There has been an outpouring of excellent scholarship on the history of race and U.S. Empire in recent years, but far less on how the building of the actual structures of empire tied into the process of colonization. Making connections between constructed environments, capitalism, and colonial state-building, Rebecca McKenna's American Imperial Pastoral brings together multiple historiographical strands to argue that the creation of a natural and built landscape in Baguio was indelibly linked to the political, economic, and cultural history of U.S. Empire in the Philippines. Her work highlights the ways in which the building of a U.S. hill station naturalized the processes of empire, even as it critically reshaped the economic and political landscape of the Cordillera.

American Imperial Pastoral revolves around the crucial steps required to construct Baguio as a locus on colonial power: the appropriations of land and labor; the creation of markets and marketplaces; and the building of social and cultural capital, represented in colonial bungalows, and the Baguio Country Club and golf course. In telling the story of these processes, McKenna's work “renders visible the work of capital and subject formation through enclosure” (7). These political, economic, social, and cultural processes transformed Baguio's pastureland into a landscape defined by the American imperial pastoral ideal (3).

In laying plans to create Baguio as a colonial retreat, McKenna notes that American officials were drawing on not only the precedent of British and French imperial hill stations, but also Spanish proposals for the area. The cooler climate of the area seemed to mark it as an ideal spot for a sanitarium, providing a regenerative experience for white Americans undone by the tropical environment of the islands. McKenna notes that the colonial government justified distinguishing Benguet Province from the rest of the country by arguing that the Igorot (the Spanish and then American term for the peoples inhabiting the mountainous Cordillera region of the Philippines) needed protection from Christian Filipinos. This focus on protecting Igorots, as well as the tendency to depict them as a natural feature of the colonial pastoral, rendered invisible the dispossessions inherent in the American creation of Baguio as a colonial retreat. Despite the efforts of some Igorots to claim land that they had held by custom and occupation, and even despite Mateo's Cariño's successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the colonial state did not recognize Igorot land rights without legal title, leaving it free to seize substantial pasturelands upon which the hill station would be built.

In addition to building Baguio itself, the colonial government had to construct an expensive and controversial road to the hill station. Proponents of road-building argued that infrastructure projects would help to pacify the islands and to teach the dignity of free labor. As McKenna demonstrates, however, in the end projects like the Baguio road contributed the construction of racial difference in empire, imposed new taxes and forced labor on Igorots, and took advantage of the dislocations of war to secure workers. Brigandage, vagrancy, and even forestry laws aimed at ending the revolution and solidifying the control of the colonial state, also functioned to create a large labor pool forced by necessity to seek wage labor (68–70).

As was the case with road-building, American colonial officials argued that the cultivation of markets, and the physical construction of marketplaces, would help to inculcate a capitalism that would free Igorot merchants from middlemen and foster democratic growth. In reality, McKenna demonstrates that marketplaces were also sites of regulation and control. Colonial officials controlled what was sold and how, and laid down standards of sanitation and hygiene in public markets. Rather than teaching the liberationist influence of the market, then, supervised sites of commerce could be used to “exploit difference and entrench divisions among Philippine peoples and between colonialists and colonized, too” (113).

At the same time, Baguio marketplaces were integrated into the American imperial pastoral, part of the commodification of landscape that drew tourists to the hill station. McKenna describes how Americans eagerly consumed views of the Igorots and the dog market along with sights of natural beauty. The bungalows and wooded trails, the Igorots and golf greens, all functioned to naturalize and reinforce American power, while simultaneously providing both retreat and entertainment. Baguio appealed to Americans, McKenna argues, because of its “peculiar and ultimately reassuring marriage of the refined and the primitive, the familiar and the strange, the domestic and the foreign” (144).

The Baguio Country Club and Topside, William Cameron Forbes's residence, represented the pinnacle of both the imperial pastoral and colonial power. Both drew on British and American imperial traditions as refuges from colonial life. Topside, however, also functioned as a model and lure for potential Filipino collaborators. Forbes used his home to entice Filipino politicians to buy into both the idea of Baguio and the U.S. regime at large. This attempt to build patron-client relationships was a mixed success, however. As McKenna notes, it was possible for politicians like Sergio Osmeña to promise limited cooperation, and yet work to constrain the power of the Governor-General and Philippine Commission in favor of the elected Philippine Assembly (169–70).

American Imperial Pastoral provides an excellent window on the way U.S. colonialism was constructed in Baguio and in the country more generally, connecting specific instances of land dispossession, infrastructure building, and landscape-making to European imperial precedents and to the Philippines as a whole. It is unfortunate that McKenna did not devote more space to the American Teachers' Camp or to the public schools for Igorot children, which pioneered approaches to vocational education; but given the breadth of her research and focus, this omission is not surprising. It would also have been interesting to hear more about ways in which Igorots and Christian Filipinos resisted and shaped the imperial pastoral, perhaps especially in the marketplace or other sites of colonial power. It is possible such records simply do not exist, of course, but it would have been fascinating to hear more about how Igorots, for example, understood and navigated their experiences selling photographs of themselves to white tourists or as caddies at the country club golf course.

Overall, however, McKenna has written a strong and well-theorized account connecting capitalism, colonial state-building, and the physical structures of power. Her book is both a unique story of Baguio's cooption, and its literal and figurative use by the colonial state; and a broader vision of the construction and consequences of empire. Her epilogue, which ties the failures of the colonial government's stated economic and political goals to the persistence of inequality in the islands and to the large-scale exportation of labor that this inequality begat, provides a helpful frame for the work as a whole (178–79). The complex legacy of American colonial rule continues to reverberate in the Philippines today, and indeed in the diasporic communities created as a result of the dislocations of empire.