The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

La Revolución Filipina in the Age of Empire
Oscar V. CAMPOMANES*Let us, however, not forget the particular circumstances under which we are
writing. . . . We shall speak, not as wrongly so-called “insurrectos,” but as“Americanistas” who have not ceased to be Filipinos. . . .
—Apolinario Mabini, “The Message of President McKinley”1
What has happened. . . . is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a
new and fertile soil. . . . The process has not been at all the fancied “assimilation” [of foreigners]. Rather has it been a process of their assimilation of us—
I speak as an Anglo-Saxon.
—Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-National America”2

THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION & US IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS“Paciﬁc Rim” or “trans-Paciﬁc” discourse and the notion of an American“Paciﬁc Century,” as late twentieth-century expressions of the Americantransnational, are not recent inventions, at least not in the ways 1990s
critical work generally seems to have advened.3 U.S. Treaty of Paris
Commission negotiator Whitelaw Reid, to cite just one example among
many, strenuously advocated for Philippine annexation after the 1898
Spanish-American War “for American energy to build up such a commercial marine on the Paciﬁc Coast as should ultimately convert the
Paciﬁc Ocean into an American lake, making it far more our own thanthe Atlantic Ocean is now Great Britain’s.”4 This kind of geostrategic
American politics and discourse that posited the Asia-Paciﬁc as its objectof desire quickly began to operate and proliferate after the republic’s
Copyright © 2007 Oscar V. Campomanes. All rights reserved. This work may
be used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Assistant Professor, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

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OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES

most articulate visionaries declared the USA’s Manifest Destiny in theearly nineteenth century, and more especially, after the republic survived
its bitter sectional conﬂicts. Such a trans-Paciﬁc American geopolitics
discursively and actually reached its apotheosis in the multiple contexts
and unusual occasions offered the USA by, ﬁrst, the unequal treaty thatwas inked with the Hawaiian Kingdom; then the compromise with
Britain and Germany over the disposition of the Samoan islands; andﬁnally the extraterritorial leavings that were the spoils of the war with
Spain. These key developments in the USA’s trans-Paciﬁc extraterritorialism notably occurred throughout and serially punctuated the lastquarter of the nineteenth-century.
For Reid and many nineteenth-century American imperial ideologues(such as the irrepressible expansionist William Henry Seward, the fabled
naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, and even later, the geopolitician ofAmerican frontierism, Frederick Jackson Turner, etc.), the Paciﬁc was avast space that kept the USA from the dream of a “China Emporium of
American Commerce” and an envisioned relationship with Japan as the“spearhead for the commercial penetration of Northeast Asia.”5 This vast
Paciﬁc needed to be overcome in a bounding cognitive leap, redrawn
from its previous zonings in mercantile-capitalist and Exploration-era
colonial cartographs, and effectively made over into—paraphrasing
Reid, in Turnerian terms—maritime and archipelagic “frontiers” for animperially emergent United States.
Indeed, amidst the immense oceanic expanse were insigniﬁcantlooking island groups that could be used as naval outposts and “coaling
stations,” including the Philippine and Hawaiian archipelagoes (geostrategic clusters of which were to be formally annexed, on various
pretexts, at various times, throughout much of the twentieth century,
beginning with the nearly-simultaneous Philippine and Hawaiian annexations of 1898). Not for nothing then that the most distinctive American
contribution to the burgeoning turn-of-the-century science of geopolitics—otherwise largely Germanic in its provenance and elaborations—
was Mahanite navalism, which made of sea power and maritime
territories an equally, if not more, signiﬁcant plank of national and imperial expansionism.6
With some highly-contingent and creatively pragmatic maneuvers asa Paciﬁc power, and with the conquest of the Philippines substantiallyconsolidated by the 1930s, the United States subsequently managed toLA REVOLUCIÓN FILIPINA IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

89establish and control a formidable trans-Paciﬁc network of “200-Mile
Exclusive Economic Zones” and a complex of naval-military facilities.7
These are currently constellated through Guam and American Samoa as“unincorporated territories,” the Northern Marianas as a “Commonwealth,” Hawaii as the only non-continental state, and the Republic of
Belau as the last remaining “trust territory” of the federal union, including offshore bases in Okinawa, Japan, and East Asian subaltern territories like South Korea and Taiwan. Such territories, zones, and outposts
constitute the world-system that is clearly dominated by the UnitedStates at present. It is an American world-system in the Asia-Paciﬁc thatis traceable to an extended history of American imperial desire and modern power geopolitics, the realization of which, as I contend in this essay,
was fatally predicated upon the defeat and containment of the Philippine
Revolution at the turn of the century.
The 1896–98 Philippine Revolution (ﬁrst phase) came at the tail-endof the nineteenth-century nationalist struggles against Iberian colonialism in the Americas and effectively marked the end of the Spanish
empire. But while it was the last of the Spanish Crown colonies to secede,
the Philippines also became the site of what is generally acknowledged
as the ﬁrst modern and anticolonial revolution in Asia. That Revolution
instituted an insurgent government by 1898 and a republic by January
1899, at precisely the points when Spanish power was being eclipsed by
the arrival of the United States as a new player on the arena of global
imperial politics. Led by politicized factions of the emergent mestizo andnative bourgeoisie, it mobilized a largely peasant-based soldiery and amulti-ethnic mass base in strategic provinces and in the major islands.
Like most nationalist movements, it had its own generous share ofinternecine power struggles, ethnic and class conﬂicts, bourgeois/folk
messianism, Enlightenment conceits, and patriarchal-masculinist structures and idiolects.8 But what probably distinguishes it from others, evenfrom the contemporaneous Cuban Revolution of 1895–98 (to which it
invites immediate comparison), was its particular misfortune of being
tightly constricted between the death rattle of an old colonial regime(Spain) and the birth pangs of a new imperial power (USA).9 Among theﬁrst to note the implications of this peculiar predicament of thePhilippine Revolution was Apolinario Mabini, perhaps the most visionary, radical, and proliﬁc of its organic intellectuals.

90

OSCAR V. CAMPOMANESAPOLINARIO MABINI (1864–1903) AND THE PREHISTORY OF THE
AMERICAN TRANSNATIONAL
In this essay, I engage the critical thought of Apolinario Mabini, as
indicated in particular in his 1899 essay “¿Cuál es la Verdadera Misiónde la Revolución Filipina? [What is the Real Mandate of the Philippine
Revolution?],” published in the second volume of his La Revolución
Filipina.10 La Revolución Filipina is typically read as, and for its, damning critique of the weaknesses or handicaps besetting the Revolution andcharacterizing Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo’s leadership, but it is, I would
argue, much more valuable for its prescient foresight on and criticalprecautions against a future Asia-Paciﬁc constellated and traversed byAmerican empire-building and pragmatic geopolitics. For heuristic purposes I have framed this consideration in Mabini’s critical legacy by an
epigrammatic reference to a related text that Harper’s Weekly publishedin its 26 May 1900 number, “The Message of President McKinley.”11 In
this polemic, it is noteworthy that a presumably anti-American voice like
Mabini’s could “speak as an Americanista (Americanist)” without ceasing to be “Filipino”—a speech act from the past which, to my mind, offersa very early example of a perfect transnational trope.
I suggest that, in these and a number of other articulate and equablemanifestations, Mabini effectively limned a nascent theory of American
imperial geopolitics and pragmatics to explain the zero-sum investment
developed by the United States in the containment and defeat of thePhilippine Revolution, and in the making of its trans-Paciﬁc empire
which was to make this Revolution that empire’s ﬁrst and most major
casualty. But while he was devoted to this task of understanding the stiff
price and destructive violence exacted by the USA as an emergent New
Empire on La Revolución Filipina, it should be clear that Mabini wasnever exclusively nationalist even as he was reductively tagged byAmerican antagonists as an “irreconcilable.” Merely a cursory review of
his many writings shows that he had often argued against American
imperialists with an amazing willingness and capacity, on his part, toinhabit the Other’s space and be empathetic to the Other’s stakes. In
short, he always took seriously, and engaged closely, what the USA’s
imperialist ideologues had to say regarding their advocacy for Philippine
colonization: from President William McKinley in Washington, D.C.,
to campaigning American generals on the ground.
I then conclude with some preliminary speculations on the post-contemporary signiﬁcance of Mabini and the Philippine Revolution in the

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91

Age of Empire, including the central point that they have much to teachus about being truly trans-national/ists. Arguably, one can count Mabini’s
critical thought—and the momentous contexts within which he developed it—as properly constituting an important part of the “prehistory”
of our transnational conjuncture and what distinguished Twain scholar
and ex-ASA President Shelley Fisher Fishkin calls “the transnational
turn in American Studies” in the present.12 I elaborate this historic andpolitical charge of Mabini’s thought and the Philippine Revolution,
which may rile those who insist on a technical deﬁnition of transnationalism as something speciﬁc only to our nominal present, in the discussionthat follows.
Apolinario Mabini was born to a small landholding but perenniallypoverty-prone family in Talaga barrio, Tanauan town, Philippine province of Batangas on 23 July 1864. Undaunted by a difﬁcult boyhood
where he had to labor early to help his mother augment the meager family
income, he nonetheless remained in frail health for much of his youth
and life, up to his untimely death in 1903. His precocity in childhood andhis brilliance as a part-time student were much remarked upon by contemporaries, as were his arduous struggles, through many interruptions
and frequent self-supporting work, to obtain formal education throughall levels of the Spanish colonial educational system. Mabini’s educational achievements across an extended period (capping in his graduation with a licentiate in jurisprudence from the Dominican University ofSanto Tomas in 1894 and his eventual admission to the colonial bar) are
now the stuff of legend. Even more legendary was how he came to thenotice of General Emilio Aguinaldo around the recrudescence of thePhilippine Revolution in early 1898 with the return of Aguinaldo fromhis Hong Kong exile.13
Mabini served as a political advisor to General Aguinaldo from June
1898 to his formal appointment as the Premier of the republican cabinet
and Minister of Foreign Affairs in January 1899 (he was replaced in thiscapacity four months from this date by Pedro Paterno, a leader of theconservative faction of the republican congress, owing to ideological disputes). Mabini drew up the plans for a provisional/transitional government on the local and central levels as the Filipino revolutionists madeterritorial gains against the Spanish colonial state at an accelerated pacefrom June 1898 onwards. He is also credited with the authorship of manyof Gen. Aguinaldo’s decrees, proclamations, and statements during the
mid-to-late 1898 standoff of the “insurgents” with Spain and the American
expeditionary and occupation forces.

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It must be remarked here that for his propaganda and agitation workin the mid-to-late 1890s, he was initially imprisoned by the Spanish regime
for nine months (from October 1896), and was only spared the harsher
treatments that were meted to his colleagues after he was paralyzed bya stroke before the August 1896 revolutionary outbreak. Captured byadvancing American forces in December 1899, a few months after the
eruption of war with the Americans, he was eventually deported to Guam(after being held under extended house arrest) by a still-embryonic
American colonial government as an “irreconcilable” in January 1901.
He remained in exile on this island for two years and was only allowed
to return to the Philippines after being compelled to take the customary
oath of allegiance to the insular US government (the precondition set
down by American proconsuls for his repatriation). Amidst these experiences, he produced an entire oeuvre that sought to give ideologicalguidance to the Revolution, to justify it in the terms of natural law andinternational jurisprudence, and to sustain partisan morale/fervor.14
Mabini died of cholera in relative obscurity almost three months after
his repatriation in early 1903.
THE AGE OF EMPIRE
The two epigraphs from Apolinario Mabini and Randolph Bournewith which I commenced this critical essay mark the turning point (1900)
and the endpoint (1916) of a crucial period in modern history: what somewriters have dubbed the epoch of “high imperialism” or what Eric
Hobsbawm has called, in his magisterial book, the “Age of Empire,”roughly from the mid-1870s to the Great War (WWI). It was a period
when, as V.I. Lenin has so famously put it, “the colonial policy of thecapitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet [and] for the ﬁrst time the world is completely divided
up, so that in the future only redivision is possible.”15
Lenin was certainly referring to the global territorial annexations bya small corps of imperial nation-states which, as Hobsbawm (following
Lenin) also acutely reminds us, were “capitalist core countries.”16 These
capitalist countries, the most prominent being Great Britain, France,
Belgium, and more lately, the emergent powers of Germany, Japan, andthe United States, were then displaying ample signs of what the Russian
cosmopolitan intellectual J.A. Novicow critically diagnosed by 1901 as
the afﬂiction of “kilometritis” (kilométrite), an “idolatry of squareLA REVOLUCIÓN FILIPINA IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

93

kilometers.”17 The locus classicus for such characterization and comprehension of world history during this period is, of course, the nowcanonical book by the liberal British critic of empire J. A. Hobson,
Imperialism: A Study, upon which text Lenin based a substantive part ofhis theoretical formulations on “imperialism” as the “highest,” “special,”or “latest,” or more speciﬁcally, “monopoly,” stage of capitalism.18
Extrapolating from Hobson’s estimates—drawn from ofﬁcial sources
and the Statesman’s Year Book of H.C. Morris—Lenin reckoned that, by
1900, 98.9% of Polynesia (sometimes called Oceania but actually
meaning Paciﬁc basin/island territories), 90.4% of Africa (especiallyafter the Scramble of 1884–1886), 56.6% of Asia, and 27.2% of theAmericas were placed under various (but largely colonial) forms ofEuro-American dominion. Extending Hobson’s own periodizing arguments up to 1914, tweaking a bit Hobson’s geopolitical statistical dataand supplementing them with updated information from the geographer
A. Supan’s research, Lenin lists Great Britain as acquiring, on the eveof WWI, a grand total of 33.5 million square kilometers; France, 10.6
million square kilometers; Germany, 2.9 million square kilometers; theUSA, 0.3 million square kilometers; and Japan, 0.3 million square kilometers, among the more noteworthy imperial expansions. It was in thecontext of this substantially accomplished inter-imperial and monopolistic appropriation of global real estate that Lenin famously advocatedfor a reading of the Great War as yet another momentous and immensely
violent attempt at a redivision of the planet among the monopoly-capitalist powers.19
The Age of Empire was indeed a pure, and because of the epic slaughter through which it was accomplished by way of and culminating in
WWI, bloody, spectacle in kilométrite. But as Hobsbawm acutely notes,“what is spectacular is not necessarily most important,” adding that for
many thinkers since the 1890s and throughout this period (eventuatingin Lenin’s grand synthesis), “what seemed a new phase in the general
pattern of national and international development” singularly gripped
their focus. In Leninist terms, what commended itself to contemporary
analysts was “a new phase in capitalist development,” when Capital
became ﬁnancial in cast because of increasing monopoly and concentration, of which empire and the wars fought over it as a political form
only seemed to be “the most striking aspects.” Furthermore, an indisputable fact about this period, beginning in the nineteenth century, was“the creation of a single global economy, progressively reaching into the94

OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES

most remote corners of the world, an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money,
and people linking the developed countries with each other and with theunderdeveloped world.”20
It seems to me that, with few qualiﬁcations, Hobsbawm here could
have just as well been describing our current transnational moment, withthe difference that rather than a multipolar imperial regime as with theAge of Empire, the US now unilaterally and monopolistically rules theglobal roost, even with its coalition politics and maneuvers from the Gulf
War of Bush I to the Iraq War of Bush II, to rein in the United Nationsin the ﬁrst, and “willing” others in the second.
MABINI ON THE TRANSNATIONAL CIRCUITS OF THE REVOLUTION
In estimating the ramiﬁcations of American intervention in the Revolution during the crucial month of August 1898, Apolinario Mabini
wearily observed, “We have not yet ﬁnished the war with Spain, and wemust not provoke another with America. We are not in a position to conduct two wars” (as quoted by journalist Leon Wolff ).21 Wolff does not
document this quote (almost certainly a paraphrase), which speciﬁcallyrefers to Mabini’s forebodings about an untimely war between thePhilippine revolutionary army and the American expeditionary and occupation forces after the latter outﬂanked and excluded the former in thenotoriously scripted attack on Spanish-held Manila on 13 August 1898.
Mabini recalls counseling General Aguinaldo “que procurase evitar atoda costa el conﬂicto, porque de lo contrario tendríamos dos enemigos
y la consecuencia más probable sería la repartición de las Islas entre
ambos [to avoid the conﬂict at all costs because otherwise we would befacing two enemies, and the most probable result would be the partitionof the islands between them].”22 The extreme delicacy of the situation
for the revolutionists, before and after the now infamous mock Battle of
Manila which ﬂagrantly excluded the Filipinos as combatants, drove
Mabini to urge Aguinaldo to exercise prudence and tact in fending off,
while also containing, the American advance(s).23
For in being (with the Cuban Revolution) the last of the epic nineteenth-century anti-Spanish national liberation struggles but also the ﬁrst
of its kind in the Asia-Paciﬁc region now shortly facing the specter of a
newly aspiring conqueror, the Philippine Revolution thus bore the double distinction of dissolving the Spanish imperium (its victory would

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95

sound the ﬁnal death knell for the once mighty empire) and portending
future Asian nationalisms (being the ﬁrst in Asia, it could supply themodel for future others to follow). But this double distinction, correspondingly, required of the Philippine Revolution a double burden, a fact
none or precious few of its historians and students, critically or afﬁrmatively, ever seemed to have appreciated.24 The double burden consisted
in these: this Revolution’s triumph was necessary to signal the declineof old-world colonialism in Asia even as it had to face, immediately andwithout rest, what the United States was to signify and exercise as a neocolonial form of power in the century to follow.25 For a Revolution so
young, almost spontaneous in its occurrence, and a ﬂedgling republic sofragile and not yet effectively consolidated, this double burden certainly
proved much too much to bear.
Mabini recognized this inordinately symbolic weight and handicap of
the Philippine Revolution with characteristic prescience. “Preguntad a
Inglaterra, Rusia, Francia, Alemania, Holanda, Portugal y otras potencias ávidas de colonizar. . . . [Ask England, Russia, France, Germany,
Holland, Portugal and other greedy powers],” Mabini wrote in 1899, and“y veréis cómo tiemblan todas por sus colonias habidas y las que aun
esperan haber en el ansiado reparto de China. . . . [and you will see how
greatly they fear for their colonial possessions and even those they expect
to acquire in the covetous partition of China. . . .]” To Mabini’s perspicacious mind, the Philippine Revolution—especially in its second phaseas a war of resistance against the United States’ invasion—served as theunacknowledged locus of these anxieties which he observed percolating
among the great imperial nations. Concerning these powers’s own
largely unarticulated stakes in the outcome of the Philippine revolutionary conﬂict, Mabini continued: “Todas ellas saben mejor que nosotros
que la Revolución ﬁlipina es contagiosa, muy contagiosa; que lleva en
su seno volcánico el germen de la ﬁebre amarilla o de la peste bubónica,
mortal para sus intereses coloniales. . . . [They all know better than wedo that the Philippine Revolution is contagious, very contagious: it
nurses within its explosive womb the seeds of epidemic disease deadly
to their colonial interests. . . .].”26
These other sources of hostility to the Revolution not only compounded
the difﬁculties that the United States posed as an intervening power but
also disabled all attempts by the revolutionists to secure internationalrecognition of their active belligerency and provisional government.27
Although foisted on the Revolution by circumstances beyond its leaders’s

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control, such a handicap with the imperial powers as faced it was something that Mabini felt the Revolution was required to accept as a necessary and inescapable given. Asking himself by what “true ends” (elverdadero ﬁn) the Philippine Revolution was bound, he declares andinterrogates, in tones both serious and suffused with half-mocking
ironies:. . . . nuestro humilde entender, tiene por único objeto y término ﬁnal de sus
aspiraciones mantener viva y fulgurante, en la Oceanía, la antorcha de lalibertad y civilización, para que, iluminando la noche tenebrosa en que hoyyace, envilecida y degradada la raza malaya, muestre a ésta el camino de su
emancipación social. ¿Que nos hemos vuelto locos y hemos dicho una
necedad? ¿Que sostenemos una utopía, una quimera engendrada por nuestra
imaginación enferma?
. . . . in our humble judgment, its singular objective and the ultimate purposeof its aspirations is to maintain alive and aﬂame in Oceania, the beacon of
freedom and civilization, so that its light shining in the dark night of ourdebasement as a Malayan people, will show the way to social emancipation.
Have we gone insane and said something nonsensical? Are we upholding a
utopia, a chimera sprouting from our inﬁrm imagination?28

Mabini, then, was quite clear on what the Philippine Revolution represented to the Euro-American corps of empire-states. As he positively
afﬁrmed, “que puede constituir en día no muy lejano el dique insuperable
contra sus ambiciones desbordadas [In the immediate future, (our Revolution) could constitute the insuperable dam against their deluvial ambitions].”29
Little wonder then that in spite of a master plan and systematic campaign for legitimating their revolution/republic in the international realm
and given these inter-imperial investments in their defeat, they naturally
failed to elicit endorsements or even some form of assistance from supposed sympathizers like the German Kaiser and the Japanese Emperor.
Sandwiched between two contending powers, more or less desired as
potential subjects by others like Britain, and chronically pressed forfunds, arms, and supplies, the Filipino revolutionists seemed doomed to“fail” from the beginning.30 Recalling the almost-quixotic persistencewith which the Filipino revolutionists battled against these odds whileemphasizing the real and ultimate goal of their enterprise, Mabini, in
another passage from La Revolución Filipina, declares:

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97

Hemos luchado convencidos de que nuestro deber y dignidad nos exigían elsacriﬁcio de defender mientras podíamos nuestras libertades, porque sin ellas
la igualdad social entre la casta dominante y la población indígena sería practicamente imposible, y así no lograríamos establecer perfecta justicia entre
nosotros; pero sabíamos que no tardarían en agotarse nuestros escasos medios
y que nuestra derrota sería inevitable.
[We have fought convinced that our dignity and sense of duty demanded thesacriﬁce of defending our freedoms for as long as we were able, since without them social equality between the hegemonic class and the native populace would be impossible in practice and perfect justice among us could not
be established. Yet we knew that our sparse resources would be exhausted
before long and our defeat was inevitable].31

Here the quest for “defending freedoms” and “perfect justice” activates
the registers of post-Enlightenment thought endemic to late nineteenthcentury Filipino nationalist writings. The goal of the Revolution resided
in restructuring native society to make it equitable and perfectible for its
future citizens who had formerly languished as hierarchized and debased
subjects of a tyrannical colonial order.32 But what commands immediate
attention is the tone of resignation to the anticipated defeat, which loss
was deliverable not so much by dissension from within revolutionaryranks (recognized as contributive in itself ) as by imperialist dissent fromwithout.
This fatalistic tone counterpointed the triumphalism expressed in thesecret correspondence, state papers, and the international propaganda
generated by the revolutionary government and its various organs. But
apart from following certain rhetorical stratagems and lines of reasoning that were adopted to represent the Filipino cause to a global audience,
this “tone” also sought to sustain internal discipline and morale. As therevolutionary army, junta, and ﬂedgling republic suffered setback after
setback in their moves against American interventionist aggression, withno recognition of their political stature and status forthcoming from theother powers, this fatalism paradoxically acquired a certain moral resonance. Propagandists and ideologues like Apolinario Mabini, and broadsides circulated internationally by the Comité Central Filipino based in
Hong Kong, made a virtue of weakness and disadvantage when the
Revolution was arrayed against the formidable resources and yet symbolic (or political) handicaps of the colluding and competing empires. It

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was as if, consigned to the margins of imperialist politics yet representing a central threat to inter-imperial interests, the revolutionists saw
negotiation from disadvantage as enabling other strategies and forms oftriumph. Again, as Mabini had so presciently recognized with the revolutionary recourse to diplomatic politics and reasoned discourse in theface of an aspiring colonizer increasingly set to adopt a genocidal war
strategy, “Habiéndose despreciado la diplomacia como arma propia deldébil, la lucha hubo de cesar solamente cuando los revolucionarios
dejaron de tener medios para continuarla [As diplomacy has been dismissed as the weapon of the weak, the struggle would only cease once
the revolutionaries exhaust the means to sustain it].”33
The Revolution, in other words, was not simply going to be, and wasnever only, a Filipino affair, for it involved rather forbidding global complications beyond the overthrow of the Spanish theocratic state.34 There
were the United States and other powers with their differing investmentsin the simultaneous destruction and redemption of Spanish imperial prestige and in the redivision of the world’s territorial and economic spoils.
Forced to accede to a reinsertion into the shifting global order of empirestates, the new nation could only bargain or negotiate for the moral andmaterial resources needed for social reconstruction and political consolidation but which remained in the hands of powerful Others. The constancy with which strategists like Mabini and revolutionary organs likethe Comité Central Filipino studied the international dimensions of the
struggle that they coordinated can only strike us in the present as something marked by pathos and yet evincingly admirable. Familiar with international and natural law, steeped in post-Enlightenment humanism,and versed in international political affairs/developments, they mediatedbetween the external forces and those within their ranks who preferred
to view the Revolution as a purely domestic problem and exclusively amatter of internal consolidation. Their political cosmopolitanism decisively shaped the diplomatic and subsequent propaganda campaigns thatwere launched through the Junta/Committee in Hong Kong. This rhetorical line precisely undertook to make political-cultural capital out of theutter marginality that came with being a ﬂedgling republic in the age ofimperial nations.
As Mabini baldfacedly conceded, but with that characteristic stingfrom which many of his discursive foes smarted and for which he had
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Es innegable que el Tratado de París legitima el traspaso a los E. U. deAmérica de la acción de España sobre Filipinas. . . . Tomamos aquí por
norma de la legitimidad, no la justicia absoluta, sino esa relativa establecida
por el tácito consenso de las grandes potencias, bautizado para gloria yengrandecimiento de éstas y en perjuicio y ruina de las débiles con el pomposo nombre de derecho internacional, esa justicia relativa que suele santiﬁcar los más estupendas, cuya sanción reguladora es la razón de la fuerza
y no la fuerza de la razón.
[We are unable to deny that the Treaty of Paris legalizes the transfer ofSpain’s control over the Philippines to the United States. . . . Thus we takeas legitimate norm not absolute but relative justice, established and christened through the tacit consensus of the great powers, for their glory andaggrandizement, to the disadvantage and devastation of the weak, in the
pompous name of international law. It is this relative justice that customarily
hallows the most marvellous usurpations, whose governing sanction is thereason of force and not the force of reason].35

SOME CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
I ﬁrst and dimly understood the word ‘transnational’ through independent reading and immersion in the proliﬁc critical work of the late
Filipino nationalist intellectual Renato Constantino, while starting out
as an undergraduate major in Filipino language and Philippine literature
at the University of the Philippines College (Baguio) in the late 1970s.36
This was therefore long before its now lusty currency and proliferation
as a term—at least, since the early 1990s—to describe the New World
Order, and as a category of postmodern political and cultural critique.
Constantino had used the term to identify and specify an omnibus organizational expression of late capitalism’s global reach and its tentacular
grips over the postcolonial Filipino economy: the ‘transnational corporation’ (or in his shorthand, the ‘TNCs’). Along with a few farsighted
contemporary analysts, Constantino sought to explicate, in a preliminaryway, capitalism’s new and ﬂexible regimes of accumulation acrossnational frontiers and in excess or abjuration of what used to be its national expressions and fealties (others would later call this kind of transnational capitalism, in the particular case of American capitalism,‘post-Fordist.’37)
Reﬂecting upon Constantino’s work now, I am struck by a haunting
sense of déjà vu. Much of the descriptive and explanatory power of his

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anti-imperial and anticapitalist critique seems to hark back to Lenin’s,and Mabini’s time, to the Age of Empire and its curious amalgams anddisjunctions of economic and territorial monopoly. It was a time when
the world was welded into one dominated by empire/s yet simultaneously and ﬁtfully redrawn by bloody border wars. It was a time when anational liberation movement could be snuffed out at its infancy throughthe alliance of the great powers, otherwise divided amongst themselves
by real and competing capitalist investments. It was a time when a New
Empire, the USA, (or also more generally what Hobson called the ‘new
Imperialism’) could spectacularly and uncompromisingly announce its
advent, and begin to build its formidable ediﬁce on that seemingly insigniﬁcant Revolution’s mangled remains.
But it was also a time, especially at its provisional endpoint of 1916,
when an American, a citizen of the emergent New Empire, could goagainst the tide and seek to overturn his own country’s now-calcifying
nationalist, militarist, and imperialist shibboleths.
In the late 1990s, while on a visiting faculty appointment at New York
University to help organize a conference and book project dealing with
the Philippine-American War of 1899 and contemporary Filipino transnational and diasporic formation, I was alerted, in the research I
conducted for this particular project, to an even earlier use of ‘transnational.’ I refer to the immensely insightful 1916 essay, “Trans-National
America” by the American public intellectual and antiwar activist
Randolph Bourne.38 Bourne had used the term to critique nationalist or
assimilationist visions and ﬁctions of America, in light of the “dissensus”
which he saw characterizing American society over, and in the wake of,President Woodrow Wilson’s abandonment of neutrality during theGreat War (WWI). He also used it as a startling modiﬁer on that proper
name, America, so as to reﬂect what he deemed was a much more complex and multivocal process of American national formation than thatallowed by the prevailing nationalist American theory of assimilation.
In calling this other and ideal America ‘Trans-National,’ Bourne boldly
advocated for a conception of the United States as something strikingly
global in microcosm, given its already and markedly multinational population at the time.39 Correspondingly, he challenged Americans, especially the young, to abandon the “parochialism and provincialism” oftheir elders, and to actively cultivate an outlook or self-image of “cosmopolitanism” that eschews the “national self-feeling” induced by what
he sneeringly dubbed the “orthodox nationalistic game.”40

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101

From the midpoint of Mabini’s moment (1900) to the endpoint of
Bourne’s (1916), the Age of Empire also produced, perhaps necessitated,
the incipient kinds of radical transnationalism and critical cosmopolitanism that either ﬁgure embodied, each in his own ways and speciﬁc
circumstances. As should be obvious from their examples, and the latter-day’s case of Renato Constantino, there is nothing unprecedented oreven radically new about our current usage and understandings of transnationalism and the term transnational, at least in that species of current
transdisciplinary writing which construes our conjuncture as an epochal
break from periods long past and presumably forgotten.41
NOTES
1
Apolinario Mabini, “The Message of President McKinley,” Harper’s Weekly, 26
May 1900, 490.
2
Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” in History of a Literary Radical andOther Papers (1916; New York: S.A. Russell, 1957), 278.
3
Arif Dirlik, ed., What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Paciﬁc Region Idea
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Arif Dirlik and Rob Wilson, eds., Asia/Paciﬁc
as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
4
Entry for 16 September 1898, in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., Making Peace with Spain:
The Diary of Whitelaw Reid (September-December 1898), (Austin, Tex.: University ofTexas Press, 1965), 29.
5Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1960), 174–75; see also the now-classic study of nineteenth-century American
imperialist ideology and ideologues by Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).
6
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 225–26.
7
Zones within two hundred miles surrounding the Paciﬁc islands or island chains
under some form of federal control by the United States (either through trusteeship or
commonwealth status) are considered “exclusive” to the USA. See Robert C. Kiste, etal., eds., Tides of History: The Paciﬁc Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 239–40.
8
See Florentino Rodao and Felice Noelle Rodriquez, eds., The Philippine Revolutionof 1896: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001).
9
The Cuban Revolution was eventually negotiated through the Platt Amendment of
1901–02 (implemented in/after 1903), probably owing to the shrewd wisdom of Elihu
Root who maintained to McKinley and the imperialist hawks in that administration that
the United States was not militarily equipped and politically capable of conducting two
counter-insurgency wars on the Philippine and Cuban fronts at that point; for more on
the patent unpreparedness of the U.S. War Department and armed forces in war footing,see Oscar Campomanes, “Casualty Figures of the American Soldier & the Other,” inLuis Francia and Angel V. Shaw, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War
and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream 1899–1999 (New York and Manila: New York102

OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES

University Press, Anvil, 2002), 135–36, and 154n13. See also Louis Pérez, Cuba Between Empires 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) for a critical account of the equally tragic fate of the extended Cuban Revolution.
10
Mabini, La Revolución Filipina, con otros documentos de la época, comp. and ed.,Teodoro M. Kalaw, vol. 2 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1931).
11
Mabini, “The Message of President McKinley.” It is not known who translated thispiece from the Spanish, but essays addressed by Mabini to a number of American periodicals or US government and Philippine colonial government organs and ofﬁcials
between 1899 and 1902 were typically mediated by the translation assistance provided
by the Comité Central Filipino in Hong Kong—the Aguinaldo government’s foreign
policy and international propaganda bureau, or his American correspondents who were
sympathetic to the revolutionary cause or moved actively in US anti-imperialist circles.
12
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American
Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12,
2004,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17–57.
13
Mabini was commended to Gen. Aguinaldo through the intercession and glowing
endorsements of fellow Batangueño and eventual revolutionary emissary to the UnitedStates, Felipe Agoncillo. Agoncillo was much impressed by Mabini’s early politicization and independent propaganda/agitation work, from Mabini’s involvement in radical
freemasonry through his membership in the fraternal organization Cuerpo de Compromisarios and the ill-fated La Liga Filipina. On his background, education, and early
political activities, see the prizewinning biography by Cesar Adib Majul, Apolinario
Mabini, Revolutionary (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1970; Manila: National Historical
Institute, 1993), 10–20, 32–71.
14
Mabini’s extant writings and selected correspondence are compiled in La Revolución Filipina, 2 vols. Other epistolary documents, written in his various capacities
outside of and as part of the revolutionary movement/government are collected in Las
cartas politicas de Apolinario Mabini (con prologo y notas), comp. and ed., Teodoro
M. Kalaw (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1930).
15
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914, (New York: Vintage, 1989); Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916; New York: International Publishers,1990), 76.
16
Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56, 50–61.
17
Quoted in Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 229. This exclusive circle is expanded
here or there by Hobson, Lenin, and Hobsbawm to include minor, unevenly developed,or “preindustrial empires” like those of Italy; Portugal (adding more, as Hobsbawm
notes, to her “ancient African colonies”); Spain (“a net loser to the USA,” but following the cession of the Philippines and transfer of Cuba and Puerto Rico to the USA, “still
managed to pick up stony territory in Morocco and the Western Sahara,” in Hobsbawm’s
satiric words); tsarist Russia (whose expansionism was “unique,” according to
Hobsbawm, for its was “secular” and involved movement into “contiguous” territories
while losing some to Japan, and in Hobson’s characterization, “principally Asiatic”);
and the Netherlands (which, observes Hobsbawm, either “failed or refused” to acquire
more and merely extended its dominion over much of the Indonesian archipelago thatit already “formally owned”). See Lenin, Imperialism, 78; Hobson, Imperialism: A
Study, (New York: James Pott and Co., 1902; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan
Press, 1965), 21; and Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 59.
18
Hobson, Imperialism.
19
Lenin, Imperialism, 76, 80, especially 9. From this comparative tabulation, we see
pretty early indications of the exceptionalist forms of empire-building in Japan and theLA REVOLUCIÓN FILIPINA IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

103

United States as, in the apt words of University of Tokyo international relations scholar
Kiichi Fujiwara, “latecomers in colonialism” whose expansionism would signiﬁcantly
depart from the norm of territorial imperialism established by their British and French
predecessors, or more classically, the Spanish and Portuguese. In the case of the USA,I have argued elsewhere that its traumatizing experience as the ambivalent tyranny inthe second, or “Philippine-American War,” phase of the Philippine Revolution, challenged to a near-genocidal and -suicidal stand-off by anticolonial Filipino resistance,compelled it to delimit its imperial ambitions and to reformulate its aspirant suzerainty
in a modality that critics would recognize as “neocolonialism/imperialism” in the twentieth century and, arguably, up to the present. See Fujiwara, “Two New Empires: Japanand the United States as Latecomers in Colonialism,” in Proceedings of the Symposium:
The Philippines-Japan Relationship in an Evolving Paradigm (Manila: De La Salle
University Yuchengco Center, 2006); Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and
Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities,” Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2, no. 2(Spring 1995), 146, 158–64; and Campomanes, “1898 and the Nature of the New
Empire,” Radical History Review 73 (Winter 1999), 135–37.
20
Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 59–60; 62.
21
Wolff, Little Brown Brother (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 135.
22
Mabini, La Revolución Filipina, 309–10.
23
John Foreman writes of the series of redeployments through which the U.S. generals usurped, on the pretext of alliance tactics, the siege positions that the Filipino revolutionary army had established around Manila where the Spaniards had rallied for theirlast stand. As he recounts, “the Filipinos were ordered not to attempt to take Manila byassault, to haul down their republican ﬂag in the bay, to evacuate one point after another,to give up their trenches to the American troops, to abstain from co-operating against
the Spaniards the day Manila was taken, and (under the threat of force) to remove their
outposts farther and farther away from the city.” Foreman, The Philippine Islands (NewYork: Macmillan, 1899), 52.
24
Of the handful of American Filipinist historians who have sought explanations, ona sustained basis, for the defeat of the Philippine Revolution at the hands of the UnitedStates Army, Glenn May, Brian Linn, and John Gates are the most typical, with Linn
and Gates additionally attributing American victory to the benevolent intentions of thecolonizers. All three and a few others practically echo the arguments of John Farrell,
made in 1954, that the power mania of, and political intramurals among, the Filipino
revolutionary leaders, along with the absence of a true nationalism among their followers, spelled doom for the Filipino independence movement from its very outset. Unwittingly, even a critical scholar like Benedict Anderson ended up ratifying these highly
problematic or reductive interpretations in a much-anthologized essay. Filipino historian
Teodoro Agoncillo endeavored to dispute these kinds of historiographic reductionism,
attributing Filipino loss to American political cupidity and military brutalities, but
stopped short of holding some Filipino revolutionists responsible for the strategic reverses that the Revolution suffered as the war of conquest and resistance (1899–1902)
trudged to its fatal end. See May, A Past Recovered: Essays in Philippine History andHistoriography (Quezon City, RP: New Day, 1987), 76 and 81; Linn, The U.S. Armyand Counter-Insurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States
Army in the Philippines (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1973); Farrell, “AnAbandoned Approach to Philippine History: John R. M. Taylor and the Philippine
Insurrection Records,” Catholic Historical Review 39, no. 4 (January 1954), 388–89;

104

OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES

Anderson, “Cacique Democracy,” in Vicente Rafael, ed. Discrepant Histories(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); and Agoncillo, Malolos: The Crisis of
the Republic (Quezon City, RP: University of the Philippines Press, 1960).
25
Felipe Agoncillo, introduced in an earlier note as Mabini’s backer, and who wasthen coordinating the Hong Kong Junta of the revolutionary government, precisely
advised Aguinaldo and Mabini to be very cautious in mulling over “the best solution to
our political problem, which is an exceptional case in history.” Felipe Agoncillo to
Apolinario Mabini, 2 August 1898, in J. R. M. Taylor, comp. & trans., The Philippine
Insurrection against the United States (1906; Manila: Eugenio Lopez Foundation,1971), vol. 3, 262–64; emphasis added. As one 1900 local circular (“to be forwarded
from one post to another by the Revolutionary Military Service”) asserts, “Those whohave said that the Philippine Revolution is unparalleled in History were not mistaken in
their statement.” By this time, however, “exceptionalism” is redeﬁnable in terms of thetenacity of “the lower class of people” who persisted in their resistance even as many of
their elite leaders were surrendering to the Americans. “To the Local Chief of Ligao andLieut. Col. of the 2nd Battalion,” (from the General Headquarters of Military Operations,
Albay [in Southern Luzon, Philippines]), 13 June 1900, signed by Lieut. Col. Eugenio
Rabiel, in Taylor, Philippine Insurrection, vol. 5, 362.
26“¿Cuál es la Verdadera Misión de la Revolución [What is the Real Mandate of thePhilippine Revolution?],” (1899) in Mabini, La Revolución, vol. 2, 56–57; see also Cesar
Adib Majul, The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine Revolution (1957;
Quezon City, RP: University of the Philippines Press, 1996), 80–81.
27This was the conclusion of more discerning members of the Hong Kong Junta of
the revolutionary government. Even before or as the McKinley administration dispatched American troops to the Philippines to “aid” the Filipinos in their insurrection
against Spain, to “protect” them from other rapacious powers, and “to maintain peaceand order” in the interregnum between Spanish defeat and American annexation, thispragmatic estimate of their political circumscription punctuated their ofﬁcial/secret correspondence and their internal as well as international communication work. See especially the 4 May 1898 minutes of the Junta, in Taylor, Philippine Insurrection, vol. 1,
505–10.
28
Mabini, La Revolución Filipina, vol. 2, 56, emphasis in the original.
29
See ibid., 57.
30
The German, and (to a limited extent) Japanese, “bogeys” were invoked by American
imperialists in agitating for the annexation of the Philippines, with much encouragementfrom British publicists who expressed a right of preference to the erstwhile Spanish
colony after the United States. Although American diplomatic historians have sought
and been unable to establish the extent of continental or Japanese imperialist designs on
the Philippines in a postrevolutionary scenario, they generally agree that the agitation
against rival interests accomplished enough political work to rally editorial and public
opinion in the United States toward not only annexation but also an Anglo-American
rapprochement or alliance against rival empires. Combined with the rampant AngloSaxonism of the time, this USA-UK reconciliation over the lingering bitterness of the1776 American revolutionary break and the Venezuela border dispute of 1895 between
the two countries apparently served enough notice to other powers not to poach on
Philippine waters or risk the combined ire of Uncle Sam and John Bull.
31
Mabini, La Revolución, 269; also, his now famous riposte to Maj. Gen. J.F. Bell,“Contestación de Mabini,” 31 August 1900, (Spanish text in Mabini, La Revolución,
vol. 2, 194–199) which is published, and canonized in Philippine letters, as “In Response
to General Bell” in Bienvendio Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera, Philippine
Literature: A History and An Anthology (Manila: National Bookstore, 1982).

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105

Majul, Political and Constitutional Ideas, 19–39; 70–91.
Mabini, La Revolución, vol. 2, 269.
34
The Spanish colonial state that was established in the Philippines is conventionallyand correctly designated in Philippine historical studies as “theocratic” given the inseparability of the Church, especially the Spanish friars and religious corporations, fromthe business of government. An alternative term is “frailocracy.”
35
Mabini, La Revolución Filipina, vol. 2, 54.
36
I refer to several series of critiques of neocolonial political economy and US
economic domination of the Philippines that he produced and issued, in the form ofhandy pamphlets, with the collaboration of his wife Letizia Constantino. The classic text
through which to get introduced to Constantino’s ideological orientation and highlyinﬂuential work of critical decolonization is his quite gripping account of contemporary
and historical US hegemony in the Philippines and Filipino resistance to it, Neocolonial
Identity and Counter-Consciousness (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1978).
37
See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (New York: Routledge, 1989).
38
The NYU conference and book-writing project, conducted under the auspices of
NYU’s Asian/Paciﬁc/American Program and Institute, has now become the tome
Vestiges of War, edited by Francia and Shaw.
39“The ﬁrst international nation,” as he called the United States, or even more interestingly, “a federation of world cultures.”40
Bourne, “Trans-National America,” 284–85.
41
On our current conjuncture (which goes under the rubric “transnational,” among
others) as an epochal break from modernity, the baldest and most speciﬁc statement is
by Antonio Negri, Thesis 4: “The periodization of capitalist development shows that weare the beginning of a new epoch.” Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of
the Class Situation Today,” trans. Michael Hardt, Polygraph 5 (1992), 141. See also his
full-scale and now controversial exposition and elaboration of the twenty theses on Marxand certain of his other “post-Marxist” ideas in his collaboration with Michael Hardt,
Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), where he argues that weare now under a global regime that has no national center and whose governance of planetary life bespeaks a radically new form of “sovereignty” that networks the world without being speciﬁable and accountable to it.
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