169. Freedom Fighters Betrayed: Colonising the Philippines
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durinpool. And we are in the middle of an incredible run with Daniel Imavar 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, a WTF moment on every other page.

Yeah. True that, 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 for the first time. 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 the extraordinary story of Teddy Roosevelt.

climbing Cuban hills and leading charges during lunch breaks. On his 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 was

seems to change entirely and become sort of a codified attitude to the world. Yeah, so basically, this is not the first time the United States has expanded. But for a lot of people, for the United States to take a number of populated and populous 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 a 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. It's flagged by law.

It changes when the shape of the country changes. New stars are added. What other flag has expansion just built vexillologically in to the country? Like, of course it's going to grow. We can accommodate. It's very interesting, 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 continued.

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 infence 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 two. 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 Britain...

British Empire is ruling India, that people are completely unembarrassed about that. 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

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. 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 racists 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. I mean, 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-Anglo-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 peoples who need to learn it from the ones who are great. And so it's a kind of handbook, not just for navigating the

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. That's right. Of course. I mean, you know, we're kind of almost doing a favor to these people. Not almost, absolutely explicit that 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.

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 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 third base. And then you 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 would 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.

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? It 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 country?

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 that's making America 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 doesn't know. 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 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, you know, 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 had 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 going on.

That's three quarters one. That's exactly right. And even when the United States enters, it's not entering alone. It provides useful force, but it's not the only one doing so. And so even after the United States has, quote unquote, won the Philippines from the Spanish, all the US 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 you can't remain in limbo. And I don't suppose the people of the Philippines like this kind of bizarre limbo that's running. So what happens then? What are the relations, first of all, between the Filipinos and the troops?

On the one hand, segregated because they're literally kept apart in separate spaces. The troops are, of course, going crazy in the way that 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 have 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 Philippines.

and respects the role of the United States in ushering the Philippines to independence. Yeah, thanks for your help. Thanks for your 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 the

in that pencil sketch that we have of a revolutionary leader. Yeah. So the thing about the

leaders of the Philippine Revolution is they're shockingly young. So the Philippines has been fighting Spain for a while. Sorry, the Filipinos have been fighting Spain for a while. Aguinaldo's only about 30, isn't he? He's 29. Yeah, in 1898. 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's

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 their particular life expectancies about people who fought the 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 a difference. He never learns to speak English because he's so young. He lives to 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 Aguinaldo.

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 its 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'd 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 mock battle. Yeah. Is this like my kids playing Jedi Knights when they hit each other's...

lightsabers but don't quite actually hit them. Is that what we're talking about? 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 there are 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, he uses the N-word. He's willing to surrender to white people, but never to the N-word. Yeah, exactly right. So it's this weird moment where 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 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, vital army around me that have sacrificed everything and 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, you know, remind everyone, we fought this together, right? This was... Yeah, with his red, white, and blue flag. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. Okay, but 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 to this very uneasy sort of standoff. Is he in Manila? Is he publicly available? Or is he worried that he might be arrested? Has 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 US seizes Manila,

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 officers 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 zone. 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 a scarlet pimpernel 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 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 US Army might be 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 Manila, 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 into, melting down church bells to make bullets. This has a bit of an echo of Toussaint Louverture 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 US generals, what they all say at the start of the war in 1899 is the populace is with Aguinaldo. We are fighting the whole country. However, the hope from the US 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. Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.

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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 wanted 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? Yeah.

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 moved 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, right?

colonial revenge attacks and brutal guerrilla warfare. Do they justify sort of burning villages men find one way and then women and children on 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 my Lai 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 re-concentration strategy. And there's torture, isn't it? There's torture of individuals. Where is that rebel? 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 US history. One of the ways that the US 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

deaths take place? Yeah, we do. There's a guy called Kenda Beauvoir who did the closest study we have. The US Army has a number of something like 15,000 combat deaths on the other side. Everyone agrees that that number is laughably small, partly 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 Filipinos died. That's just an extraordinary number. It's a shocking number. Astonishingly high amount. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it does accord with some contemporary estimates from US 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 US Civil War.

But we don't know about it. Right. Yeah. Right. We just don't know 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. Yeah. 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 US Civil War is seen as absolutely central and pivotal to US 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 books or certainly in American minds, is in 1901, the Ballengiga

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 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 US forces have already detained a number of ostensible rebels there.

And just the civilian population attacks an army camp in Balangiga. This is called, from the US 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, right?

But in US memory, this is the 9-11 of the 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 bearing arms and actual hostilities against the United States. He said this replied to anyone over, wait for it, 10 years old. That's right. So the order becomes kill all males over, you can even say men, kill all males over the age of 10 in Samar. It must be made into a howling wilderness. Right.

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. US power is limited. A lot of Filipinos die from disease, not from outright massacre. 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 US 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 interfere with his further usefulness. This is like Amritsar, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The kind of non-response to a major massacre. Yeah. Too bad he stepped over the line a little bit because he was a great general. But with Amritsar, if you're joining, and I see the dots and they are

Tempting. Amritsar was the touch paper for a wholesale rejection of British rule and it sort of started off the whole, you know, kick them 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 US 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 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? In 1901? 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

after Roosevelt has declared it over. And it's really hard to know exactly when to call it, but US 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 sometimes that does happen as well, or you 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. Crags 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 comes.

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 large 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 when 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 a 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, 1946? Yeah, until 1946. And by the 1940s, we have, you know, Philippines become salient again because it's involved in World War II. And we have all these accounts of US 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 colonized us. And the soldiers are like, what are you talking about? Right.

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. mainland during the period of colonization, but it is also marginalized.

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 school book from 1900, the Philippines is on the map. Puerto Rico is on the map. Hawaii is on the map.

And then by about 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...

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

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 US 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 US territories, annexing them to the United States, running the US flag up the pole. And that seems to be the dominant pattern.

for US 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 I mean, 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 US colony until the 1940s. Puerto Rico is still a US 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 state-turned 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 it to be one. Daniel, I'm

I just was blown away by your book, How to Hide an Empire, A Short History of the Great United States by Daniel Imavar is available in paperback. Go get it. It is a spectacular read. It's one, Alicia 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 an 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 has 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.

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 listening, 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, one may say, empire building. Empires of the mind, 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 Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Turnbull. Music

And there you have it. Dr Al Bamawe is not responsible for the death of Lord Harmsen. British Podcast Award nominee for best new podcast. We simply must ask ourselves who planted the idea in Lord Harmsen's head that he was stung by a bee.

Who was in the hospital garden that very morning to do so and who was sleeping with his wife? British Podcast Award nominee for Best Fiction. Dr Sir Michael Winstanley. British Podcast Award nominee for the Listener's Choice Award. Officers, take Dr Sir Michael away. Show him to his cell.

He can do with a lie down. He's been a busy little bee. Oh, please. Okay. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What? It wasn't recording. Oh, what? Stupid, stupid mic. Everything okay? No. Why not? The adventure didn't record. We only have the end. But that was the best adventure yet. Yeah, I know that.

From Goalhanger. The breakneck series Gen Z is hooked on, says the Times. Oh, OK. Got it. Let me hold your weight. OK, I'm going to do No Cup November, so I might be a little heavier than usual. Shut up and get on with it. Very funny, mildly sweary and hugely popular, says the Guardian. OK, OK. I'm on. Excellent. All right. Not that bad. Not at all.

Sherlock & Co. The Adventure of the Red Circle begins Tuesday the 20th of August. Catch up with the show now wherever you get your podcasts.