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''This article was originally published on [http://videri.org/index.php?title=A_War_of_Frontier_and_Empire:_The_Philippine-American_War,_1899-1902| Videri.org] and is republished here with their permission.''
David Silbey's <i>A War of Frontier Empire" </i> is a narrative history of the complexity and shifting definitions of the war between the U.S. and the Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Silbey weaves the threads of impact together, arguing that for the U.S., “It was a war that brought together the dominant American experience….the chaotic and defining expansion westward, with a new…and uncomfortable imperial ambition” (xiii). For the Philippines, the war resulted in a culturally and socially fractured collection of islands becoming a “self-conceived nation” via a shared experience of revolution, war and insurgency. Yet Silbey is careful to not label the conflict as just an insurgency, or a larger war, or just a revolution. Rather, he describes three distinct conflicts each with their own characterization and description. The first was the war between the Spanish and the allied U.S. and Filipino forces. The second was a conventional war between the U.S. Army and Navy and the Philippine Republic’s Army of Liberation. The third was a guerilla war fought between the U.S. forces and insurgent and disparate alliances of groups broken off from the Army of Liberation and elsewhere.
Organized into six chapters, Silbey first traces the Spanish history of the Philippines, noting the influence of Catholicism and Spanish legal codes on the native people, as well as the distinct social structure and multiple languages that were in place. At the same time, the U.S. was beginning to conceive of itself as a naval and imperial power (influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book) that coincided with their vision of exceptionalism and frontier acquisition. The election of the first “imperial president” William McKinley capped this self-conceived trajectory and influenced the U.S. to declare war on Spain in the Philippines after the Cuban revolution resulted in the explosion of the battleship Maine. The U.S. joined in an uncomfortable alliance with Emilio Aguinaldo, the self-proclaimed governor, who was interested in enacting an elite republic and not a democracy. Ultimately, the McKinley administration decided after they defeated the Spanish at Manila Bay that they simply had to take control, which led to war with Aguinaldo’s forces. Silbey details the outbreak of war on February 4th, 1899 between the two sides, pointing to several reasons why that date was significant, including how soldiers in the Army of Liberation conceived of their military duties as defined by loose and shifting loyalties to superiors.
