Harvard Law School Library Book Talk

The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State: Imperial Rule and the American Constitutional Tradition in the Philippine Islands, 1898-1935 (Cambridge University Press, Fall 2016)

Cromwell Prize Winner, American Society of Legal History

Author:

Leia Castaneda Anastacio, LL.M. ’96, S.J.D. ’09
Research Fellow, East Asian Legal Studies, Harvard Law School

Commentators:

Gerald L. Neuman
J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law, Harvard Law School

Christopher Capozzola
Associate Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The US occupation of the Philippine Islands in 1898 began a foundational period of the modern Philippine state. With the adoption of the 1935 Philippine Constitution, the legal conventions for ultimate independence were in place. In this time, American officials and their Filipino elite collaborators established a representative, progressive, yet limited colonial government that would modernize the Philippine Islands through colonial democracy and developmental capitalism. Examining constitutional discourse in American and Philippine government records, academic literature, newspaper and personal accounts, The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State concludes that the promise of America’s liberal empire was negated by the imperative of insulating American authority from Filipino political demands. Premised on Filipino incapacity, the colonial constitution weakened the safeguards that shielded liberty from power and unleashed liberalism’s latent tyrannical potential in the name of civilization. This forged a constitutional despotism that haunts the Islands to this day. Examining American colonial constitutionalism, this book yields insights for legal historians, comparativists, post-colonial scholars, and Southeast Asia specialists. Its focus on the use of American political models in Philippine colonial state-building and development will resonate with law and development scholars and political scientists specializing in American political development.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and EALS.