International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States wrested the Philippines from Spain and engaged in a short, bloody war against Filipino forces fighting for the archipelago’s right to self-rule. In an equally important but often ignored phase of the pacification, the U.S. then launched a protracted and largely covert campaign using police and paramilitary to defeat Filipino nationalism from within. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy explores the mechanisms and long-lasting effects of this final, sub rosa stage in the United States’ occupation of the islands. Prodigiously researched and superbly narrated, this book will unfold a truly transnational history, one with profound ramifications for the understanding of both the Philippines and the United States.

McCoy shows how in the Philippines the U.S. colonial regime, unhindered by Constitutional constraints to state power, devised new techniques for silencing radicals, cultivating pliant elites, and controlling the press. Exploiting an array of emerging technologies—telegraph, telephone, typewriter, photograph, numbered file, and more—officials of the U.S. state used their extraordinary powers to censor public discourse and penetrate private space for political advantage. Information potentially damaging to opponents or favorites was deftly gathered, efficiently archived, and selectively shared or discreetly withheld. Moreover, in strengthening prohibitions on gambling, opium smoking, and prostitution, the colonial administration effectively oiled the machinery of scandal on which its power depended. This criminalization of personal vice created, at the same time, an unintended side effect: a thriving underground economy that encouraged corruption by police and politicians. The result, for the Philippines, was a government undergirded by a deeply entrenched network of clandestine services and criminal syndicates, the mastery of which has proved the measure of every Philippine leader since.

But the effects of this colonial experiment, McCoy shows, were not limited to the Philippines. At this remote outpost of empire, the U.S. developed techniques prohibited, at that time, within the United States—practices that would soon, however, seep into the metropole itself, when public anxiety attending World War I loosened constraints upon the state and permitted it to surveil its own population, with a particular focus on ethnic communities. McCoy reveals how, midst the tensions surrounding America’s ill-prepared entry into that war, a small cadre of colonial police veterans drew upon their experience in the Philippines for both broad precedents and specific policies. Bringing home an array of methods perfected in America’s early pursuit of empire, they helped found new federal agencies for foreign espionage as well as domestic counterintelligence. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from systemic surveillance of German-Americans in World War I, to intimidation of labor activists in the interwar period, through mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II, to secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. Refined over the decades in response to challenges from enemies real or perceived, this institutional outcome of our imperial past persists, finding its latest articulations in American efforts to defeat terrorism. McCoy offers us a methodologically original, analytically rich study of major importance.