ABSTRACT
Chapter one, “Insular territory: war, democracy, and America's ‘first moment of global ambition,’” narrates the origins of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines from the Spanish-American War to the Philippine-American War and concurrent establishment of the Insular Government under the U.S. War Department. Engaging with diverse understandings of the emerging American empire and colonial state formation in the archipelago, the chapter emphasizes the contested legal, political, and military construction of Insular Territory as a cross-cutting spatiality, worked out on the battlefield and in a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases (1901–1922), that which enabled the creation of American colonial spaces over the template of more than three centuries of Spanish colonial rule.
