¹ Taft to Schmidlapp, J.G., 15 June 1900, William Howard Taft Papers, Series 3, Reel 30, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.Google Scholar

² There were, of course, good reasons for these concerns. But they had more to do with an absence of European or American immunities to radically different disease environments than to innate racial characterìstics or the heat, humidity and miasmatic conditions that were usually the focus of discourses on the ill-health of Anglo-Saxons and other ‘white races’ in the tropics. See especially the work of Philip Curtin, including The Image, of Africa (Madison 1965)Google Scholar chapter three; Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York 1989)Google Scholar; and Disease and Empire (Cambridge 1998).Google Scholar Also highly informative on European explanations for their high mortality rates and ill-health in the tropics is Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley 1993), especially chapters one and two.Google Scholar

³ Kidd, Benjamin, The Control of the Tropics (London 1898).Google Scholar

⁴ Griffis, William, ‘America in the Far East; II The Anglo-Saxon in the Tropics’, The Outlook 60/15 (December 1898) 903–904.Google Scholar

⁵ Of the extensive literature on American Diplomatic duplicity and military operations, Wolff, Leon's Little Brown Brother (New York 1960)Google Scholar and Miller, Stuart C.'s more recent Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven 1982) remain the most revealing.Google Scholar The most detailed treatment of the costs in terms of Disease and famine of the violent occupation of the islands can be found in Ken DeBevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton 1955). On Kipling's poem as a response to America's colonial takeover, see Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 189–190.Google Scholar

⁶ On Root, see Jessup, Philip C., Elihu Root I (New York 1939) 300Google Scholar; and Wright, Luke, ‘The Situation in the Philippines’, The Outlook, 12 September 1903, 111.Google Scholar

⁷ Elliot, Charles, The Philippines to the End of the Military Regime (Indianapolis 1917) 59–60Google Scholar; Crow, Carl, America and the Philippines (Garden City, New York 1914) 241Google Scholar; Harrison, Francis, The Corner-Stone of Philippine Independence (New York 1922) 331Google Scholar, 338–339; and Wood, Leonard ‘A Word about the Philippines’ in: Report of the Thirty-Third Annual Lake Mohonk Conference on the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, 20–22 October 1916, 153.Google Scholar

⁸ The phrase was used by Norbert Lyons, the associate editor of the American-owned Manila Daily Bulletin to characterise the first decade and a half of United States colonisation in the islands. See, ‘Some Observations on Race Contact’, in the Lake Mohonk Conference Report, 148.

⁹ Wright, “Situation in the Philippines’, 111.

¹⁰ Elliot, End of the Military Regime, 80–83; Harrison, Corner-Stone of Independence, 54–59; and Lyons, ‘Race Contact’, 148–149.

¹¹ Harrison, Corner-Stone of Independence, 325.

¹² Ibid., 326, 329–330, 338–339.

¹³ Report of the Special Mission to the Philippines (Manila 1921) 12.Google Scholar

¹⁴ David Prescott Barrows Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, 10 April 1917, Box 34.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Wright, ‘Situation in the Philippines’, 111.

¹⁶ Taft, W.H., ‘Some Results of Our Government in the Philippines’ in: Dauncey, Campbell ed., The Philippines: An Account of their People Progress, and Condition (Boston 1910) 35.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Harrison, Corner-Stone of Independence, 320.

¹⁸ Doom, J.A.A. van, De Laatste Eeuw van Indië: Ontwikkeling en Ondergang van een Koloniaal Project (Amsterdam 1994) 83–85.Google Scholar

¹⁹ From his instructions to the second Philippine Commission, reprinted in Forbes, W. Cameron, The Philippine Islands (Boston 1928) 442.Google Scholar

²⁰ Report of the Taft Philippine Commission in Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900 I (Washington D.C. 1901) 122–224.Google Scholar

²¹ For samples of American contempt for their Spanish predecessors, see Wright, ‘Situation in Philippines’, 114–115; Shurman, Jacob G., Philippine Affairs (New York 1902) 26–27Google Scholar; and Warren, L. Donald, Isles of Opportunity (Washington D.C. 1928) 65–64.Google Scholar

²² Harrison, Corner-Stone of Independence, 337–339.

²³ For sample expressions of American pride in the scientific nature of their colonial initiatives drawn from widely disparate projects and departments, see Shurman, Philippine Affairs, 67 (legislation relating to economics and finances); an anonymous article on ‘Versatility of the American Army’, Army and Navy Journal, 7 September 1912, 6 (psychology and policies towards the ‘pagan’ and primitive peoples of ‘the southern islands’); and David Barrows to the General Superintendent Department of Public Instruction, 5 October 1901, page 1 and Barrows to Dean Worcester, C., 7 April 1902, page 2 (approaches to education and his ethnological studies of the Filipino peoples), Barrows Papers, Box 1, Bancroft library.Google Scholar

²⁴ Elliot, End of the Military Regime, 54–59, quoted portion page 59.

²⁵ Harrison provided perhaps the most important exception in this regard, but see also Crow, America and the Philippines, 241–242.

²⁶ Headrick, Daniel's The Tentacles of Progress (Oxford 1988)Google Scholar provides a useful overview of these processes. For important, historical accounts with reference to specific colonial sites, see (for British India), the essays in: MacLeod, Roy and Kumar, Deepak eds, Technology and the Raj (New Delhi 1995)Google Scholar; Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body (Berkeley 1993)Google Scholar; and Whitcombe, E.M., Agrarian Conditions in Northern India (Berkeley 1972)Google Scholar; (for The Netherlands Indies) Doom, Van, De Laatste Eeuw van Indië, especially chapters four to seven; and H.W. van den Doel, De Stille Macht: Het Europese Binnenlands bestuur op Java en Madoera, 1808–1942 (Amsterdam 1994)Google Scholar chapter five; and (for French Indochina) Frédéric Hulot, L'Indochine — Le Yunnan: Le chemins de fer de la France d'Outre-mer I (Saint-Laurent-du-Var 1990); Pham Cao Duong, Vietnamese Peasants under French Domination (Berkeley 1985) especially 9–23Google Scholar, 136–151; and Marcovich, Anne, ‘French Colonial Medicine and Colonial Rule: Algeria and Indochina’ in: McLeod, Roy and Lewis, Milton eds, Disease, Medicine, and Empire (London 1988) 103–117.Google Scholar

²⁷ Shurman, Jacob, ‘Our Duty to the Philippines’, The Independent 51, 28 December 1899, 3466–3467.Google Scholar

²⁸ Elliot, Charles Burke, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government: A Study in Tropical Democracy (Indianapolis 1917) 271.Google Scholar For sample expressions of these sentiments by Elliot's administrative predecessors, see James F. Smith's 1908 ‘Message of the Governor-General to the Philippine Commission and the Philippine Assembly’, in the Harrison Papers, Container 42, especially pp 1–7; W. Cameron Forbes, the Secretary of Commerce and Police ‘Extracts from Letter of the Secretary of Commerce and Police’ in: Forbes, W. Cameron, The Philippine Islands (Boston 1928) volume I, 408–409; volume II, 455–458.Google Scholar

²⁹ Elliot, The Philippines to the End of the Commission Government, 277–278.

³⁰ For a more detailed analysis of the centrality of engineering imagery and leadership in America's colonisation of The Philippines, see Michael Adas's forthcoming study on The Technological Imperative: Social Engineering and America's Civilizing Mission, chapter five.

³¹ From a rather large literature on the history of the engineering profession in the United States in this period, perhaps the most insightful and broadly conceived remain, Layton's, EdwardRevolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland 1971);Google Scholar and Noble, David, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism(Oxford 1977).Google Scholar

³² On These trends in The academic Disciplines, see Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge 1991);Google Scholar and on the increasing confidence that social science theories could be applied to human societies, ordan, John M., Machine-Age Ideology: Social: Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939(Chapel Hill 1994).Google Scholar

³³ Wim van den Doel drew my attention to this key difference, and thereby set in motion the line of argument that follows.

³⁴ One of the few serious explorations to date of the significance of these measures in American colonization and Filipino responses to them can be found in Vicente L. Rafael's essay on ‘White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the U.S. Colonisation of the Philippines’ in: Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E. eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham 1993) 185–218.Google Scholar

³⁵ And, as George W. Stocking Jr and Henrika Kuklick have shown, in the Pacific islands more generally as well as in sub-Saharan Africa-, where development was also seen to stopped at the savage level of existence. See, Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York 1987)Google Scholar chapter seven; and Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge 1991), especially chapter four.Google Scholar

³⁶ Sullivan, Rodney J., Exemplar of Americanism: The Philippine Career of Dean C. Worcester(Ann Arbor 1991).Google Scholar

³⁷ Barrows to Dean C. Worcester, 7 April 1902, Barrows Papers, Box 1.

³⁸ Rydell, Robert W., All the World's A Fair (Chicago 1984) chapter six.Google Scholar

³⁹ On these divergent strategies, see the studies in Owen, Norman G. ed., Compadre Colonialism: Studies in the Philippines under American Rule(Ann Arbor 1971);Google Scholar and Stanley, Peter W., A Nation in the Making: the Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921 (Cambridge Mass. 1974);CrossRefGoogle Scholar compared, for examples, to Van den Doel, Stille Macht, chapter six; Fox, Richard G., Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley 1985)Google Scholar chapter eight; and Adas, Michael, ‘The Reconstruction of Tradition and the Defense of the Colonial Order’ in: Schneider, Jane and Rapp, Rayna eds, Articulating Hidden Histories (Berkeley 1995) 291–307.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Elliot, End of the Military Regime,54–55.

⁴¹ Ibid., 58–60.

⁴² Wright, ‘Situation in the Philippines’, 111; Taft to Captain Charles T. Barker, 13 July 1901, Taft Papers, Series 3, Reel 33; Elliot, End of the Commission Government, iii; Roosevelt, The Philippines: A Treasure and a Problem (New York 1926) 15;Google Scholar and Gilbert (quoted passage), The Great White Tribe in Filipinia (Cincinnati 1903) 302–303.Google Scholar

⁴³ The late-nineteenth century French debates over assimilation and shift to association are discussed at length in Hubert Deschamps, Les méthodes et les doctrines de la France du XVIe siècle à nos jours(Paris 1953);Google Scholar and Betts, Raymond, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York 1961).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Van Doom, Laatste Eeuw, chapter six; David W. Del Testa, ‘Paint the Trains Red’: Labor, Nationalism and the Railroads in French Colonial Indochina, 1898–1945(Ph.D. dissertation in progress, University of California at Davis) chapter one; Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford 1959)Google Scholar and Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca 1989) chapters three and five.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Here, I am abbreviating the concept of the peasantry developed by Wolf, Eric in his seminal study of Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1966) chapter one.,Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Lachica, Eduardo, Huh: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt (Manila 1971)Google Scholar chapters two and three; Philippines, Bureau of Agriculture, A Half-Century of Philippine Agriculture (Manila 1952);Google Scholar and Owen, Norman G., Prosperity Without Progress: Manila Hemp and Material Life in the Colonial Philippines (Berkeley 1984).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ The fullest study of this prolonged agrarian crisis remains Shannon, F.A., The Farmer's Last Frontier (New York 1945).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Furnivall, J.S., Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and the Netherlands Indies (Cambridge 1948).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ For samples of official stress on the central importance of market mechanisms in the ‘development’ of the Philippines, see Taft, William Howard, Present Day Problems (Freeport 1908) 26–27; Elliot, End of the Commission,300ff; Forbes, Philippine Islands, 8.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ See, for example, Report of the (3rd) Philippine Commission I (1903) 59–60.Google Scholar

⁵¹ May, Glenn Anthony, Social Engineering in the Philippines (Westport 1980), especially chapter Three.Google Scholar

⁵² See, for example, de Kalaw, Para Villanueva, ‘The Filipino Woman in the Past and Present’, The Philippine Review 2/12 (December 1917).Google Scholar

⁵³ Ileto, Reynaldo Clemena, Payson and Revolution (Manila 1979)Google Scholar; Sturtevant, David, Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840–1940 (Ithaca 1976)Google Scholar; Huk, Lachica, and vliet, Benedict J. Kerk, The Huk Rebellion (Berkeley 1977).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Health problems, his own and those of family members, became a recurring concern in Taft's voluminous correspondence with officials and friends back in the United States.

⁵⁵ Though he implicitly argues for a much broader impact that his small sample of doctors and patients warrants, this underside of the American colonial venture has been explored in interesting ways by Warrick Anderson in ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown’, American Historical Review 102/5 (1997) 1343–1370. See also, De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁶ Report (3rd) of the Philippine Commission, 31–32; and Crow, America and the Philippines, 58–60.