The US took over the Phillipines after the Spanish American war in 1898.
What did the US gain from owning the Phillipines other than having a forward military base? Surely it must have cost alot to put troops there and build military bases.
Manila was going to be our Hong Kong
After the US Civil War, American industry’s output had reached the same level as the Western European nations. But domestic production outstripped domestic consumption. Industry paid low wages for the largely unskilled labor, performed by waves of immigrants each willing to work for less than the preceding, and who weren’t paid enough to buy what they made. This race to the bottom was part of what caused the Panic of 1893. The answer was to find foreign markets: somewhere that 1. the local industry could not compete, 2. the local government was too weak to impose protective tariffs, 3. There were millions and millions of potential customers. That summed up China in the 1890’s
That and the US wanted a forward military base in the Eastern Pacific. Yes, it costs a lot of money to build and maintain foreign bases around the world, but how else can you provide a quick strike capability to protect our national interests overseas?
So what went wrong? Why didn’t Manila become a vital trade centre between the US and China? And why not use Hawaii for that purpose?
The short answer is that Hong Kong was purpose built to siphon off the wealth of China. Manila was already a big city focused on the Philippine archipelago. The US steamed into read-made naval bases in Subic and Cavite, with our heads swelled up with Alfred Thayer Mahan’s naval-centric philosophy of world domination. But Asia at this time was changing in ways that it hadn’t been when the British put their hands on it almost a century earlier.
The US acquired it’s Asia concession station just as the great days of economically raping China were ending: The Boxer Rebellion, although a big loss for the Chinese, proved to the victors that China needed stabilization if it was going to anything besides a hornets nest. The Chinese Republican revolutionaries knew that we knew this, so they cunningly worked themselves in with the best group positioned to help them: not US congressmen, or US merchants, but US Christian missionaries. As a result, the US pumped more money into China than it ever pulled out.
Eventually, it was expected, China would have its act together as a modern nation somewhat in the American mold, and we’d be shipping in Model Ts and Singer sewing machines by the boatload. And it may have well worked out that way, but Japan wanted in on the good old-fashioned China-raping, and really queered the deal.
The scramble of overseas empires that took place in the nineteenth century is kind of bizarre. There were attempts made to justify building these empires but they really made no sense.
Personally, I feel it was just one of the manias that sweeps through society sometimes. And like most manias, it was self-reinforcing: countries saw other countries seizing colonies and worried if they didn’t join in quickly, they might not have a chance later. So governments sent expeditions out to plant flags wherever possible without any master plan.
Spain, Great Britain and the Netherlands all made huge amounts of money from their empires in the 18th century. It was quite natural for the late comers to think they could do the same.
Our* main reason* was to not let a European power control it.
If we did not annex it, then Germany or Japan certainly would have. And that would mean obstacles to the opening of Asian markets to American goods.
Exactly, and thus a foreign European power blocking access to Asia.
America was different in it’s “Empire Building” since from Day One there were plans to make the Philippines independent.
The Native Americans might disagree. America’s imperial expansion was westward on its own continent.
We had a duty.
That’s not generally considered Imperialism or Colony building.
There were some places that could pay off. If you took over a small island that could produce a high value crop like spices or sugar, you had a combination of minimal overhead and high yield. But other colonies had sizable native populations and required much higher costs to govern and at the same time didn’t have the kind of concentrated wealth that could be easily extracted and sent back to the mother country.
It wasn’t like the nineteenth century imperialists had discovered some new place. Europeans had been sailing around Africa for three hundred years and nobody thought the place was worth conquering. Sure, you could set up trading bases along the coast. But let the local kings run things. They’d pay the expenses for maintaining their kingdoms and you’d just trade for the wealth they produced.
We’ve always told ourselves that we weren’t part of nineteenth century imperial scramble. But compare a map of the United States in 1800 to a map of the United States in 1900. We were just taking a different continent from a different group of natives.
The Philippines (and also lesser Pacific possessions like Guam) were to an extent a side-effect of the US main focus against the remnants of the Spanish empire in the Caribbean. Some in fact wondered about occupying the Philippines: referring to the compensation the US paid Spain, then Speaker of the House Thomas Reed remarked “We are buying 10,000,000 Malays at $2 a head unpicked, and nobody knows what it will cost to pick them”.
But practically, the US had demonstrated that Spain was finished as an imperial power. If the US hadn’t occupied the Philippines, they would have swiftly become a colony of Britain, France, Germany or possibly Japan.
Very good analysis…the fact is, imperialism and colonies didn’t pay off until late in the 19th century. Powers that came late (Imperial Germany, Italy) wound up getting the worst of all worlds-out of the way colonies, with few resources and violent, ungovernable populations. Like German Southwest Africa (now namibia)-the Germans finally resorted to exterminating the local population. Or Italy-they had a worthless chunk of sand called Libya-and missed the giant pool of oil underneath. The fact is, while people like VP Teddy Roosevelt were heel-bent on imperialism, President McKinley later regretted the acquisition of the Philippines. It is much better to secure concessions from the local governments.
It’s rather more complicated than that. Aguinaldo fought with the US against Spain under the understanding that he was fighting for a free Philippines.
You could argue that if the US hadn’t appropriated the Phillipines, some other power would have, but the bulk of the fighting in the Philippines was not between the US and Spain, but between the US and Filipino forces.
The 1911 pistol was adopted by the US as a result of the conflict in the Phillipines.
I hear bagpipes.