The Work of Empire - Books.Infosec.Exchange

Published by The University of North Carolina Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-4696-6032-5

In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.

How was this relatively small and inexperienced army able to wage wars in Cuba and the Philippines and occupy them? American soldiers depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos, both for military operations and civil government. Whether compelled to labor for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos, suspended between civilian and soldier status, enabled the making of a new US overseas empire by interpreting, guiding, building, selling sex, and many other kinds of work for American troops. In …

In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.

How was this relatively small and inexperienced army able to wage wars in Cuba and the Philippines and occupy them? American soldiers depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos, both for military operations and civil government. Whether compelled to labor for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos, suspended between civilian and soldier status, enabled the making of a new US overseas empire by interpreting, guiding, building, selling sex, and many other kinds of work for American troops. In The Work of Empire, Justin Jackson reveals how their labor forged the politics, economics, and culture of American colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines and left an enduring imprint on these islands and the US Army itself. Jackson offers new ways to understand the rise of American military might and how it influenced a globalizing imperial world.

3 editions

Ben Waber reviewed The Work of Empire by Justin F. Jackson

A Temporally Focused but Disjointed, Wandering History

3 stars

If you don't already have a lot of background on the Spanish American war, as well as on the situation in the Philippines and Cuba both before and after that conflict, you're going to have a hard time following this history. Jackson does a good job zooming in on the formative years after that conflict, but the pairing of Cuba and the Philippines is a bit strange given how radically different those regions were, and besides the racism of the American occupation there's very little connective tissue between the events there during this period. This book does an excellent job documenting the interactions between the US military and the different local and international actors in these areas, although without much of a thesis on what binds these events together it's more of a chronology than anything else. As a reference book, however, this book is extremely useful

Ben Waber

rated it

December 3

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