DOC Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Studies in Legal History) by Bruce H. Mann in History

Description

In 1899 the United States; having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War; inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades; U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking; transnational study; Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire; and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines.Kramer argues that Philippine-American colonial history was characterized by struggles over sovereignty and recognition. In the wake of a racial-exterminist war; U.S. colonialists; in dialogue with Filipino elites; divided the Philippine population into "civilized" Christians and "savage" animists and Muslims. The former were subjected to a calibrated colonialism that gradually extended them self-government as they demonstrated their "capacities." The latter were governed first by Americans; then by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the "white man's burden." Ultimately; however; this racial vision of imperial nation-building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to insulate the United States from its colonies; even at the cost of Philippine independence. Kramer provides an innovative account of the global transformations of race and the centrality of empire to twentieth-century U.S. and Philippine histories.