Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines

The publication of Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism exactly thirty years ago heralded a new wave of US empire studies. Emerging in the shadow of the Persian Gulf War and through the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, this collection of essays identified the United States as an empire and drew connections between American culture and projections of US power in the world. The book and much work that followed bucked enduring views—academic and popular—of US overseas aggression circa 1898 as an aberration and US imperialism as exceptional and incomparable to European forms. In Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, Allan E. S. Lumba builds on this scholarship while also advancing a distinct framework for his subject.Drawing on the insights of decoloniality, Lumba approaches "economic experts" and their work of building and controlling a monetary and banking system in the colony as part of a broader history of decolonization. In making decolonization—not imperialism writ large—his conceptual frame, Lumba follows American Studies scholar Manu Karuka's provocative analysis of the United States' "countersovereignty" vis-à-vis Indigenous nations. Lumba sets US colonialism in the Philippines in relation to an "American tradition of reactionary logic" manifest in a continental history of settler colonialism (3). Economic experts from both the United States and the Philippines designed a colonial currency, established a Postal Savings Bank system that stretched across the archipelago, managed the operations of the Philippine National Bank, and communicated visions of economic nationalism during the Philippines' transition from colony to commonwealth. None were efforts to realize what Lumba terms "unconditional decolonization"—the undermining of a colonial system of racial capitalism and the development of a fundamentally fairer and more just collective life (8). Experts applied their monetary authority as part of a "counter-decolonization" strategy or, in the case of Filipino nationalist elites, toward a form of merely "conditional decolonization" (3, 13–14).Lumba sources his account primarily in "the archives of experts"—the official reports, academic articles, and correspondence where university-trained men made and claimed knowledge about the capitalist market (5). Among these money and banking experts were Americans Charles Conant and Edwin Kemmerer. Conant addressed currency problems that troubled the early years of the US military occupation. Accepting the view that Filipinos' racial capacity did not yet rise to the measure of modern, civilized societies operating on the gold standard, Conant adjusted his commitment to "a world smoothed out by one unified gold standard" and proposed a new colonial currency—a silver coin called the Philippine peso (58). Its value would be the same as a "theoretical gold peso" (58). This "ghostly" and hierarchical monetary system signaled recognition of the colony's class and racial order and preserved it, Lumba argues (60).Meanwhile, "money doctor" Edwin Kemmerer, who had helped to design the US Federal Reserve system, was brought aboard to improve the adoption of the new currency. Like Conant, Kemmerer drafted policy premised on Philippine peoples' supposed incapacity and the benignity of American racial paternalism. To encourage Filipinos on a path toward financial probity, he helped to establish a Postal Savings Bank system that operated across the colony. Encouraged to save their money in these banks, Philippine people practiced a new relationship to money and to the colonial state.To their promoters, the currency and banking systems provided Filipinos with a much-needed education. By assigning the power of seigniorage to the colonial state, the currency plan was also profitable to the colonial government. Capital accumulated in making and maintaining the currency system funded colonial infrastructure projects and labor and supplies and thus lent material support to the military pacification of the colony. Colonial currency and banking also performed ideological work, teaching people within the colony and beyond to see the US government as a protector of capital investment and safeguard against commercial insecurity. In all these ways, the currency and banking reforms were rooted in and entrenched racial capitalism and constituted elements of "counter-decolonization." Monetary authorities "materially and ideologically bound the Philippines to the U.S. Empire and capital. To demand decolonization would be to demand the destruction of such a relationship and to lose present and future wealth" (92).Filipino political and economic elites also come under scrutiny in Lumba's study. His first chapter, set primarily in the Spanish colonial period, concludes with a consideration of the Malolos Republic, the government created by members of the revolutionary movement to overthrow Spanish colonialism and then the US occupation. In pursuing national sovereignty, political recognition from within and outside the Philippines, and loans to underwrite their operations, Filipinos at the helm of the Malolos Republic shelved problems of economic inequality and labor exploitation. They pursued the "conditional decolonization" that Lumba goes on to associate with the positions of nationalist leaders like Sergio Osmeña and Manuel Roxas. They challenged US imperial sovereignty but not the strictures of capitalism in the Philippines. Nationalists like these accepted a colonial currency that kept wages low; they viewed workers' strikes and unrest as impediments to national sovereignty; and in the 1930s, they repressed radical movements led by the Philippines' Communist Party and the Sakdalistas.Lumba's framing of the colonial Philippines as a long history of decolonization is novel and foregrounds the anxieties and tensions that beset the Spanish and US colonial government. Economic experts fretted over the instabilities triggered by the circulation of forces perceived as foreign to the colony or beyond their control whether in the form of the Mexican coin (in the Spanish colonial period), embodied by Chinese workers and capital, or expressed in workers' intractability. Economic experts idealized sovereign markets yet also claimed the right to structure markets in ways that advantaged colonialists and preserved the racial and class status quo. Lumba's decolonization framework also helps him avoid an essentializing parable of imperial aggressors versus champions of national independence. Lumba is attentive to the capitalist ordering of the world that Filipino nationalists embraced or, in some instances, may have accepted pragmatically.By the end of Monetary Authorities, lineaments of an "unconditional decolonization" finally come more sharply into view. Writing on the Depression-era Philippines, Lumba describes peasants and farmers practicing "new modes of collective survival" and discusses Crisanto Evangelista, a founder of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (the Communist Party of the Philippines), who countered a narrow vision of national sovereignty with one of "radical internationalism" (139, 140). A history framed by decolonization invites this and arguably even more attention to the alternative forms of collective life practiced by historical actors and their social and political imaginaries. We might also wonder about historical subjects whose actions, ideas, and beliefs over time blurred the binary of "conditional" and "unconditional" decolonization. Perhaps some of them suggest still other complex and contingent paths toward a world more just.