In the early 20th century, U. S. colonial officials in the Philippines confronted the problem of reconstructing a colonial society from the ashes of exterminist war. In doing so, they found themselves engaging in new ways with both Filipino elites and Spanish colonial history. This talk will examine how U.S. officials focused their attentions on the figure of the "cacique." This widely-used term for local elites alternatively imagined "caciquism" as the primordial expression of hierarchical, premodern indigenous society, and as the by-product of centuries of Spanish "feudalism." By exploring the emergence and evolution of this category, Kramer will track broader debates about what, for early 20th century Americans, were interconnected problems of colonial succession, indigenous agency, and the limits of imperial transformation.
Paul A. Kramer (Associate Professor of History, University of Iowa) is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Sponsored by the Department of History, the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Part of the Department of History's lecture series on the U.S. Empire in Comparative and Historical Perspectives.