Empire: World History - 169. Freedom Fighters Betrayed: Colonising the Philippines

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

By the end of the Spanish-US war, the Philippines was on the menu. Two battles played out simultaneously on the archipelago: and old and a new empire fought for power over a colony, whilst Filipinos fought for independence. The Philippines honoured the US in their new constitution and flag. But they were betrayed, and a young revolutionary, Emilio Aguinaldo, led the Filipino people in the brutal war against American imperialism. Listen as Anita and William are joined once again by Daniel Immerwahr to explore the colonisation of the Philippines.  Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Derrimple. And we are in the middle of an incredible run with Daniel Imovar and his fantastic book. How to Hide an Empire, a short history of the greater United States, that has taught Anita and I so much stuff we didn't know.

One of those books that almost every other page, you've got a what-the-fuck moment, excuse me. That's right. A W-T-F moment on every other page. Yeah. Trudad, as they say, I tell you what, though. Sometimes I meet an author or an academic, and I just think, oh, God, I'm so jealous.

I'm not starting off my university career and can't be in those classes and just learn all of this in the first. Oh, no, it's fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. Look, we sort of left off with Teddy Roosevelt and Cuba. And what an extraordinary story that was. If you missed that episode, go immediately back and listen to an extraordinary story of Teddy Roosevelt climbing Cuban hills and leading charges during lunch breaks. On its own sometimes. But we did mention the Philippines a few times in that episode. And we will talk about the Philippines in more detail in this episode. But I think, first of all, what we should maybe talk about is this very important year 1898, where the whole idea of America and acquisition seems to change entirely and becomes sort of a codified attitude to the world.

Yeah, so basically, this is not the first time the United States had expanded. But for a lot of people, for the United States to take a number of populated and populists, overseas colonies, it felt like a switch was thrown in the national history. And so it might be worth exploring a little bit what was so different about taking the Philippines versus, I don't know, taking huge part of Mexico. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. And one way to think about it is that the United States had been an expanding country from very early on. And by the way, it has a bizarre feature that I think we don't often remark on. Its flag by law changes when the shape of the country changes. New stars are added. What other flag has expansion just built exologically in to the country?

Like, of course it's going to grow. We can accommodate. It's very interesting, right? Right, right. So the United States had long expanded, but there'd always been a kind of tension at these expansionary moments. And the tension throughout the 19th century had almost always broken down pretty straightforwardly into one camp thinking, we would like the borders of this great country to grow so that it will be greater. And the other camp thinking, yes, but if you do, you will infense non-white people within it. And they might deteriorate the greatness of this great country. So at all of those moments, what you see is the United States facing what I call a trilemma. The trilemma is where, you know, you want some good or service.

It can be, you can have it fast. it can be good or it can be cheap, but you probably can't have all three. You have to choose two. So trilemma is, you know, of these three you choose to. And so the trilemma that the United States faces is it is committed to some kind of Republican government, some kind of representative government. It is interested in expansion. And it is also committed implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly to the idea that white people would control the government to white supremacy. Daniel, give us an idea of racial attitudes at this moment. 1898. This is the moment when British Empire is ruling India, that people are completely unembarrassed. Yeah. You mentioned last time the title of the book that Teddy Roosevelt is reading in the middle of this war, Anglo-Saxon superiority. Give us an idea of quite how unflinching this racial attitude is at this period in history.

No, that's exactly right, because we're often, know, we all know, that people were way more racist in the past than they will cop to being today. But what we don't often acknowledge is that it wasn't like today where racism was seen to be a character flaw. Yeah, right. Racism was a theory of history that explained the world around you and that you might invoke, if you were a member of one of the dominant classes in this cosmology, to develop projects and to explain what would be good and helpful and right. So the people who are racist are not ashamed of being racist. They are quite loud about being racist because that's how they see the world and they're not concerned about that. I mean, they wouldn't have a name for it. They would just say, they are right and everyone else is a bit odd. Yeah, yeah.

That's it. It's so mainstream, yeah. Give us an idea of what's in that book, Anglo-Saxon superiority. What's the kind of thing it's saying? Yeah, so it's not what you might imagine a sort of book about personal racism, right? So when I encounter non-Englo-Saxon people on the street, I find that they are more given to laziness or criminality or something like that. It's a theory of the world, as many of these kind of racist books are, which explains why there are a certain set of peoples who seem

destined for greatness, and there are other people who need to learn it from the ones who are great. And so it's a kind of handbook not just for navigating a store, but for ruling the world, right, and for deciding which people are actually going to be in a position to do so. Extraordinary. And often expressed in such patrician tones. as well. Of course. I mean, you know, we're kind of almost doing a favor to these people. Not almost, absolutely explicit. This is the duty and the divine calling. There's an element of sort of Christian providence at work here and very unembarrassedly expressed. Yeah, that's really good. There was a saying about a former president of my country, George W. Bush,

that he was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple. And that same sense, I think, You can imagine what it looks like from the perspective of white European descendant of people at the end of the 19th century. They look around and everyone in power looks like them. And then they create these theories about, you know, like, well, we seem to be on their base. And then they create these theories about how that is right and proper and either God wants it or the laws of nature want it or the whole world has led up to this point. Whereas now we look at that and we just think that is a combination of an accident of history

that is enforced by, you know, immoral exertions of force. So take us into the Philippines, Daniel. We've just finished the war with Spain, and the Philippines is on the menu as one of the acquisitions the United States has made as a result of this war, almost sort of without thinking about it. It wasn't part of the plan of the war, particularly to take the Philippines, but now it's there. Yeah, and I think that phrase on the menu is right. It's on the menu and the United States can order it up or not.

militarily, the question has been answered. Does the United States wish to annex the Philippines? You can have it if it wants it. It has defeated Spain, so that's not up for contestation. But then a question that the United States faces is, does it want to annex this large, distant, populist colony that contains millions of non-white people and very few people that anyone in the United States would recognize to be white? And this is a dilemma. It's the fact that they're not white. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's making American question whether it actually wants it or not. Yeah, so if you think about the Louisiana purchase, which is this another moment of dramatic expansion for the United States. Explain what it is just in case someone does it. Yeah,

in 1803 emissaries of Thomas Jefferson, who's then the president, arranged with Napoleon's government to purchase what had been the French possessions in North America. So it's a vast part of North America that includes, you know, Louisiana up to the contemporary Midwest and part of the West, it doubles the size of the United States. So that's dramatic. But one reason that that's okay, even though it hadn't been part of the plan, the general sense is that even though there's a lot of territory that's been added, there aren't that many people on that territory so that the United States will still be comfortably majority white. and there's this vision that either the other land can be sort of an Indian-only space that doesn't

impinge on the political fabric of the United States or it can be settled by white settlers. No one thinks that about the Philippines. There is no plan that white people will arrive in the Philippines and will dislodge and take political control of the Philippines, a colony that contains millions. In fact, what most people think at the time is that white people aren't built for the tropics and they can be there temporarily, but they're always going to be like underwater, divers who can sort of come down for a little bit but have to come up for air. With the transfer of land that takes place during this extraordinary year, is there money

that's exchanged as well, sort of compensation? You talked about the Louisiana purchase. Is there like a Philippines purchase as well, for example? Yeah, there is. It's a little weird because the United States has won a war, so you think, why should it owe Spain any money? But it does pay Spain $20 million in the process of taking three of Spain's territories. Now, that's not payment for the territories.

Technically, what that is payment for is that Spain has improved the Philippines, i.e. it has built buildings. And so what is being bought is the improvements that Spain has added. We get the colony, you know, it is ours to Christianize and civilize. But we recognize that you've put some effort into it already. So in the same way that a house improves in value and you can sell it for a higher price, Spain gets 20 million. That in itself is potty and bonkers. But okay, so 20 million is paid. Philippines is now America's to do with whatever it wants, although it's not sure what it wants.

I mean, what does it do, first of all? Because normally when we see these colonial expansions and adventures, the first people to turn up are the men with the Bibles. Is that what happens here as well? No, that's not what happens. And the reason that doesn't happen is that you have to imagine what it took to dislodge Spain. So the United States have naval power, but it does not have a huge army that can spread out all over the archipelago.

it is relied enormously on native troops and particularly led by this guy Emilio Aguinaldo. And so generally it has been the Filipinos who have dislodged the Spanish. So again, like in Cuba, the United States has come late into a picture where there's already a freedom struggle that's three quarters one. That's exactly right. And even when the United States enters, it's not entering alone. It provides, you know, useful force, but it's not the only one doing so. And so even after the United States has, quote, unquote, one, the Philippines from the Spanish, all the U.S. has, for the most part, is control of the capital city Manila.

So it governs in Manila. It is occupying Manila. Its soldiers are in Manila. And then by and large, Aguinaldo's forces are dispatching the Spanish and controlling the territory outside of it. So you get this question of, if you look at the Philippines, one set of soldiers is holding the capital. the other set of soldiers seem to have free reign over the rest of the country. It's not clear actually whose country this is at that point. Okay, so, I mean, you can't remain in limbo, and I don't suppose the people of the Philippines

like this kind of bizarro limbo that's really. So, I mean, what happens then? What are the relations, first of all, between the Filipinos and the troops that are there in patches? On the one hand, segregated because they are literally kept apart in separate spaces. The troops are, of course, going crazy in the way that, you know, know, men with guns do. They're getting bored. They're getting impatient. They're spending an enormous amount of money on alcohol and prostitutes. And they're just, you know, getting in little

sort of skirmishes with Filipinos whenever they can see them. But that doesn't seem like it's going to has geopolitical consequences. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo realizes that actually the political destiny of the Philippines hasn't been set. It's going to be set in these weeks and months. And so he just starts doing everything he can do to like firm up the Philippines as its own country. He declares independence. There is a Philippine flag. The Philippine flag is red, white, and blue to honor and respect the role of the United States in ushering the Philippines to independence. Thanks for help. Yeah. Thanks for help. Thanks for help. Bye-bye. Right. And the Philippine Declaration of Independence thanks the United States for birthing this new age of

freedom. And that's the story that Aguinaldo is telling and hoping to make true. I need to know more than just Emilio Aguinaldo. I want to know sort of what was his origin story. Who is he? Where does he come from? What was he like? You know, just fill in that pencil sketch that we have a revolutionary leader. Yeah. So the thing about the leaders of the Philippine Revolution is they're shockingly young. So the Philippines have been fighting Spain for a while. And, sorry, Filipinos have been fighting Spain for a while. Aguinaldozzi is only at this point. He's 29, yeah, in 1898. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he's the leader.

And the rest of the guys to the left and right of him, i.e., his fellow generals, tend to be in their 20s. There's a general who's 21 who dropped out of high school to fight the Spanish, whose aide-de-camp is 15 years old, and he was made a general two years after dropping out of high school. What that tells you is something about Filipino life expectancies under Spain, but what it also tells you is the particular life expectancies about people who fought the colonel. colonial power. There's just a whole generation of Filipinos who've been mowed down. And so Aguinaldo is a very young man without a lot of seasoned officers to draw on. But I mean, is he educated? Does he come from money? Is he from poverty? What's his sort of the soil from which he grows? Yeah, Aguinaldo is educated, but, you know, with the difference, he never learns to speak English because he's so young, he lives in 1964 and he just sort of like hangs out as a remnant of the Philippines that might have been

the Spanish-speaking Philippines, the one that was never really accommodated itself to US rule. Yeah, I'm just looking at pictures of the young Aguano, handsome young man. He is a handsome young man. And, you know, sort of this uniformed kind of smart, straight-backed kind of creature. You know, we talked about the handover between Spain and America, and this 20 million that was handed over for real estate improvements rather than the land itself, which just seems completely potty, not the land or his people. But, you know, this deal between Spain and America, isn't there some kind of like set up fantasy battle that is sort of created to make this look like it's an okay handover? Can you tell us about this? Yeah, so you think that the war between, on the one hand, the United States and Filipino rebels, and on the other hand, Spanish colonizers would look like that. Those would be, that's how you would divide up the adversaries. Something happens during and after the war, which is that the U.S. and Spain collaborate even as they're fighting a war against the Filipinos. And you see it militarily

when the United States is trying to take Manoa. There are U.S. troops and there are Filipino troops and they are besieging the city. And rather than fight to the death, the Spanish agree, okay, we'll let the U.S. troops in. We will fight a mock battle just to preserve our honor, to say we did a little fighting. It's set up as a battle. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's like my kids playing Jedi nights when they, you know, they hit each other's light sabers but don't quite actually hit them. Is that what we're talking? The lightsabers don't have to actually touch. And it will be a mock battle. It will last a small number of hours. It will result in Spanish honor being at least half preserved. Zero casualties, presumably. One hopes. And the U.S. troops will enter.

They will raise the stars and stripes. And then the war will be over. But the deal is no Filipinos are allowed to enter the city because, I mean, obviously they're Filipinos, who live there, but no Filipino troops, rebels are allowed to enter the city because the Spanish don't want to surrender to Filipinos. I mean, the Spanish governor uses the worst language for this, doesn't he? Yeah, yeah, he uses the N-word. He's wanting to surrender to white people, but never to the N-word. Yeah, exactly right. So it's this weird moment where, like, even in a war, you realize there's two wars going on. There's a war between Spain and the United States. And then just humming in the background of everyone's mind, there's a race war between Europeans and Filipinos.

And ultimately, that's the war that kind of pops up right at the end. Right. So if I was Emilio Aguinaldo and I've been fighting for as long as I have, and I have young men being mown down in their prime, and I have won, and I've got a young, you know, vital army around me that have sacrificed everything and, you know, have done all of the work, and then suddenly to have a mock battle and to be treated like that, is he not really pissed off? Pissed off, but nervous, too, because you think this could break one of two ways.

Okay, that was weird what just happened. That was ominous what just happened. But nevertheless, we've still fought this war under the general presumption that this leads to the independence of the Philippines. So perhaps this was a hiccup or perhaps this portends what's about to go down. And Aguinaldo is nervous about how this could break and is just trying to do everything he can to sort of remind everyone. We fought this together, right?

This was... Yeah, with his red, white, and blue flag. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly that. Yeah. It doesn't work, does it? It doesn't work. When Aguinaldo hears of the terms of the treaty,

which he was not involved in signing or shaping, he just thinks, oh, we've been utterly betrayed. Here we go again. Right? Now we're going to have to fight another war? Yeah. And it doesn't immediately lead to war. It just leads this very uneasy sort of standoff.

Is he in Manila? Is he publicly available? or is he worried that he might be arrested? Is he retreated to the hills and arming for a second round? What he's going to have to do is declare a counter capital to Manila because he's insisting his government is sovereign over the Philippines. So if they don't control Manila, they have to have their own capital. He ends up declaring capital after capital because every time he loses a battle

and the U.S. seizes the capital that he's just declared, he has to declare a new one. And ultimately he flees to the hills and won't even tell his fellow officer. where he is. And luckily, the Philippines has over 7,000 islands. So there's a lot of territory to move around. Yeah, now this is all happening on the main northern island was on, but that's right. There's a lot of territory. And US troops don't know the territory at all. Okay. So, I mean, look, he's Scarlet Pimper now, just trying to keep two steps ahead of the Americans. But what is the nature of the combat that goes on? And, you know, how are both sides managing?

You could see it going either way. On the one hand, the troop size, they're sort of evenly matched. But the U.S. officers have been trained. They have a lot of resources, both that have gone into their training and also that, you know, go into provisioning them with food and that kind of thing. They've been seasoned and they've had experience fighting Indian wars, wars that they've generally won, but nevertheless got some experience fighting. And a general officer in the U.S. Army might be, you know, in their 50s. The Philippine Army is young boys, young boys who don't have weapons.

So even in that first moment in the kind of standoff around the military, Manoa, a third of the troops, the Filipino troops, don't have rifles. So some of them have spears. There's a unit with bows and arrows. What? Yeah, what are they going to do, right? So the whole war, they find themselves just scrambling for weapons. So, like, you know, gathering tin cans that they could melt down to make cartridge intues, melting down church bells to make bullets. This has a bit of an echo of Tussaluvatou and what happened in San Domingo, the sense of imperial powers doing deals with each other and the locals just being left, you know, ignored almost. Yeah. But on the other hand, there are a lot of Filipinos. So for the United States to win, it's not just going to have to

defeat Aguinaldo's army. It's going to have to fight against what increasingly looks like a guerrilla insurgency. And it gets pretty brutal pretty quickly. It gets really brutal really quickly. Are the populists not exhausted by war? I mean, does Aguinaldo's name command respect and where people say, we fight for you, Aguinaldo? Or do they just say, oh, bloody hell, not again? Yeah. Please go away. It's always a little hard. to say what is in people's hearts in war, especially when those people are not writing things down. But even from the perspective of the U.S. generals, what they all say at the start of the war in 1890 is the populace is with Aguinaldo.

We are fighting a whole country. However, the hope from the U.S. side, if you're kind of thinking big picture, is if this war drags on long enough and if we make it so unpleasant, Anita, you're right, will they just give up and will they say, you know, it's just better to be colonized by the United States than to continue to lose this exterminatory war, a war in which hundreds of thousands of people die. Well, let's take a break here. Join us after the break when we visit this seemingly never-ending hell that the Filipino people are facing. Hello, welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about Emilio Aguinaldo, who is hopping around, just keeping three or four steps

ahead of the Americans. His men are tired, but they're still fighting and people are still loyal to them, some of them fighting with bows and arrows and spears. And I just want to get a sense of the nature of the tactics he has to use because he has numbers. They don't have weapons. So are we talking about guerrilla warfare as we understand it today? It starts differently. It starts as conventional armies facing each other in the field. And there's a kind of politics of respectability that goes along with that. Aguinaldo understands that in the eyes of the world, it's kind of dirty business to engage in guerrilla warfare. And so the thing to do is to, you know, have an army that, you know, wears the uniforms. Faces each other. Exactly, right. But this goes terribly for the

Filipinos and for Aguinaldo. And so... Presumably, they're facing Gatling guns and things by now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Just asymmetry of weaponry is extraordinary. And at a certain point, they start sending divers into the ocean in the hopes that maybe the Spanish drop some ammunition from their sunken ships that could be recovered. I mean, this is how desperate they have become. So, yeah, they move to guerrilla warfare. And then it becomes a very different thing because now the United States is not just fighting armies. It's fighting potentially anyone, right? Any village that is harboring rebels, anyone who looks like they might be a rebel or is indistinguishable from a rebel.

It starts to become less a war between two armed forces and more of a race war. So the 20th century opens in the Philippines with a very 20th century conflict involving burnt villages, colonial revenge attacks, and brutal guerrilla warfare. Do they justify sort of burning villages, men fine one way, and then women and children are both their game as well? I mean, what's the American attitude to civilians? The general attitude is these villages harbored rebels, so they are guilty in some way.

All of them, collective punishment then. Collectively guilty. Now, the story, as we know, it is not at least this part of the war. We might talk about a later part where there are some large massacres of civilians, But in the early part of the guerrilla war, it's not the kind of mili images that you have from Vietnam where whole villages are mowed down. What's rather done is the homes are burned, the food stocks are burned, and people are made to feel unsafe in their homes.

It's the same reconcentration strategy. And there's torture, isn't it? There's torture of individuals. Where is that rebel, you know, who's the leader of this attack? Show me that kind of thing. You write about the water cure. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's something that's come back to haunt U.S. history.

One of the ways that the U.S. soldiers have of getting information that they otherwise can't get is to try to torture Filipinos by holding them down and then sort of filling their mouths and lungs up with dirty water. This is the water cure, the cure for dissidents. And it bears a resemblance to waterboarding that you would see 100 years later. Do we have any calculation of how many civilian deaths take place? Yeah, we do. There's a guy called Kendipavu. who did the closest study we have. You know, the U.S. Army has a number of something like, you know, 15,000 combat deaths on the

other side. Everyone agrees that that number is laughably small, probably because a lot of people don't die in combat. When you burn people's food and you burn their homes, they start dying of malnutrition, they start dying of disease, and the disease is rampant in the Philippines. The best study that we have based on census numbers estimates that in the first four years of the war, slightly more than three quarters of a million. and Filipinos died.

That's just an extraordinary number. It's a shocking number. It's astonishingly high amount of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it does accord with some contemporary estimates from U.S. officers who will estimate, like, in local places, what percentage of the population has died, and we're talking about, like, one-sixth of the population.

Just to make this clear, if that number is anywhere close to being true, more people die in the Philippine War than in the U.S. civil war. But we don't know about it. Right. Yeah. We just don't know anything. anything about it. It's totally out of the history textbooks. Exactly right. Yeah, yeah, because of who dies and where they die. Even the fact of American conquest of the Philippines is not

well known. And those two wars actually compare well. They're both wars of secession slash reconquest. They both, you know, the hot fighting lasts about four years and they kill somewhat commensurable numbers of people, although it seems like the Philippine conflict kills more. And yet the U.S. Civil War is seen as absolutely central and pivotal to U.S. history and the Philippine War is a chapter in the textbooks at best. Can we talk about one episode that takes place, which I think might be in American history, but so certainly in American minds, is in 1901 the Bangiga massacre. Now, I mean, it isn't a massacre of Filipinos.

It's a killing of Americans or massacre of Americans. How many people and what are we talking about here? And what are the repercussions of that? So you get tempted when you see this kind of profoundly asymmetric or, you're, uneven warfare, where just, you know, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are dying for just small numbers of thousands of U.S. soldiers, you start to wonder, yes, I understand this is a colonial war. Does it ever just become a popular war where not even rebels, but just Filipinos rise up against the United States? And yes, that happens. There is a moment on the island of Samar where

U.S. forces have already detained a number of ostensible rebels. And just the civilian population attacks Army camp in Balangiga. This is called, from the U.S. perspective, the Balangiga massacre. They kill 45 soldiers in a single day, not coming with weapons or not rifles, just storming it, like with farm implements and that kind of thing. And this is a really interesting event because in the Philippines, there are statues to it, right? Like, this is a major event in the story of the independence of the Philippines.

But in US memory, this is the 9-11 of the, you know, 100 years before. In fact, it happens in September 1901, so almost 100 years before 9-11. There is an equally brutal response, isn't there? There's this general Jacob Smith, hell-roaring Jake, as he's known, who instructs his major, I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of best.

bearing arms and actual hostilities against the United States. Yeah. He said this reply to anyone over, wait for it, 10 years old. That's right. So the order becomes, kill all males over the, you can even say men, kill all males over the age of 10 in Samar. It must be made into a howling wilderness. Now, it doesn't entirely happen, right?

There's a way in which you can say that, and then the next sentence becomes, and so it was. U.S. power is limited. You know, a lot of Filipinos die from disease, not from outright. But the idea that this can be ordered openly, written down, and that that can be just part of the way of fighting the war. They've killed 45 of us. We need to destroy the entire island.

That's the kind of ambiance in which the United States is fighting this brutal war. Is any of this getting back to America? Are the words of this man getting back, kill everyone over the age of, every boy over the age of 10? Is that reaching American ears? And what are they making of this? Yeah, it does. Things get so violent in the Philippines.

that it starts to echo back to the U.S. mainland and become a political issue. Smith's words do come back. I mean, the reason we know this is that it's reported and it becomes the basis of a trial. Smith is reprimanded and retired from active duty for having gone a little bit too far. And then Roosevelt comments on this, taken in the full, his work has been as to reflect credit on the American army and therefore upon the nation, it is to be deeply regretted that he should have so acted in this instance as to infere with the war. further usefulness. This is like Amritsa, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The kind of non-response to a major mask. Yeah, too bad he stepped over the line a little bit because he was a great general. But with Amritsa, if you're joining, and I see the dots and they are tempting, Amritsa was the touch paper for a wholesale rejection of British rule and it sort of started off the whole, you know, kick him out movement. Is that what this order from Smith does in the Philippines as well? Well, no, but only because there's already a wholesale rejection of U.S. rules.

This is happening in the middle of a bloody war. Right, they're fighting and they're dying already in numbers. Yeah, yeah. But what it does do is it touches off not a kind of wholesale rejection, but at least a recoiling, a revulsion within the mainland's United States to this kind of empire. And you start to see people, even Teddy Roosevelt, thinking, well, oh, this is a little much. This is a bit off. Yeah.

Are there ways that we could control other countries that wouldn't involve this, that wouldn't take us down this dark road? So this sort of bloodlet goes on for about two years? When does the war end? How does the war end? Aguinaldo gets captured, doesn't he? 8901? Yeah, and you'd think that the war would be over when Aguinaldo gets captured. In fact, Aguinaldo says, please stop fighting. This is over. They keep fighting. And Roosevelt declares the war over in 1902, although I think the US government had declared it over like four times before that already. And the fighting keeps. going on. It changes locales. Certain places are quote-unquote pacified, although there's still upsurges of violence. Generally, the war moves south. The bloodiest massacres in the war happen after Roosevelt has declared it over. And it's really hard to know exactly when to call it. But, you know, U.S. military government, including active fighting, does not end until 1913,

which makes this a 14-year war by that count. That in itself is extraordinary. Is there ever any attempt to use carrot and not just stick to get the Filipino people on the American side? Because, you know, sometimes that does happen as well, or you're sort of buy loyalty from certain groups. Does that ever happen here? Yeah, there's a book about this from many decades ago called School Books and Crags. Craggs refers to the guns, but school books is the carrot, right? And so the promise of the United States is we will bring civilization. And the specific form that promise takes is we'll set up schools.

You can send your kids to schools. They'll learn English, but they'll learn, you know, all kinds of other things, too. And eventually, it does kind of work. The United States makes the rebellion so costly for Filipinos. And, you know, maybe it sets up enough schools too that eventually first the Philippine elite and then sort of the large population stops rebelling and goes along with being colonized. Is there much impact in America of the acquisition of the Philippines? the fact that you've now got this empire in the middle of the Pacific. Do you get Filipinos coming in the national numbers to the United States, for example, or the large immigration? You do get some, although the United States does a lot to limit movement between the Philippines and the mainland.

It's interesting, and I had to puzzle through this one writing my book. One reason I called it How to Hide an Empire was that I was just repeatedly struck by how clueless mainlanders seem to be about the dimensions of their own country. There's obviously a huge moment during the war and the sort of scandal of war. and a lot of talk about that. But after the fighting calms down in the Philippines, it becomes really easy for white people, at least, in the mainland, to just forget that the Philippines is part of the United States.

And it remains part of the United States until, what, 1996? Yeah, until 1946. And by the 1940s, we have, you know, Philippines become sailing again because it's involved in World War II. And we have all these accounts of U.S. soldiers who are sent to the Philippines. So they have reason to think about it. They have a long journey on the way there. and they get down there and they meet Filipinos and they're like, wait, why do you speak English?

And the Filipinos are like, well, you taught us English when you colonize this? And the soldiers are like, what are you talking about? So it is a colony, but it doesn't become a state. It's not acknowledged. It's not taught in American schools. Filipinos are not part of the American fabric of life. They're not running Filipino restaurants all over Washington or New York. The Filipino presence is marginal in the sense of not an enormous number of people in the U.S.

during the period of colonization, but it is also marginalized, right, the place that such people have in society. One really on the nose example that I like is the maps. So right after the United States takes the Philippines, if you look at a map that appears in the front page of a schoolbook from 1900, the Philippines is on the map. Puerto Rico is on the map. And then, you know, by about like World War I, those places have just literally been pushed off the map.

The map zooms in and the country is just the contiguous part. You call it the logo map, the map of the United States as the mainland. Yeah. But you say in your book, and this is a fascinating idea, that the map that we're so familiar with of the mainland United States is only what the United States is for three years. Yeah, that's right. There's three years of US history, 1854 to 1857, if we're counting,

where that familiar shape, which would be the logo of the country if it had a logo, is actually the map of its borders. Because right after 1857, it starts. expanding overseas. And then by 1900, it has large colonies all over the world now. Just dumbfounded, again, and not for the first time talking to you. But, you know, after having the experience that America does have in the Philippines, does it signal some kind of gear shift in America's mind about how they're going to preserve, expand their interests overseas and what that might look like? Or does the resistance and the bloodshed put them off further acquisitions?

Yeah, so you realize that the war that starts in 1898 sort of forks in two different directions. On the one hand, because anti-imperialists made it impossible for the U.S. to annex Cuba, it has to control Cuba through other means. But no one passed a law preventing the United States from colonizing the Philippines, so it claims the Philippines as a colony. By the end of the Philippine war, the Cuba path starts to look a lot more attractive. And what you see the United States doing in the ensuing decades, particularly in the Caribbean, is what we call dollar diplomacy or gunboat diplomacy, seizing control of the foreign policy and the economic policy of foreign countries, but without actually making them U.S. territories, annexing them to the United States, running the U.S. flag up the pole. And that seems to be the dominant pattern for U.S. power through the 20th century. I mean, the French have a phrase for this sort of change in methodology. It's really neat.

Coca colonization. You call it dollar diplomacy. Coca colonization, I think it's quite neat as well. But can you then say that there are distinct phases of empire with America? Yeah. You can. You want to be a little cautious because it's tempting to say, and often you'll see this in textbooks, the United States had a brief flirtation with colonial empire,

and then it moved on to other forms of power projection, which is kind of true, but also the United States still had the colonies. Right. So the Philippines is a U.S. colony until the 1940s. Puerto Rico is still a U.S. colony. So there's, I think, a change in strategy, but that doesn't automatically change the shape of the United States. And the United States still lives with those colonies. Is there no movement today for Puerto Rico to get statured or to have independence, one or the other? There is. Yeah, absolutely. It's complicated. But there are intense status debates and questions in Puerto Rico. There's still status questions in Hawaii, which is a state and not everyone wants.

wanted to be one. Daniel, I just was blown away by your book. How to Hide an Empire, a short history of the great United States by Daniel Imovar is available in paperback. Go get it. It is a spectacular read. It's one, and I both agree, of all the books we've read lately for this podcast, this is one that stands right out, and it's the extraordinary book that blows your mind every other page. You will not read it once. Let me put it this way. You will read it a number of times and you will keep coming back to it. It's a fabulous book. Really, really interesting. And Dan, it's been a fabulous guest. Thank you for this long marathon we've taken you on. You've been amazing, absolutely wonderful and so articulate and interesting. We've loved it.

Thank you so much for having me on. You're welcome back anytime. That's it for this week. We are taking a break after this from America. We've done the genocide of the Native Americans. We've looked at America beginning its own first colonial ventures in Hawaii and the Philippines. means before we get on to a different sort of empire, the empire of influence, we're going to go and do something we think is very important, something we missed out from our Indian series when we first started this podcast, which is the terrible story of the 1943 to 1945 Bengal famine with our wonderful friend Kavita Puri, who has just done some extraordinary

research on this. So we'll be bringing that to you before we go back to the second half of our American series. A really powerful listen and some very powerful testimony. So, I mean, do join us for that. And then, as William says, we will return to America and a different type of, I may say, empire building. Empires of the minds, empires of politics, empires of influence, but not the traditional kind of colonialism that we've talked about thus far. So until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Drupul.