Teachers of the American wars in Cuba and the Philippines have long given much attention to the belligerent rhetoric of politicians, the waging of war by soldiers, and the governing of new territories by armies and their military apparatus. But an essential aspect of war and colonialism that has remained largely in the shadows is the actual “work of empire,” that is, the administration of power over subordinate populations. Justin F. Jackson’s exposure of this lacuna reveals the critical and contested role of “subaltern sovereignty” in these imperial outposts from 1898 to 1913. Such a concept is used to capture the many ways in which subalterns expressed their “sovereignty from below” (13).
Thematically organized into separate sections on knowledge, infrastructure, and bodies, the six chapters (not including the introduction and epilogue) show how the United States tried to dominate subject populations in Cuba and the Philippines, only to have nationals resist imperial prerogatives. The reader learns about Filipino false guides who tipped off insurgents with their coughs or even killed American officers; Cuban cigar workers who disrupted imperial plans by going on strike; and Chinese laborers who often quit rather than suffer the low wages and “managerial chaos” of American rule (210). None of this subaltern recalcitrance came without a cost: Major Littleton W. T. Waller directed his men to murder eleven Filipino cargadores, or carriers of supplies, for allegedly assisting the enemy. In Cienfuegos, women sparked a riot when they denied American soldiers entrance to a brothel.
What comes through clear and bright is that the American empire was thoroughly shaped by the agency of Cubans and Filipinos. Jackson notes that when cargadores refused to carry military equipment for less pay, Americans “had to haul their own equipage; remote garrisons in the interior went weeks without resupply” (104). And when American officials got Filipinos to do the work, the Americans often had to agree to Filipino terms: such was the case in March 1900 when General Elwell Otis paid Filipino workers “exclusively in coin,” rather than the rice that they were usually offered (138). A similar dynamic appeared in Cuba after 1906, when a wide swath of Cuban society “exerted greater control over the island’s politics and economy than they had in 1898” (173).
Stressing the variety of ways that subalterns resisted the occupation of the U.S. Army does not change the outcome, but it does underscore how contested the empire turned out to be. Jackson shows that the operation of empire on the ground was, compared to the grand declarations of politicians and overconfident assertions of generals, a much less certain, more conflictual affair. American prerogatives were challenged at every turn, and the objectives of the military resisted and, at times, thwarted.
One strength of The Work of Empire is that it includes the experience of subaltern women in Cuba and the Philippines. Here, for example, we learn of the different types of women: tenderas, women who ran small shops or stalls; lavenderas, who washed soldiers’ laundry; clandestinas, who were involved in illegal sex work; and queridas, who engaged in longer-term relationships with soldiers. But as their varied experience is described in rich detail and set alongside the army’s attempt to control the sexual behavior of soldiers, the concept of subaltern sovereignty reaches its limit. Are soldiers subaltern as well? Even if soldiers were not sovereign (in a strict military sense), their subaltern experience is so dissimilar to that of the women whom they depended on that it calls for a different term: perhaps personal liberty.
But this suggestion is to quibble with a fine book. Jackson has produced a work that bears the stamp of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault but does not get lost in the theoretical fog that has stymied other scholars. Instead, he grounds his insights in an impressively deep archival source base that includes Cuba, the Philippines, and over a dozen American states. His conclusions—addressed across fields such as military history, labor history, colonial studies, and gender and sexuality—are compelling.
The Work of Empire should reorient the teaching of America’s wars in Cuba and the Philippines the way that Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire (1963) and Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood (1998) have done. Just as scholars came to see the extension of American power in the Pacific as chiefly an effort to access China’s market and later understood the expression of jingoism as an assertion of masculine character, they may now see the thick web of labor dependence that tied the United States to subalterns in Cuba and the Philippines. This is admittedly high praise, but it is not undeserved, for what Jackson has accomplished merits the attention of not just specialists in the Gilded Age or their graduate students, but of advanced undergraduates and the informed public.
