The United States and the end of slavery in the Philippines, 1898-1914: A study of imperialism, ideology, and nationalism. (Volumes I and II)

The complex relationship between anti-slavery ideology, United States colonialism, and Philippine nationalism is the subject of this dissertation. By 1896, slavery had come to symbolize the state of being colonized for the Christian Filipinos who rose in revolution against Spain. In the United States, the early debates about colonial rule were cast in terms of slavery even before Americans learned that slavery existed as an institution in the Moro (Muslim) societies of the Southern Philippines, and among some of the so-called Non-Christian Tribes of Northern Luzon. At first, anti-slavery ideology supplied a vocabulary that American anti-imperialists used to attack colonial rule as a violation of Filipinos' rights and a threat to corrupt the United States as a republic. However, the political implications of anti-slavery beliefs changed dramatically. From an embarrassment to a United States colonial regime initially reluctant to act against slavery in the Southern Philippines, slavery became an issue increasingly embarrassing to Filipino nationalists and their North American allies.;Anti-slavery ideology became deeply implicated in the rationalization and legitimation of colonial rule by forming a terrain that contained the potential for conflict over colonial bondage and liberation, in both literal and metaphoric senses. It also helped to shape a positive disciplinary structure that defined elite Philippine nationalism in symbiosis with progressive United States colonialism. This was manifest in the national elite's defense of indigenous hierarchies of ethnicity and class, and its complicity in the colonial state's use of forced labor. Forced labor was designed not only to provide labor, but also to rehabilitate groups classified as "uncivilized" or criminal. This classification paralleled the definition of colonial hierarchy, just as the rehabilitative functions of forced labor (especially in prisons) followed the colonial concern for internalized discipline as a prerequisite for "self-government." In this way, my work draws on David Brion Davis' interpretation of anti-slavery as a hegemonic ideology and Michel Foucault's insights on reformative asylums in order to rewrite the history of United States imperialism in the Philippines.