In recent years there has been renewed interest in the subject of the United States as an “empire,” and an increasing historiographical canon is building up on the US experiment with overseas empire in the Philippines. In the introduction to his book Blood of Government, Paul Kramer promises a “transnational history of race and empire” (2). Taking race as his central theme, Kramer explores the role that racial constructions and ideologies played in the consolidation of American power, defining race as a necessarily complex entity: “a dynamic, contextual, contested and contingent field of power” (2). Kramer's exploration of this problem in colonialism includes the internal divisions and contests within Filipino culture that historians often overlook, and how US colonialists utilized such rifts. Kramer rejects the claims of US exceptionalism in colonialism and contextualizes it within European models. He sees US colonialism in the Philippines as the product of local, European and American influences, and illustrates how it affected both sides of the Pacific.

Blood of Government is a factually dense volume, divided into six chapters covering distinct themes, which are organized in a roughly chronological progression. Kramer's first chapter depicts the Philippines as a country that was “twice-colonized,” and emphasizes the often underplayed importance of the Spanish colonial experience in informing the American era (28). The following chapters covering the Philippine–American War and the formation of US civil government in the archipelago follow more familiar ground. Kramer portrays the Philippine–American conflict as a “race war” (28). In a similar vein, he describes the setting up of a US-run civil government as a racially defined state distinguished by “collaborative colonialism” and “inclusionary racism,” which capitalized upon the existing divisions within Filipino society (191). Chapter 4 focusses on the role of race at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, a subject Robert Rydell raised in All the World's a Fair (1984). In greater depth, Kramer looks at the unintended two-way cultural and ideological exchanges that resulted from the exposition's Filipino village. Chapter 5 analyses how, in the face of growing Filipino nationalism, US colonialists used race to question the capacity of the Filipinos for further self-government in the period running up to the opening of the Philippine Assembly in 1907. In the final chapter, Kramer covers a much wider time period, from the debates over Democratic policies that initiated the first definitive promise of future independence in the Jones Act of 1916, to the early 1930s. Of particular note here is Kramer's discussion of how nativism in the US played a vital role in securing Philippine independence, through a determination to keep Filipino immigrants out of the United States.

Kramer's book is the result of not only a re-evaluation of the existing historiography, but also of original multi-archival primary research in both English- and Spanish-language source materials. His resulting transnational history of race and empire has given an important work not only to the field of Philippine–American studies, but also to the studies of race and imperialism in general.