filipino populations." (157)

Ironic, given imperialist insistence that they were bringing cleanliness.

One more imperialism book before presentation on Decolonization Classroom Discussions of Colonialism at History Fest 2018. Kramer emphasizes that "intersections of race and empire were contingent, contested, and transnational in scope" (4). Racial constructions in the Philippines and the US were products of imperialism, not, or not just, causes.