Civilizational Imperatives

In Civilizational Imperatives, Oliver Charbonneau reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism.

Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, Charbonneau argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for US military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to US settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange—accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike—gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character.

Civilizational Imperatives is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.

Oliver Charbonneau is Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow. Follow him on X @olaferr.

Oliver Charbonneau offers a valuable distillation of the U.S. encounter, if that is the right word, with the Southern Philippines and its then-majority Muslim population. The book evokes the sense of a period that was hardly one of reluctant trusteeship, but rather of muscular Christianity backed up by all the weapons at the undeclared empire's disposal.

Civilizational Imperatives is a welcome addition to the relatively sparse literature on U.S. imperial rule in the southern Philippines, an episode in twentieth-century American history that is too often ignored. A well-crafted reconsideration of the exceptionalism that often still characterizes histories of U.S. imperialism.

Civilizational Imperatives is a much-needed work that contributes to the fields of U.S. empire, U.S. foreign relations, Southeast Asian Studies, and religious studies. The attention to the transimperial is long awaited, and anyone interested in the longer genealogical history of U.S.-Muslim relations and the "war on terror" should read this book.

Civilizational Imperatives is one of the most compelling accounts of the US colonization of Moro peoples. It is a vital contribution to our understanding of the authoritarian pretentions and practical limits of the US empire and is especially prescient in its study of the first Muslim polity that Americans sought to control.

Patricio N. Abinales, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, author of Orthodoxy and History in the Muslim-Mindanao Narrative:

Oliver Charbonneau has crafted the most comprehensive study so far of the American colonial experience among the Muslims in the southern Philippine island of Mindano.

Christopher Capozzola, MIT, author of Bound by War:

Civilizational Imperatives is the best book that has ever been written about the Southern Philippines. Charbonneau brings a nuanced local knowledge of geography, language, culture, and religion to help us understand the region and its Muslim residents, while also connecting that story to big themes in Asian, Pacific, and world history.