American empire, agrarian reform and the problem of tropical nature in the Philippines, 1898--1916

This dissertation investigates the practice of American overseas empire in the early twentieth century. By looking at the natural resource management programs the United States created in the Philippines, it shows how Americans came to link political stability to the creation of agricultural surpluses and the transformation of rural peasantries into middle class consuming citizenries.;American administrators and agricultural reformers understood their work in the Philippines in terms of the domestic reform movements of the progressive era, environmental ideologies that held the tropics to be naturally fertile and its inhabitants lazy, the example of other empires, and the scientistic aspirations of local elites. They expected that the introduction of "modern" agricultural practices to the fertile Philippines would tap the hitherto latent energies of the soil, integrate the Philippines into world commerce, and bring the violence and unrest of the Philippine War to an end. They founded Bureaus of Agriculture and Public Lands to achieve this end. These institutions instead became forums for debate between U.S. administrators and local elites over independence, demonstrating how the science of reform facilitated both imperial control and nationalist politics. Further, the encounter with the natural environment and ecological crises led some scientists to modify their ideas about tropical nature. This intellectual and ideological reorientation, further informed by inter-imperial exchanges, produced an image of the Philippines as part of an underdeveloped world, which justified increased state and scientific interventions into local agricultural practices at the very moment when the colonial government was formally withdrawing from the Philippines.;By setting the little-known story of these technocratic institutions alongside the more familiar history of American-Philippine political relations, the dissertation sheds light on how rural people experienced and shaped American colonialism, and how the practices of American empire evolved in relation to local environments and specific political contexts.