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The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives. Edited by JULIAN GO and ANNE L. FOSTER. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. viii, 316 pp. $64.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).
Published in the year of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, this book, which seeks to examine the United States's first overseas colony in the context of global colonialism and imperialism, is long overdue. In his introductory essay, Julian Go describes the motivation for the book as the desire to combat the "exceptionalist" paradigm in the historiography on the Philippines-the idea that the United States was an exception to the "rule" of European colonial powers because its intention in acquiring the Philippines was not to hold it in perpetuity, but to give it eventual independence. This book aims to introduce a new perspective: "The United States, as an overseas colonial empire, was embedded in a larger global field of imperial interaction" (p. 34). Although the book easily demonstrates the reality of international interconnectedness, I found that the exceptionalist argument nevertheless inserted itself again and again.
Anne L. Foster makes the best case for the impact of international practice and opinion on U.S. colonial policy in her article on opium. Opium was an item of legal farming and trade at the turn of the twentieth century, and income from sales and taxes supported several colonial governments. Philippine colonial governor William Howard Taft, we learn, was initially an advocate of opium farming for government revenue. But by the end of the nineteenth century, its ill effects on health were widely criticized by missionaries and others who advocated "benevolent" colonization. After touring Asia, the U.S. government's "Opium Committee" recommended a gradual policy of opium prohibition that was fully implemented in the Philippines by 1909. In spite of her emphasis on U.S. consultation with other colonizers, she acknowledges that "the United States was the only power to give up the lucrative opium revenue voluntarily" (pp. 112-13), thus raising the specter of exceptionalism.
Vince Boudreau, comparing methods of domination and modes of...