Disaggregating Progressive Counterinsurgency

Edgerton's American Datu disaggregates the US colonial project in the Muslim Philippines by parsing counterinsurgency. While American military governors shared a common background as Indian fighters and advocates of progressive governance, they utilized distinct tactics in imposing order. Modes of pacification had implications well beyond the battlefield. Indeed, this book raises numerous questions about how coherent “progressive” colonial rule in the Muslim south actually was.Footnote ³ Provincial governors Leonard Wood (1903–6), Tasker Bliss (1906–9), and John J. Pershing (1909–13) encapsulated a spectrum of colonial praxis that ranged from highly invasive direct rule to a far lighter touch. Commitments to progressive agendas mattered far less than individual proclivities and geopolitical realities. Whereas Wood proved too controlling and Bliss too aloof, Pershing combined aspects of direct and indirect rule to strike a more effective administrative balance. Pershing had few compunctions about using violence against recalcitrant natives; yet, once the state had established its supremacy through military force, locals could pursue cultural and religious traditions free of overbearing colonial regulation. Collaborating elites could rule their own followings, provided they did not stray beyond exogenously imposed sociopolitical bounds. For Edgerton, armed conflicts across Moro Province were triggered by an inability to maintain a consistent commitment to indirect pacification. Instead, oscillations between direct and indirect counterinsurgency tactics led to cycles of rebellion and conciliation.

As military commander around Lake Lanao in 1902–3, Pershing incorporated himself into indigenous political structures, effectively becoming a supralocal datu. Edgerton stresses that the primary initiative for Pershing's localization came from Maranao Moros themselves (pp. 42–43). Lanao's loose confederation of autonomous strongmen encouraged colonial agents on the ground to adopt divide-and-rule policies. However, local datus refused to cooperate in such schemes if Americans acted like arrogant outsiders, refusing to consider local cultural norms. By taking part in indigenous rituals and practices, such as bicharas (informal conferences), where Moros aired grievances and sought redress, Pershing tamped down on armed resistance at the expense of pursuing progressive social reform. He could not have done so unless local datus felt his politico-cultural incorporation would redistribute power in their favor. Datu Amai Manibilang directed American violence against his rivals in order to expand his power into heretofore hostile areas (p. 77). He enhanced his prestige in the lake country by positioning himself as an intermediary between Pershing and other local chieftains. Colonial power rendered significant profits to pro-American indigenous elites.

It is a well-known platitude that Leonard Wood had no patience for coddling natives. Edgerton presents Wood as a colonial ruler committed to revolutionary change. Wood viewed Moro political and cultural traditions as little more than atavistic displays of savagery that hindered their forced march into civilization. Social reform took precedence over social order. Slavery was marked as a most nefarious practice and slated for immediate abolition. Such brash interventions in Muslim lifeways sparked immediate armed resistance, particularly across the Sulu archipelago, where systems of bondage undergirded Tausug social hierarchies to a greater extent than in Cotabato or Lanao (p. 133).

Nevertheless, astute elites continued to benefit from Wood's paroxysmal violence. Datu Piang of Cotabato used Wood's hard-line policy to take out his main political rival, Datu Ali, and assert the dominance of coastal commercial interests over resource-rich hinterlands. In turn, the massacre on Bud Dajo in 1906 annihilated the disloyal followers of Jolo datus and ensured that those who remained knew their place (p. 163). Edgerton argues that Wood was essentially duped into serving the interests of factional groupings, inadvertently increasing the power of some datus while eliminating others. This conclusion offers only a partial explanation. However destructive the American colonial state could be, it was administratively anemic. Indigenous elites had to fill power vacuums created by punitive expeditions for economies to function. Compliant datus familiar with sociopolitical landscapes were also essential agents in maintaining social order. No matter how many unruly datus Wood killed, he allowed loyal elites to consolidate their client networks and pursue opportunities for enrichment.

Aggressive combat operations were scaled back under governor Tasker Bliss. Military commanders came to view resistance as a law and order problem best left to lightly armed Constabulary units rather than lumbering regular army forces laden with heavy weaponry. Conflicts continued, but at a reduced scale. In addition, datus viewed Bliss as a check on efforts by Christian Filipino politicians to fully integrate the Muslim south into the rest of the Philippine archipelago. In addition, Bliss kept American planter interests at bay, thus preventing the dispossession of indigenous communities on Mindanao (pp. 169–70). Such conciliatory actions thinned out the colonial state's presence on the ground and allowed local strongmen to recoup their autonomy.

Pershing, by contrast, hybridized direct and indirect forms of counterinsurgency. He deepened modernizing initiatives throughout Moro Province while increasing the role of Muslims in state agencies, particularly its coercive and administrative institutions. The political system remained the preserve of loyalist elites as datus made inroads into district deputy governorships.Footnote ⁴ Muslims from leading families enlisted in Moro Scout and Constabulary units. Martial races trained in acts of regimented violence were hurled against defiant bands wedded to outmoded traditions (pp. 229–30). Pershing's disarmament campaign, initiated in 1911, triggered extensive disorder. However, it concurrently consolidated the power of pro-American datus allowed to retain their arms in exchange for disarming their followings. Pershing knew both his time and resources were limited. National and metropolitan pressures to return Moro Province to civilian rule ensured a steady drawdown of American personnel. This opened larger politico-military spaces to Muslim participation. Under Pershing, the colonial state encouraged Moros to pacify themselves.

Edgerton places refractory insurgents and supine collaborators at opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Between these two minorities stood a large majority attempting to manipulate fluctuating colonial policies to their best advantage (p. 243). The American intrusion did not eliminate traditional factional rivalries. Foreign rule only made the stakes much higher. Patron-client groups able to maneuver onto the right side of colonial violence reaped substantial rewards. By 1913, there were far fewer datus, but those who remained possessed sizeable resources and greater security of tenure than ever before. For both Moros and Americans, colonial rule was a learning process that eventually achieved a rough equilibrium of give-and-take, coercion, and co-optation.

Edgerton's well-researched study provides invaluable detail on colonial state formation at the ground level. Regardless of ideological intentions, empires are often built from the bottom up through painstaking processes of negotiations and force. Indigenous elites acted as gatekeepers to people and resources. Without their cooperation, very little could be accomplished. Pershing's Philippine career is thus very much a classic exercise in administering overseas metropolitan colonies. Edgerton rightly marginalizes the importance of frontier expansion across the continental United States as a blueprint for governing Moros. White settlement in a remote Pacific holding may have seized the colonial imaginary at times, but it never resulted in a white deluge that overwhelmed indigenous peoples. Veteran of the Plains Wars had to learn very different lessons when dealing with native communities they sought to control rather than replace.Footnote ⁵

Far more problematic is Edgerton's attempt to write the Moro experience into contemporary US counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. He views Pershing as practicing a type of full-spectrum COIN. Full-spectrum COIN argues that military forces occupying hostile territories must operate more like state builders than war fighters. While containing insurgencies, soldiers should also train indigenous security forces, provide basic service delivery, encourage good governance, and facilitate economic development (p. 247). Once host populations view exogenously constructed governments as providers of security and development, they will withdraw their support from guerilla bands and insurgencies will wane. The US military has made numerous attempts to apply this clear, hold, and build strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, with very mixed results. While facing down Moros more than a century ago, Pershing came to understand that there was only so much soldiers could do. Operating in a context of limited time and resources, American forces in Moroland cleared and held territory effectively enough to negotiate with insurgents from a position of strength. Military commanders then handed off the job of building a civil society and infrastructure to civilian administrators. Pershing, in effect, did less better while avoiding overambitious and open-ended nation building.

American soldier-administrators certainly learned from one another within Moro Province for the duration of their rule; however, it is unclear whether present-day commanders can apply lessons from the Muslim Philippines to current insurgencies. US military technology, training, and force structures have undergone such fundamental transformations since the early twentieth century that it would be difficult to compare America's Moro wars with its war on terror. The military's ability to surveil and deliver lethality has increased exponentially. This gives US war fighters extensive reach. Although, such high technology does not guarantee the ability to pacify insurgent groups that are far more mobile and globally connected than rebellious datus ever were. Afghanistan and Iraq are also subject to deep sectarian divisions that did not apply to the Muslim Philippines. Furthermore, military commanders in Moro Province cultivated pro-American elites that proved far more durable and able to control client groups than their Iraqi counterparts. Loyal datus looked to Manila for patronage and protection, while present-day Afghan warlords are virtually autonomous local kings that must be accommodated by capital elites when they hope to get anything done.Footnote ⁶ Perhaps Pershing's experience should not be read as an example of how to prosecute counterinsurgencies, but as an indicator of how much times and circumstances have changed.

Disaggregating the Metropolitan Gaze

Michael Hawkins's Semi-Civilized shifts the locus of colonial disaggregation to metropolitan displays during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri. Exposition organizers viewed the event as an advance in imperial epistemology. Rather than classifying the world's inhabitants into fixed racial hierarchies that placed Anglo-Saxon colonizers atop a totem of gradually degenerating civilizations, the fair ascribed civilizational gradations according to behavioral norms and economic pursuits. Tutelary colonialism was therefore justified because it inculcated appropriate correctives to indigenous lifeways and advanced inferior peoples up civilizational scales (pp. 2–3). At the same time, profit motives undermined the exposition's grandiose narrative. Promoters made sure some degree of primordial savagery would be on display as fairgoers were intrigued and attracted by dangerous natives from far-off exotic locales. Such lurid packaging proved self-defeating in certain respects. Benighted lands gripped by barbarism dissuaded American investment and settlers. In addition, Filipino nationalist politicians condemned live exhibits that questioned their capacity for self-government. If anything, the St. Louis fair only hardened distinctions between Christian and non-Christian Filipinos, with the former viewing the latter as little more than backward minorities disconnected from the archipelago's dominant culture.

The exposition's Philippine Village presented a continuum of indigenous racial categories ranging from headhunting tribes of the northern Cordillera to smartly attired and well-drilled native Scouts and Constables. Hawkins places his work among broader historiographical revisions that question pervasive Orientalist tropes that were ostensibly accepted across metropolitan societies. Points of contact between colonizer and colonized, whether they occurred in colony or metropole, proved far more contentious, negotiable, and subject to revision (pp. 5–6). Semi-Civilized contends that immediate proximity between Moros and Americans within metropolitan fairgrounds enhanced Muslims’ ability to contest and reconfigure imperial discourses.

Since most Americans never had any direct experience of Moro Province, impressions formed at the exhibit made a much deeper impact. Moros stood between extremes of irredeemable savagery and grotesque indigenous mimicry. Nearly naked Igorot tribesmen stood beyond the pale of civilization for most fairgoers, while Filipinos dressed as modern soldiers breached acceptable racial boundaries by appearing too Western for Anglo-Saxon comfort. Moro mimicry could, by contrast, be tolerated as it demonstrated the potential for further civilizational progress (pp. 14–16, 20). However, such didactic pronouncements resonated far less with fair patrons than nostalgic yearnings for a vanishing American pastoral. Sociocultural homogenization across the continental United States, combined with the emasculating effects of mass urbanization, made for a sense of industrial ennui. Hawkins stresses the importance of place. As a former slave state, Missouri's racial order had undergone severe disruptions during and after the Civil War. Familiar tropes were a comfort to many. A need to conserve the past before it was entirely enveloped by banal mechanization created strange affinities for certain living objects. Moros on display reminded Americans of the rugged frontiersmen from days gone by.

Muslim interests in material accumulation and their competitive spirit during athletic events placed them apart from aboriginal tribes living primitive egalitarian lives. Ultimately, American nostalgia was predicated on perceived native violence. Moro violence negated an overcivilized existence and confirmed the virile martial characteristics fairgoers longed for. Moros must have also appeared as a superior race because of their ability to enslave weaker peoples. It is highly unlikely customers either knew or cared very much about colonial ethnographic inquiries depicting Philippine bondage systems as milder than the chattel slavery practiced in the antebellum American south. The mere fact that Moro datus owned slaves may well have made them more admirable than those they enslaved for some audiences. Muslim polygamy allowed others to indulge guilty pleasures. Forms of cohabitation that were socially proscribed in the West could be openly viewed when placed in an appropriately scientific and educational context (p. 58).

Fair organizers had not intended to impart such lessons to their customers. Nonetheless, patrons spent their money on exhibits that appealed to these desires and consequently had to be obliged. Colonial officials themselves bestowed Moros with numerous superhuman attributes. Their physical stamina, aquatic skills, and ability to take many bullets before succumbing in battle all earned ebullient praise. Samal Moros were awarded numerous medals in recognition of their athletic talents. American observers were ecstatic when Datu Facundo of Zamboanga teamed up with some Lanao sultans to best a group of Igorots in several sporting events (pp. 80–81). Displays of physical strength under a metropolitan gaze surely added to a datu's sense of prowess. As quintessentially Southeast Asian strongmen, Moro elites embraced any opportunity to increase their charisma.

As Americans gazed, Moros looked back. They proved astute observers of metropolitan tastes and desires. Crafting their performances to fit public expectations yielded material and social benefits (p. 20). Throughout the recruitment and exposition process, Philippine Muslims negotiated terms of service, received salaries, pocketed tips, performed odd jobs, and ultimately determined how they interacted with American audiences. The experience of being put on display might have been demeaning for many, but they made the best of it. Within the admittedly tight corners of the Moro village, colonized subjects exercised agency.

Hawkins qualifies Paul Kramer's contention that fair organizers failed to convey their intended narrative of civilizational uplift to audiences (p. 89).Footnote ⁷ In retrospect, the Philippine exhibit may have been little more than a glorified freak show or grotesque human zoo with highbrow pretensions. This, however, was emphatically not the case for Moros, who appropriated and influenced the ways in which stereotypical fairground tropes were interpreted. For Hawkins, the Moro village was a zone of contestation in which the discursive intentions of organizers, audiences, and natives on display intertwined and transmogrified. Moro agency had much to do with the eventual reconfigurations that took place. White audiences further diversified imperial discourses by injecting interpretations and desires that subverted imperial intensions.

This concise and insightful monograph provides readers with an engaging set of arguments questioning the solidity of racial binaries during high colonialism. Hawkins does more than just extend Philippine Muslims’ distinct experience under American rule from colony to metropole. He also diversifies metropolitan impressions of living Moro exhibits. For many fairgoers, Moros were more like Americans than the indigenous communities recently displaced across the continental United States. Muslim grit, violence, ambition, and individualism appealed to audiences who lived in a society that increasingly viewed such aggressive traits with disfavor. Americans projected these characteristics onto Moros within the socially acceptable confines of the fairground.

My only issue with this important work concerns the depth of the fair's impact on ordinary Americans. Without question, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a major event, lasting from April 30 to December 1, 1904, and costing some $15 million to produce. It is doubtful, however, that most fairgoers had any further direct experiences with Moros thereafter. Immediate impressions, whether insurgent or obedient, naturally faded out over time. Thus, their overall effect on imperial discourses could be viewed as ephemeral. This does not however detract from the merits of this study which should be required reading for scholars of race, colonialism, and American imperialism in Southeast Asia.

Divergent Means to Civilizational Ends

In Civilizational Imperatives, Oliver Charbonneau takes a wholistic, and emphatically transnational, perspective on the Moro-American encounter from 1899 to 1942. This monograph centers a remote imperial periphery by making it a crossroads for epistemologies, precedents, and personnel from the mainland United States, insular Southeast Asia, European colonies, and the wider Islamic world. His main argument is that American colonial authorities shared a common vision regarding the need to reconfigure and civilize Philippine Muslim territories. Yet large sections of the colonial community differed as to how civilizational advancement was to be achieved. This basic premise leads to many interesting, if at times debatable, conclusions.

Numerous American colonials, particularly but by no means exclusively soldier-administrators, viewed Mindanao-Sulu as the next great frontier. Prior to the construction of an overseas empire in 1898, native peoples in the continental United States provided white Americans with their primary experience of alien cultures (p. 37). Native communities adhered to sociopolitical and economic systems so distinct from Euro-American settler societies that they could never be fully incorporated into these national communities. Indigenes may well have been the land's original occupiers, but their inability to profitably exploit their patrimony deprived them of their right to it. White settlers, by contrast, knew how to tame the wilderness and make deserts bloom. Natives were not meant to work but to disappear. Progress and civilization depended on dispossession.

Americans tried to implement these deeply embedded ideas and precedents in their newly won Muslim territories. In the end, attempts to transform Moro Province into a white settler colony floundered. Administrative officials failed to attract enough whites to a distant and unruly periphery. At the conclusion of American military rule in 1913, Mindanao-Sulu had a population of 518,695. This total was divided into 324,816 Moros, 103,358 Lumads, and 85,148 Christian Filipinos. Americans, Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese throughout the south only numbered 5,376. Filipinization of the colonial administration after 1913 further decreased the white population and Japanese migrants quickly surpassed the number of Euro-American residents (pp. 179–80). Without the critical mass of settlers required to transform a small white population into a multiclass civil society, Moro Province remained a military-administrative colony ruled by a thin stratum of Americans dependent on native collaboration. However, Christian Filipinos, who shared Euro-American notions of Muslim savagery, internalized and continued previous settler projects (pp. 67–70). Land-hungry agrarian cultivators from the Christian north flooded into Muslim Mindanao hoping for a better life. Sectarian difference further exacerbated settler/indigene animosities.

For Charbonneau, Christian Filipinos picked up where American settlers left off. Whether white or nonwhite, these two settler colonial movements were practically indistinguishable from an indigenous perspective. This argument has much to offer, yet certain distinctions between the two settler movements must be considered. Propagandistic pronouncements aside, the best American administrators could hope for was an ethnic-plantation colony, wherein a white minority seized a majority of the land and worked it with indigenous labor. This would make for a socioeconomic formation more akin to north Sumatra's plantation belt than the American west.Footnote ⁸ Even this came to naught. Military authorities never fully acquiesced to plantation interests advocating extensive land grabs. Unlike white efforts at demographic transformation, Filipino settlement rapidly produced Christian laboring classes. Consequently, the Philippine settler colonial movement's primary articulation was not to indigenous labor but directly to the land. Moros were superfluous to its productive requirements and could be excluded as an uncivilized, if at times exoticized, other. Their main role was to evacuate the land and render it available for exogenous transformation.

More importantly, Americans and Filipinos faced profoundly different spatial realities in the Muslim south. No amount of American colonial imagining could make Moro Province a contiguous part of the continental United States. Disconnection and distance may not have been insurmountable obstacles to territorial incorporation as Hawaiian precedents had shown. Yet disconnection coupled with far more proximate Christian Philippine aspirations for archipelagic integration created too many difficulties. Filipino elites viewed Mindanao as an integral part of their emerging nation-state. In addition to territorial propinquity, relocating Christian cultivators from overcrowded lowland zones to underpopulated frontiers dissipated class tensions. This gave Filipino settlement a momentum and depth simply lacking among white Americans. Furthermore, protracted conflict with Manila over who owned Mindanao would only endanger larger American geostrategic interests in the Asia-Pacific. Efforts at colonial retention by Republican officials could not decisively reverse Christian Philippine dominance in Muslim Mindanao. Other Americans viewed a Christian presence in the south as a spur toward civilization. In their view, Christian socioeconomic lifeways provided positive examples for backward Moros to follow. America's civilizing mission was thus sloughed off to its more advanced colonial subjects.

Americans also attempted to civilize their Muslim charges through the reconfiguration of indigenous knowledge systems. This was primarily attempted in two ways: the imposition of compulsory Western education and the modernization of Islam. Charbonneau moves beyond established accounts of secular education in the Muslim south by uncovering indirect efforts to convert Moros to Christianity through the provision of “Christian” learning and manners (pp. 81–93). Missionaries directing or funding ostensibly secular schools felt that a Westernizing curriculum would gradually lead to Christianization in controlled environments. Such actions belied the purported separation of church and state in an American-ruled territory. Colonial administrators tolerated such infractions due to perennial funding shortages. Pacification and infrastructure took up most of the budget. Financial contributions from missionaries and private donors provided much-needed monetary resources for government programs. Moro elites were therefore justifiably suspicious when it came to secular schooling. Fear of losing their religion kept Muslim attendance low and Christian children made up a majority of the student body in most schools. Although a select number of Moro elites went on to obtain higher degrees and pursue distinguished careers, mass education did not take root in Muslim communities.

Some American officials made considerable efforts at linking Philippine Muslims with global movements striving to modernize Islam. For field commanders, Islam was little more than a heathen faith inspiring rebellion. Others such as Najeeb Saleeby and Charles Cameron, as provincial school superintendents, sought to hybridize secular and religious education. Cameron advocated the use of foreign clerics as instructors at a datu school where elite children would be taught Middle Eastern forms of Islam along with a sense of obedience to secular authority (pp. 191–97). While the provincial legislative council blocked this proposal, others saw merit in using religion to strengthen the state. In 1911, Zamboanga district governor John Park Finley went so far as to invite an Ottoman Palestinian cleric to the Muslim south over the objections of his superiors. Finley felt native clerics and datus espoused a degraded version of the religion which encouraged disorder. A “purer” form of Islam emanating from the faith's core regions made for more compliant subjects and created a sacral order Americans could control. Finlay's proposition was ultimately disavowed. Islam, unlike Christianity, remained separate from the state.

Charbonneau sees little diversity in colonial approaches to repressing resistance. Military commanders met resistance with crushing violence in order to destroy concentrations of autonomous datu power and deter future insurrections (p. 95). Coercive measure never fully pacified Moro Province but were deployed time and again. For Americans, the only language Moros understood was force. This interpretation contradicts Edgerton's contention that the US army was a learning institution able to adjust punitive praxis when facts on the ground necessitated course corrections. Return to civilian rule changed little. The Philippine Constabulary continued dealing out disproportionate violence when it assumed responsibility for peace and order after 1913. According to Charbonneau, there was no appreciable difference between American soldiers and Filipino police troopers. Attempts to distinguish direct counterinsurgency from law enforcement are little more than semantic exercises. Christian Filipinos internalized American punitive procedures and carried them forward. Constant use embedded these repertoires of violence into postcolonial coercive institutions. Dissenting Muslim communities would be met by Philippine military forces indoctrinated into a culture of terror for a long time to come.

The purportedly atavistic practice of juramentado (suicide attacks) was also a product of anxious colonial imaginaries. A highly disruptive colonial transition, rather than primordial native beliefs, drove many Muslims to these desperate acts (p. 101). Rebel datus were viewed as men of prowess leading their followings beyond the reach of an invasive alien state. By portraying Moro Province as an untamed land awash in savagery, American administrators increased their stock with compatriots back home. Only an intrepid few could grapple with such barbarism. Yet behind the romanticism stood stark realities. Disorder in the Muslim south had more to do with counterproductive colonial policies than indigenous cultural characteristics.

Charbonneau's “progressivism at gunpoint” thesis requires certain qualifications. Senior officials pursued different counterinsurgent logics according to shifting contexts. Having ruled with a light hand under the Bates Treaty, Leonard Wood launched aggressive combat operations in order to definitively conquer Muslim polities. This created as many enemies as it destroyed, and Bliss was compelled to relax rule by force. More importantly, Pershing made Muslims essential components of the colonial state's counterinsurgent machinery. Moros engaged with, as much as they attempted to evade, the colonial state. Like refractory datus, American commanders were also seen as men of prowess able to provide protection and resources in uncertain times.Footnote ⁹ Charbonneau does not mention the critical role played by Moro Scout units on Bud Bagsak in 1913 (p. 109).Footnote ¹⁰ Muslims enforcing colonial objectives did accrue benefits and do not seem to have considered that those benefits came at the expense of other Muslims, co-ethnics or otherwise. Some ethnic groups cooperated more than others. Maguindanao and Samal Moros accepted their foreign overlords to a greater extent than their Tausug and Maranao counterparts. Moro divisions were deeper than American ones; colonial interference did not trigger supra-regional mobilizations against it. Exogenous agents encouraged indigenous compliance, and division, by strategic distributions of patronage. The Filipinization of southern Muslim administration after 1913 created an altogether different set of state-society relations in which Moro communities faced deepening dispossession. These reservations aside, Charbonneau provides an interesting analysis of intracolonial contradictions, false starts, and roads not taken.

Composite Colonialisms, Dominant Characteristics

The aforementioned works emphasize disaggregation within, rather than between, specific colonial phases and formations. Colonial regimes were not monolithic entities; all contained divergent objectives, advocated by different interest groups, that gave them a composite quality. Yet, each phase of American colonialism in the Muslim south displayed dominant tendencies and characteristics that overpowered contrarian inclinations.Footnote ¹¹ These characteristics were dominant without being hegemonic, nevertheless they typify the state's primary intentions during particular times.

From 1899 to 1903, the Muslim Philippines was ruled indirectly. Iberian and American political traditions influenced colonial perceptions. However, these imaginings gave way to larger geostrategic calculations. With military forces heavily engaged in a violent war of conquest further north, few resources could be spared for the south. Against their republican inclinations, American agents made treaties with local rulers and governed much as British residents did on the Malay peninsula. Transimperial precedents thus provided valuable lessons for Americans to emulate. Traditional Muslim elites attempted to induct exogenous power into internal struggles for wealth and prestige.Footnote ¹² Imperial associations presented opportunities to either reconfigure or consolidate sociopolitical hierarchies. Slavery, raiding, polygamy, and illicit trade networks essentially continued unimpeded. Such practices endured while greater concerns diverted the colonizers’ attention. American power's southward expansion after 1902 rapidly dissipated these arrangements.

Although the Bates Treaty was not formally abrogated until 1904, Leonard Wood's ascension to the governorship in 1903 marked an acute rupture in colonial praxis. Henceforth, provincial officials allied with compliant Muslims against the defiant. Compliance was rewarded by incorporation into a nominally “modern” state administration. This defiant/compliant dichotomy typified the entirety of military rule (1903–13). Efforts at white settlement, Filipino nationalist encroachment, furtive Christianization, and Islamic modernization occurred. Yet these interest groups could not overturn dominant practices under military government. Datus who acclimated to the American presence during the early Bates era entered the new dispensation at an advantage. After 1903, slaving was no longer acceptable, but loyal datus conducted other forms of illicit commerce with colonial acquiescence in exchange for maintaining order in their respective domains. The state's regulatory mechanisms stymied competitors rather than clients. While this period saw a sharp contraction in elite numbers, compliant datus attained far greater power than previously possible. For all the change it wrought, colonialism operated within an indigenous context of personal rivalries and feuding factions. When manipulated properly, American violence eliminated political opponents and facilitated the coalescence of larger followings. Exogenous rulers offered effective means toward endogenous ends.

Subaltern Muslims extracted benefits without threatening social hierarchies. Service in the colonial army and Constabulary ultimately reinforced loyalist chiefs. In becoming regimented purveyors of legitimate violence, Moro soldiers strengthened the colonial state's armature and decreased autonomous sociopolitical spaces. Western schooling imparted technical skills rather than rhetorical or organizational abilities, making it difficult for ordinary Muslims to articulate anti-elite discourses.

After 1913 the Muslim south fell under several jurisdictions. However, the Department of Mindanao and Sulu (1914–20), the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes (1920–36), and a special commissioner from 1936 onward all worked toward similar structural transformations. Residual missionary and white settler interests remained as peripheral elements of the political landscape. Yet the dominant tendency of this period was the consolidation of a sub-colonial regime directed by Filipino elites for their own, and subaltern Christian settler, benefit. While remaining under US suzerainty, Philippine interest groups carved out their own colonial domains in non-Christian zones.Footnote ¹³ Initially, Mindanao and Sulu operated according to a triangular configuration, in which Americans, Filipinos, and Muslims jockeyed to defend or widen their privileges. Moro elites attempted to retain a greater US presence as a hedge against growing Filipino settler assertion. American officials advocating colonial retention used Filipino persecution of non-Christians as a pretext to maintain more direct imperial oversight. With the passage of time, the American presence receded, leaving Filipinos free to consolidate their supremacy over Muslim territories. State-building projects under military rule had already killed, captured, or disarmed numerous recalcitrant datus. Pro-American datus who utilized American firepower to consolidate followings now deployed their clients as vote banks in support of Manila politicos offering them the best deals. Elites occasionally voiced concern over indigenous displacement but did little of substance to contain it. Territorial dispossession resulted in seething Muslim resentment which exploded in violence against settler communities under Japanese occupation. Nevertheless, settler colonial movements resumed soon after the Pacific War, leading to irreversible demographic transformation in southwestern Mindanao.

Colonial projects in the Muslim Philippines displayed dominance in diversity. Composite interests made for intracolonial contestations, yet predominant characteristics either emerged or held sway for prolonged periods of time. Scholars of the southern Philippines must grapple further with these colonial shifts, the ability of certain tendencies to dominate during specific phases, and the impact various forms of dominance had on indigenous peoples.