Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World by Oliver Charbonneau

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World by Oliver Charbonneau Cesar Suva OLIVER CHARBONNEAU Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 282 pages. Oliver Charbonneau’s Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World is a welcome addition to the relatively sparse literature on US imperial rule in the southern Philippines, an episode in twentieth-century American history that is too often ignored. Charbonneau challenges the still lingering undercurrents of exceptionalism in American imperial histories of this period by taking a “transimperial” lens, which considers the complex interplay between their rule in the southern Philippines and factors on a global scale. Civilizational Imperatives is the first book of the author, who is also a lecturer of American history at the University of Glasgow. This book considers the story of Moros and Americans between 1899 and 1941, backgrounded by a Spanish legacy of overrule stretching back to the seventeenth century. The Muslim locals of the southern Philippines, known as Moros, were also part of a complex and interconnected Islamic world. While many colonial tropes of Moros sought to portray them as untouched by civilization, isolated from the influence of modernity, Charbonneau outlines their extensive transborder kinship and commercial relations with the rest of Southeast Asia. In addition to contending with colonial forays into their world, with reactions ranging from acquiescence to resistance, the Moros were also subject to their own internal shifting power structures, which Americans often misinterpreted as indicative of their lawless and chaotic nature. Charbonneau describes how American imperial exceptionalism centered on a transformative vision of colonial rule. The US adopted the forms and practices of other empires but still felt inherently better equipped to civilize subject peoples. Upon returning from the Philippines in the early 1900s, Hugh Scott, former governor of the Sulu Archipelago, told the attendees of the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of Indians and Other Dependent Peoples in upstate New York that the US was more “altruistic” in their colonial aims than any other colonizing nation in the Orient (40). Americans at this time saw Muslim people in general as a challenge unlike other subject peoples, and the imperialists deemed Moros as being particularly difficult. While the colonizers saw Moros to [End Page 315] be even less civilized than their Christian counterparts to the north, their martial spirit and stubborn independence made them “redeemable” in the American imperialist imagination. This redemption became a centerpiece of the Americans’ self-styled role in the imperial endeavor. Occupation, subjugation, and suppression became necessary tools in the tutelary process, resulting in a tension between pacification and the remaking of Moros in the American image. The reality, however, when taken in the transimperial context that Charbonneau weaves, was that despite the moral fantasy of their occupation the Americans accomplished very little in the four decades that this book covers. After reviewing a short history of the Moros in the introduction, Charbonneau considers how the American imagination regarded Moros in the first chapter, how colonial policies purported to bring about modernity into the Moro region of Mindanao and Sulu in the second chapter, and how education and Westernization sought to render permanent positive change in the third. The fourth chapter examines how American imperialists also saw repression as tutelary, “corrective” violence, and the fifth chapter discusses how the colonizers controlled and shaped the physical environment to draw clear lines between civilized Anglo-Saxon imperialists and uncultured Moro “fanatics.” Chapter 6 considers how the American tutelary mission over the Moros was imprinted into pop culture, and the seventh chapter provides fresh emphasis on the continued interconnectedness of the Moro world with the rest of the globe throughout the forty years of colonial rule. As they began their occupation, Americans imagined the southern Philippines as a conceptual extension of the continental US and their experience with indigenous peoples there. Governors general Leonard Wood, Hugh Scott, and John Pershing all spent the early years of their military careers on the western frontier. John Finley, district governor of Zamboanga, was keen to develop the link between native Americans with Moros, advocating for the study of the western frontier to avoid the same mistakes...