ABSTRACT
This chapter subjects how geographies of war and 'post-war' were bound together in processes of colonial state formation, and in extension of democracy at multiple spatial scales. The ensuing exchange is illuminating, both for its formative character in US imperialism and counter-insurgency doctrine and for intersecting geographies of war and 'post-war' reconstruction in Philippines that it reveals. The chapter traces the development of ideologies and practices of American 'progressive military occupation' amidst continuing guerilla warfare in Philippines, the first US counter-insurgency fought in distant lands. If the American colonial project in Philippines offered model of US imperial engagement with the world, and with insular worlds of the tropics particularly, it was not clear that could be read in terms of discrete stages of conflict and reconstruction. On October 18, 1901, the forces of empire and democracy-seemingly contradictory impulses within American colonial state in Manila-reached accommodation in an early legal skirmish that tested efficacy of the new civil authority in Philippines.
