Commentary on Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire
At the 2025 AAG Meeting in Detroit, I was part of an author meets readers panel for Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire.
The panel was organized by Christian C. Lentz, Michael Hawkins, and Joseph Palis, and included commentary from Kristian Saguin, Mona Domosh, Don Mitchell, and myself.
A version of our comments was published in September 2025 for the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. What follows is my original unabridged commentary.
Let me begin by making a distinction between the violence and injustice of American imperialism on one hand, and its sophistication, coherence, and success on the other. Though at perpetual risk of erasure, the evidence for the former in the Philippines is plentiful. But this is not necessarily evidence of a total, nor monolithic, nor coherent project.
To resist the erasure of American imperialism, and to understand its ongoing legacies, it is important not to ascribe to it more power than it could actually muster. We could instead name its weaknesses and contradictions, through finer-grained close studies, and show just how vain, incomplete, and unsuccessful its schemes are. And what better way to do this than to study Great Men and their Grand Designs, at the height of their hubris?
This is the approach Scott Kirsch takes in American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire. Kirsch “tells the story of a regime of US colonial retentionists that attempted…to build an enduring American empire in the Philippines through the production of space”, and “the limits of these spatial strategies, and their appropriation by different actors for different ends” (p. 4). The picture that emerges is unflattering, and offers lessons for skewering the improbable, farcical resurrection of William McKinley as a presidential ideal in 2025—and for appraising the limits of American empire, as it actually exists.
To these ends, American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines demonstrates the value of an historical-geographic approach. It is no grand sweep: it keeps a sustained focus on the archives of a handful of elites within the American colonial government and on a rather narrow timeframe, 1898 to 1921. Through a few keywords—territory, map, landscape, and road—Kirsch writes a geography of American empire at a crucial moment of its formation, and as it was undertaken and understood by its proponents. These men—most notably William Howard Taft, Governor-General of the Philippines (1900–1903), US Secretary of War (1904–1908), and US President (1909–1913); William Cameron Forbes, Commissioner of Commerce and Police (1904–1908), Governor-General (1909–1913), and joint head of the Wood-Forbes Commission (1921); and Daniel Burnham, architect and urban planner, commissioned by Forbes to design plans for Manila and Baguio (1904)—all had wide latitude to pursue their ambitions at the apex of American expansionism, with the Philippines as their site for experimentation.
Taken together, the picture that forms from Kirsch’s account show an American colonial effort that was awkward and incomplete, often stymied by its own ideology and its preoccupation with prestige. Despite their broad powers, these men never could surmount political-economic limits that I think were rooted in the contradictions of their own ideology. For me, the most interesting forms this took were the Americans’ professed insistence on thrift and on private investment.
The American colonial elite fixated on the notion that the Philippines should be “strictly self-supporting” (p. 9): that whatever cost is incurred in running the colony will be paid for not by American taxpayers, but (presumably) by the colonized people and lands. Hence the territory’s Forest Bureau was made to “fund itself” through timber exports (p. 62), and the development of the new hill station of Baguio was to be funded by auctioning off private lots (p. 108). The auctions of the “friar lands” in 1904, briefly noted by Kirsch (p. 47), may have been an expression of the same impulse, and perhaps the one with the longest-lasting and most pernicious consequences.
The example that Kirsch most vividly discusses is the rollout of a road network, pursued by the Americans as both a marker of “progress” as well as an enabler of colonial control (pp. 120–1). Unsurprisingly—given the ravages of war, the hostile monsoon climate, and the scarcity of capital in the distant colony—Taft and Forbes thought the maintenance of the roads underfunded. To build and maintain these roads, the Americans doubled the cedula, a regressive poll tax, and reinstituted corvee labor (pp. 121–134). As with the prosecution of the Philippine-American War, among the many possible ways that Taft and Forbes could have interpreted “civilization” on the ground, they ultimately defaulted to brutal practices of conquest, tribute, and enslavement.
The Americans also had a penchant for framing the many problems of their territory as one of ‘access to capital’. To them, the commercial potential of the archipelago—whether as an entrepot (pp. 31, 155) or as resource colony (p. 60)—was self-evident. All that was needed to unlock these riches was investment, which with the right laws, infrastructure, and a bit of boosterism, should come (pp. 2–5; 121; 135–6; 155). The job, then, was to make the colony attractive for investment.
Kirsch begins the book with such an episode: a gala thrown in Forbes’s honor in 1912. Reflecting on the evening in his diary, Forbes seemed quite pleased with himself, noting the presence of “the largest railroad and banking businesses” (p. 5). Their applause, however, was never followed up by actual investments. Private American banks were conspicuously absent from the American territory, a void that came to be filled by British, overseas Chinese, and Japanese private banks, and a string of state-established banks (Nagano 2015, pp. 52–59). Similarly, what little railroads in Luzon at this time were owned by a British concessionaire, and eventually brought under state ownership in 1917 (Samonte 1967, p. 140).
Forbes’s own comparison between Hawaii and the Philippines (pp. 135–6) showed the limits of his imagination. As Kirsch observes, Forbes understood the wide gap in exports between the two territories as rooted in underinvestment, with “capital as the solution to virtually every social problem” (p. 135), and personally saw to investment promotion. Yet the Americans never saw the Philippines as an important market, nor as a destination for investment (Doronila, 1992 p. 33). By the 1930s, American private investment in the Philippines only amounted to US$200 million, about 1% of total US foreign investment; the portion of its national income from the Philippines was a fraction of 1% (Corpuz 1997, p. 244; Cullather, 1994, p. 9).
If the colony was neither self-supporting, nor attractive to investment, nor profitable, why did these elites persist on it? As a showcase for American enterprise, the Philippines was hardly ever exemplary. As a base for projecting power, the Philippines had an enduring value for American Empire throughout the 20th century, a role it seems set to reprise in the medium-term future—but this did not seem to be as important for this generation of American imperialists. After reading Kirsch’s account, I suspect that it was aesthetics, not cold political-economic or geopolitical calculations, that motivated Forbes and his ilk: the cultivating the appearance of America being capable of a civilizing mission, as evidenced through the landscape.
The most visible example of keeping up with the viceroys was Baguio: a hill station in the image of British India’s Simla (now Shimla), carved out by the Philippine Commission in 1904 out of the lands of the Ibaloi people in Luzon’s Cordillera Central. To the minds of Forbes et al., a tropical colony must have a hill station, a “Philippine Adirondacks” (p. 91) where the colonials can rehearse their whiteness on the polo grounds and annual retreats. He recruited Burnham, by then renowned for his work on the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, to draw up plans for Manila and Baguio, plans that leaned heavily into “values of order, efficiency, monumentality, and hierarchy” (p. 101). In his capacity as Commissioner of Commerce and Police, Forbes kept pouring state money into Baguio (pp. 106–7), belying his (and his compatriots’) professed beliefs in thrift and private enterprise. Meanwhile, the road kept washing out, and the roadworkers kept dying—from accidents, and from epidemics brought by the Americans.
My read of the folly of these men was that capitalism and empire were the bounds of their limited imagination. They could only recognize possibility only in terms of conquest, “civilization”, and their own presumed superiority. Despite wielding power that is (consciously) the envy of autocrats today, they were creatures of high privilege, and of the narrowmindedness it begets.
Kirsch’s most valuable observations do not call attention to themselves on the page, and only become apparent in comparative and historical context. For instance, many of the hallmarks of modern state territoriality, such as geodetic surveys, taxation, or censuses, were only incompletely implemented under this period of American colonial rule, and in some cases even reverted to less sophisticated forms. The case of the doubled cedula tax and corvee roadwork is one such example, but its significance can only be made apparent when situated within a longer timescale: the Spanish colonial administration operated mainly on tribute well into the late 19th century, and only (incompletely) replaced it with the cedula in 1884 (see Plehn, 1901, p. 691).
Similarly, the significance of the belated establishment of Spanish efforts at forestry, and then the piecemeal American effort that remained incomplete in 1912 (pp. 60–5), only becomes apparent in comparison, e.g. with Siam, where forestry was a crucial impetus for modern state territorialization (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995, pp. 408–12). As with the conspicuous absence of American investment, these aren’t, strictly speaking, points that Kirsch makes, but ones that come to mind in dialogue with other work.
Read in reference to landscapes in the Philippines today, other observations prompt fresh open questions: Is there a line that connects the elitist, hypermasculine coding of recreation shared by Forbes and Burnham (pp. 91–103) to the prevalence of golf courses in present-day Manila and Baguio—including in military properties in the former Camp Murphy, Fort McKinley, and Camp John Hay, and the backfilled moat of Manila’s Intramuros? When the Philippine Commission made roadwork disbursements conditional on provincial boards doubling the cedula (p. 132), and when Forbes threatened the leaders of Ilocos Sur with the termination of public works unless they improved maintenance efforts (p. 141): where do these episodes sit in the global history of policy conditionalities and austerity? Was the American insistence on concrete (p. 9) the origins of utak semento[1] urbanism?
I think Kirsch letting the empirical material speak for itself, and allowing readers the space to form their own questions, reflects the strengths of his method and tight research agenda. I suggest two ideal readers for this book: readers able to situate the well-formed pieces Kirsch offers within their own puzzles, and readers who have come to appreciate the contradictions of American rule in the Philippines as itself an incomplete puzzle. American Colonial Spaces is a welcome addition to a growing literature that speaks to the relative shallowness of both Spanish and American colonial bureaucracies. Along with the many excellent studies Kirsch already cites, I see it as in a long-timescale dialogue with Stephanie Joy Mawson’s Incomplete Conquests (2023), Leia Castañeda Anastacio’s The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State (2016), and Reynaldo Ileto’s essay, Outlines of a Nonlinear Emplotment of Philippine History (1988).
If America’s empire in the Philippines was neither sophisticated nor coherent, could that mean that the ongoing violence and dispossession is at least partly the outcome of an internal colonial project, carried out and refined by an independent, postcolonial, nationalist state? For Filipino nationalists, the implication might be too troublesome to fully confront, and it is more comforting to repeat the refrain that the Philippines was a Spanish colony for 300 years, and an American colony for 50—and let their foibles disappear under this grand, linear sweep.
Perhaps this ceases to be a useful history when some of the wounds on our psyche are, at this point, self-inflicted. Today the too-obvious examples on the landscape are elite enclaves—developed post-independence, by Filipino-nationality firms—with names like Forbes Park (1947) and McKinley Hill (2004); the same class of firms are the key beneficiaries of an ongoing round of dispossession (Cardenas, 2020). Evidently, anticolonial nationalism has not been an effective antidote to coding colonialism as markers of exclusivity and excess—nor to seeing exclusivity and excess, somehow, as desirable. Maybe Forbes et al. were on to something in their insistence on aspirational aesthetics. If so, undoing their legacy could draw inspiration from Toni Cade Bambara: our job is to make revolution irresistible. Failing that, we could at least cultivate disgust at colonial landscapes.
[1] Idiomatic Tagalog: “cement brain”, referring to a widespread preference for concrete as a building material, and for hard infrastructure as policy solutions—even when alternative materials are appropriate, or when the use of concrete exacerbates the underlying problem. Riff on an older idiom, utak pulbura (“gunpowder brain”): trigger-happiness as an affliction of authority.
Works cited
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Castañeda Anastacio , L. (2016). The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State: Imperial Rule and the American Constitutional Tradition in the Philippine Islands, 1898–1935. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Kenneth Cardenas 