Imperial Standards: Colonial Currencies, Racial Capacities, and Economic Knowledge during the Philippine-American War

• Published in: Diplomatic history 2015-09, Vol.39 (4), p.603-628
• Main Author: LUMBA, ALLAN E. S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Colonies & territories; Currencies; Currency; Imperialism; Knowledge; War
• ISSN: 0145-2096; 1467-7709
• DOI: 10.1093/dh/dhu020

Recent historical work has illustrated the importance of the Philippine-American War in the twentieth-century formation of American empire. These studies, however, tend to efface important tensions between political and economic forms of imperialism, seeing capital as merely another instrument of sovereign rule. In response, this article illustrates that wartime imperial encounters in the colonial Philippines from 1898 to 1903 troubled the capacity of American empire to hold authority over the disorder caused by a seemingly autonomous capitalist market. Indeed, the market appeared to the military colonial government as a force that could not only limit American authority, but could also upturn racial and labor hierarchies. Tensions over the market surfaced especially in and through: the fiscal policies of the occupying military government, the mundane daily interactions between Americans and local retailers in the cities, suspicions over foreign banks, and the disbursement of wages to soldiers. As a response to this threatening political and economic disorder, one of the first steps of the American colonial state was to employ publically renowned financial expert, Charles Conant, to institute a new Philippine currency system. Racial capacities of colonial subjects—both ethnically Chinese and “native” Filipinos—to understand the truths of the capitalist market and obey colonial authority consequently shaped Conant’s design for a new currency system.