ABSTRACT
Chapter five, “Coda: Insular empire,” serves as the book's epilogue and conclusion. It follows Forbes's travels from Manila to New York, via Moscow and Sussex, in a journey that anticipated the unraveling of the Taft-Forbes regime on the eve of the 1912 U.S. Presidential election. The election would put U.S. Philippine policy in the hands of the erstwhile anti-imperialists of the Democratic Party for the first time but did not, of course, mark the end of U.S. empire in the Philippines. Reflecting on the historically specific geographies of territory, map, landscape, and road that I attempt to reconstruct in what follows, the chapter considers the limits of the production of space as an imperial strategy but also the persistence of U.S. empire, and enduring elements of insular territoriality, in different forms.
