The Moro Province of the Philippines:

National Imagination and the Periphery

in Comparative Perspective
By Joshua Gedacht
Introduction
During all the long period of Spanish of the Philippines, the internal affairs of
the Sulus remained absolutely in the hands of their chieftains. Spanish
jurisdiction was merely an external one. They managed their own local affairs
in their own way. We, having accepted Spain's sovereignty, had no more
rights than she had among the Sulus.1
Jacob Schurman
Chairman of the First U.S. Philippine Commission, 1899
No discussion of the Filipino people would be complete without a reference to
the Moros, a very picturesque and interesting people. Unconquered by the
Spanish or by the Christian Filipinos, they surrendered to the United States
Army because they thought they had an understanding that the American
flag would govern and protect them from the Filipino flag forever.2
Carmi A. Thompson
Special Representative to the
President of the United States, 1927
In his influential work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defined the
nation as an "imagined political community" wherein "members will never
know most of their fellow-members, meet them,
Throughout the imperial
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
period, circumstances
lives the image of their communion."3 This
served to keep the Moro
seminal reformulation spawned countless
Provinces at a distance
studies of nationalists and their imaginings of
from their nominal political
the nation. Less famously, Anderson also
rulers in Manila. This
outlined an assumption that informs much
remove engendered
subsequent work on the ideational creations of
ongoing tensions between
the nation. Noting an "isomorphism between
colonial authorities,
each nationalism's territorial stretch and that of
nationalist elites, and local
the previous imperial administrative unit,"
Muslim leaders.
Anderson asserted a coincidence between the
space of anti-colonial nationalist imagination and
colonial statehood. This correlation captured
much of the logic impelling anti-colonial
nationalist movements in Asia and elsewhere, while also suggesting many
contradictory impulses in colonial state formation and their important

implications for anti-imperial agitation. Although colonial powers regularly

consolidated unitary power within arbitrary boundaries, they also pursued
"divide and rule" policies that required multiple and differentiated
administrative structures. Such inconsistencies antagonized indigenous elites
and provided a motor force for nascent nationalist movements, even as they
contributed to lingering separatist sentiments in outlying provinces.
Mindanao and Sulu in the Philippines exemplified these complex dynamics.
Throughout the imperial period, circumstances served to keep the Moro
Provinces at a distance from their nominal political rulers in Manila. This
remove engendered ongoing tensions between colonial authorities,
nationalist elites, and local Muslim leaders. By considering the interplay
among these three groups, this paper will examine how the incongruities of
imperial governance transformed the colonial periphery of Mindanao and
Sulu into an integral, albeit bitterly contested, component of elite national
imagination.
To elucidate the evolving position of the periphery in Filipino nationalism
under colonialism, I will divide my inquiry into three parts. The first section
will briefly summarize two theoretical frameworks indirectly suggestive of
colonial contradictions and their significance for the idea of the nation:
Jackson and Rosberg's juridical/empirical schema of statehood and
Winichakul Thongchai's notion of mapping. The next section will focus on the
primary object of this study, the relationship between Manila and the Moro
Provinces in the Philippines. This analysis of the Philippines will be divided
into three subsections: the later period of Spanish imperial rule in the
nineteenth century; American military rule in Mindanao and Sulu between
1901 and 1914; and, the separatist administration of Governor General
Leonard Wood between 1921 and 1927. The third and final section will
examine the post-colonial ramifications of colonial administration for
separatism and the future of the Filipino nation.
Theory, "Divide and Rule," and the Nation
In the pre-colonial period, many areas recognized today as nation-states
lacked any semblance of political unity or cultural coherence. Few theorists
of anti-imperial nationalism address the question of why, if imperial powers
sometimes carved their contiguous holdings into administrative units of
fundamentally different kind and type, did the concept of the nation become
attached to the larger imperial holding rather than more local jurisdictions?
Yet these same scholars often present a teleological relationship between
colonialism and nationalism. In this view, the advent of imperial rule
necessarily transformed the global map into states that corresponded with
the boundaries of their previous colonial ruler. However, if colonial subdivisions and strategies of "divide and rule" did not mirror colonial,
indigenous state formations, they did offer alternative models and rationales
for more local forms of statehood. To understand why a state system

coterminous with broader European, American, and Japanese holdings

developed, one must move beyond somewhat facile assumptions and
investigate the aspects of the imperial international system that militated
against the inclusion of Mindanao and Sumatra into the fellowship of world
nations.
...the pressure of The political scientists Robert Jackson and Carl
international norms and Rosberg furnish an especially incisive analytical
the relative incapacity of lens for understanding the emergence of nationAfrican states to govern states with their typology of empirical and
demonstrated that juridical juridical statehood. Asserting in their article
functions ultimately played "Why Weak States Persist" that statehood "is an
the decisive role in shaping international legal condition rather than some
weak post-colonial states. kind of sociological given,"5 Jackson and Rosberg
delineate a distinction between a state's
empirical properties, i.e., the actual ability to
control a stable population and to ensure
effective government, and its juridical function of being a legal entity
recognized by the international community.6 They further unpack these
vague definitions, describing empirical statehood as the "authority to issue
regulations and the power to enforce them,"7 and juridical statehood as a
government's internationally sanctioned control over territorial "property."8
Jackson and Rosberg then proceed from this exercise in taxonomy to assess
the relative importance of the two types of statehood in the creation of
African nations. In their final analysis, the pressure of international norms
and the relative incapacity of African states to govern demonstrated that
juridical functions ultimately played the decisive role in shaping weak postcolonial states.
Although Jackson and Rosberg's concentration on Africa in the post World
War II period does not lend their analysis, prima facie, to a study of colonial
Southeast Asia, their framework is still highly applicable to the Filipino case
of national identity. The crux of this connection hinges on the contention that
"the European colonies were the only political vehicles that could give
expression to African nationalism; as a consequence, these artificial
jurisdictions acquired a vital legitimacy in the eyes of the most
knowledgeable Africans."9 Jackson and Rosberg argue that this "vital
legitimacy" derived from an international order that emphasized the
centrality of sovereignty and conceived of the world as a membership of
formally co-equal states. Thus, "however arbitrary and alien in origin the
inherited state jurisdictions might have been," anti-imperial nationalism had
little choice but to imagine its nation in terms of juridical colonial boundaries
even if it could not mobilize the capacities of the empirical state.10
While Jackson and Rosberg adduce this reasoning from post-colonial Africa, it
also possesses considerable relevance to colonial Southeast Asia. As

sovereignty gained normative prominence and as empire went increasingly

out of fashion in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, nationalists in Southeast Asia
began equating their prospective nations with the broader territories of
Empire.11 It did not matter that many indigenous leaders privately, and in
some cases publicly, acknowledged the historical heterogeneity of "the
Philippines." Demands for undiluted and unabridged sovereignty offered the
best, and perhaps only, available avenue to challenge imperialism. In this
global environment, Southeast Asian leaders could perceive administrative
segmentation and imperial decentralization not as an effort to return power
to more "traditional" units, but as a grievous affront to their nationalist
aspirations. By dividing their territory into neutered cantons, the colonial
powers could portray themselves as the protectors of oppressed minorities
and undermine the juridical, "property" like, basis of their anti-imperialist
competitors. Therefore there is a need to analyze how "Moroland" might
have simultaneously threatened the basis for imagined post-colonial nations
and stirred the embers of nationalism.
Beyond Jackson and Rosberg, Winichakul Thongchai's concept of mapping
advances another complementary theoretical approach to comprehending
the significance of the danger posed by peripheral regions like Mindanao and
Sulu. Though starting from radically different premises and methodological
backgrounds, Thongchai shares with Jackson and Rosberg an interest in
explaining how the intellectual notion of the nation-state preceded and in
fact predicted its empirical reality in the post-colonial world. Thongchai's
argument centers on his notion of the "geo-body." Denoting this neologism
as "a man-made territorial definition" which "is merely an effect of modern
geographical discourse," Thongchai envisions the "geo-body" as existent
"nowhere apart from the map."12 In other words, maps produce potent
images of the bounded nation. However, Thongchai makes it clear that the
"geo-body" does not exclusively belong to the realm of the imagination. The
concept of the "geo-body" can also channel practices associated with
statehood and reify the limits of the nationWhile scholars must resist
state:
the temptation to impute
unbroken continuity to the
There are innumerable concepts, practices, and
conflict or overlook
institutions related to it or working within the
intervening circumstances
provision and limitation of a nation's geo-body:
like the rise of global Islam,
the concept of integrity and sovereignty; border
the historical events of the
control, armed conflict, invasions, and wars; the
late colonial period loom
territorial definition of the national economy,
large in these troubles.
products, industries, trade, tax, custom duties,
education, administration, culture and so on. But
the term geo-body is used to signify that the
object of this study is not merely space or
territory. It is a component of the life of the nation. It is a source of pride,
loyalty, love, passion, bias, hatred, reason, unreason.13

By inextricably linking the sum of human activities to a bounded graphical

representation on maps, modern cartography effectively acts as the
handmaiden of the international state system. Moreover, the development of
colonial cartography, often a major endeavor of the imperial project, served
a very important role in reifying the legal fiction of Jackson and Rosberg's
notion of the "juridical state" in the popular imagination. In effect, maps
linked international legal convention to the imagining of nations. The
intertwined production of the "juridical state" by legal regimes and the "geobody" by cartographic regimes will thus inform much of the analysis in this
study.
The Philippines: Mindanao and Sulu
Apparently, they did not resolve the issue on territory, particularly in the
determination and delineation of areas to be placed under the Bangsamoro
Juridical Entity.14
Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).
In the Kuala Lumpur Talks of February 2005, representatives of the Filipino
government in Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front from Mindanao
met to negotiate a settlement on an issue that has plagued the region since
at least the nineteenth century.15 How autonomous should Muslim regions of
Mindanao and Sulu remain from their predominantly Catholic Visayan Islands
and Luzon counterparts? Do independence and separatist movements
constitute an intolerable challenge to the sovereign Filipino state, and how
much autonomy will the Filipino state countenance? Can Mindanao and Sulu
retain their cultural peculiarity within the Filipino nation-state? These highly
contentious issues have been a source of endemic violence and warfare
between separatist forces and Manila since the 1970s. Moreover, the 2006
comments of Eid Kabulu, the spokesman for the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front, indicate that sovereignty and borders in the proposed Muslim
"Bangsamoro Juridical Entity" remain at the forefront of this debate. While
scholars must resist the temptation to impute unbroken continuity to the
conflict or overlook intervening circumstances like the rise of global Islam,
the historical events of the late colonial period loom large in these troubles.
From 1850 to 1926, Spanish and American imperial powers lurched between
an unprecedented integrationist project and declarations of "Moroland"
separateness.
Late Spanish Imperialism, 1852 to 1898:
Of Sovereignty and Slave Raids
In 1851, at the conclusion of the latest round of intermittent warfare whcih
dated back all the way to 1565,16 the Sulu Sultanate and the Spanish agreed
to a peace treaty. The core element of this agreement, in the eyes of the

Spanish, rested with the recognition of sovereignty over the vast stretch of
nine hundred islands that comprise the Sulu Archipelago.17 The Sultan
agreed, nominally, to fly the Spanish flag, recognize Spanish government,
and abstain from making treaties with other foreign nationsin other words,
to cede all the trappings of independent sovereignty.18 However, these
arrangements soon came undone, following the tradition of numerous other
discarded treaties; periodic raiding continued, Spanish counterattacks
ensued, and warfare obstructed the imposition of effective Spanish rule.19
Though they enjoyed more success in Mindanao, the Spanish encountered
similar difficulties there and never were able to consolidate ruling power
through local government.20 This begs the question: why did these Muslim
regions remain so obdurate in the face of foreign aggression while the
Visayan Islands and Luzon acquiesced to Spanish rule three hundred years
earlier? And what import did the renewed effort at imperialist conquest in the
late nineteenth century have for Manila-based nationalism and the
recalcitrant Muslim lands of Mindanao and Sulu?
The notion of a solidifying Recent scholarship has debunked the traditional
"Moro" identity was largely explanation for resistance in Mindanao and Sulu:
an artifact of Spanish Islam. James Warren's Muslim Rulers and Rebels
merchants and sailors, and James Warren's The Sulu Zone conclusively
whose own experience with demonstrate that some sense of trans-local
Islamic "Moors" in Europe Islamic identity or solidarity in the face of
predisposed them to Spanish incursions did not unify this area.
viewing the inhabitants of Although there did exist a shared adherence to
Mindanao and Sulu as one Islam, the variegated cultures, languages, clan
devilish and war-like whole. groupings, and ethnicities of the area hardly
cohered into anything resembling a common
people. In the lowland Cotabato region of
Mindanao alone, three cultural groupings
organized around different languages competed for dominance,21 and a
highland/lowland division further distanced the island's inhabitants from one
another.22 Moreover, the Spanish sometimes managed to peel off sultanates
in Mindanao as allies against the more powerful entity based in Sulu.23 The
notion of a solidifying "Moro" identity was largely an artifact of Spanish
merchants and sailors, whose own experience with Islamic "Moors" in Europe
predisposed them to viewing the inhabitants of Mindanao and Sulu as one
devilish and war-like whole.24 This perception thus stemmed more from
Spanish biases than the reality on the ground.
The absence of a common "Moro Zone," however, should not lull historians
into the belief that Mindanao and Sulu occupied a position in the Southeast
Asian world comparable to that of the Visayans and Luzon. As James Warren
shows in Sulu Zone and Iranun and Balangingi, eighteenth and nineteenth
century phenomena in the global economy propelled the ascendance of the
Jolo Tausugs and the Iranun, forging a new economic and cultural unit as the

'Sulu Zone.'" Concentrated mainly in Sulu, with subsidiary settlements in

Mindanao as well as Sulawesi and Borneo in present day Indonesia, the
Iranun adroitly exploited the arrival of European trading empires by
satisfying their desire for exotic fish and forestry products. They
accomplished this by embarking on a major slave raiding enterprise, culling
chattel from distant places like Luzon and Melacca to harvest seafood, teak,
and other products in Sulu and Mindanao.25 The Iranun also subordinated
nearby ethnicities and sultanates in Mindanao not for the purposes of
slavery, but for basic food production that could sustain the booming
economy in the entrept of Jolo and Sulu Island more generally.26 While the
devastating slave raids in the Visayan Islands and Luzon incensed Spanish
authorities there, these strategies brought the Sulu Sultanate tremendous
wealth in the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century. It also
bound Sulu and Mindanao into an integrated, if differentiated economy
oriented mainly toward the "Land Below the Winds."27 The Visayans and
Luzon did figure into these structures, but except as an embittered
hinterland which supplied slaves to a distant power. The emergence of the
Sulu Zone, and not some essential cultural unity among Muslims, formed
much of the basis for difference that estranged these two regions through
much of the later colonial period.
While the Sulu Zone exercised considerable power in the nineteenth century,
the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the enhanced power of European
states encroached on their influence. The Dutch and British significantly
enlarged their presence in Southeast Asia during the second half of the
1800s, and even the laggard Spanish bolstered their presence in the
Philippines. In Siam Mapped, as mentioned earlier, Thongchai identifies the
"fetishizing" of colonial boundaries as one key consequence of Europe's
industrialization and outward expansion.28 Such pressures weakened the
autonomy of the Sulu Zone in two ways. On the one hand, the imperative of
defining borders prompted the Netherlands to claim formal and direct
ownership over ever-greater swaths of Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and
Guinea. While the simultaneous hardening and growth of the Dutch empire
never reached the Sulu Zone, it did induce the relatively weak Spanish to
renew their efforts to subdue that region and establish firm, incontrovertible
control.29 Interstitial areas between Empires stood markedly less chance in
this historical moment of escaping foreign invasion, and the 1851 treaty
mentioned earlier represented only the first of several Spanish campaigns to
forestall potential rivals and integrate Sulu and Mindanao into their holdings.
Meanwhile, the tightening of Spanish boundaries in Luzon and the Visayans
posed the other major challenge to the Sulu Zone. Spanish coastal defenses,
formerly so permeable, repelled the majority of the Sulu slave raids in the
late 1800s and undermined the basis for the Sultanate economy.30 Thus, the
heightened salience of borders in these two ways hastened Sulu and
Mindanao's decline.

What implications would this strengthening of frontiers entail for the colonial
entity known as the Philippines ? Though the Spanish continued to confront
intense resistance and the extent of their true dominion in Mindanao and
Sulu is doubtful,31 Spain did ratchet up its attempts to incorporate the
region into the Filipino "juridical" entity and the Filipino "geo-body." With the
introduction of the "Government of Mindanao" in
The Sultan's decision to
1860, Spanish authorities for the first time
spurn Filipino nationalists
imbued their nominal sway over the region with
like Aguinaldo in favor of
a legal gloss, telegraphing their sovereignty to
Bates thereby prefigured
would-be competitors.32 Beyond this innovative
the intricate and often
political form, Spain also launched the
bitter triangular
unprecedented endeavor of mapping their
relationships between
Muslim holdings. In a 1909 article, the Director
colonial authorities, Manila
of the American Bureau of Mines in Manila,
politicos, and Muslim datu
William Du Pre Smith, cited a magnetic survey
that would develop under
by Jesuit geographers in Mindanao as one of the
United States rule.
most significant cartographic enterprises
undertaken by the Spanish in the Philippines.33
Although Smith does not mention a year, this
presumably would have had to occur after the
Spanish first sent Jesuits to Mindanao in 1859.34 Moreover, Smith also
discusses the mapping of a remote Sulu Sea Island, Cagayan Sulu, by the
crew of the British ship Marchesa in 1883.35 While the Spanish did not
conduct this expedition, the British often cooperated with the Iberian nation
at this time and supplied valuable technical expertise. Content with
dominating the Filipino economy, the British generally found it expedient to
pass off the hassles and costs of governance to a third rate power.36 It is
thus not unreasonable to assume that the Marchesa enjoyed the blessings of
Spanish authorities. In sum then, this burst of cartographic and juridical
activity illustrates how Spain hoped to paper over the deficiencies of its rule
and attach Mindanao and Sulu to the Filipino colonial polity.
On the eve of American conquest in 1899, the status of the "Moro" territories
vis--vis the Philippines remained fluid. In one sense, rebellions and
resistance afflicted Spanish efforts to assert its dominance, and Mindanao
and Sulu remained largely beyond the ambit of Manila, Madrid, or any other
colonial center. As in centuries past, Iberian assertions of sovereignty
seemed devoid of substance. In another sense though, the circumstances of
"high imperialism" effectively diminished the threat posed by the Sulu
Sultanate, and the period witnessed new Spanish campaigns to map the
region, literally and figuratively, onto the colony. Thus, relations between the
Filipino center and the "Moro" periphery would remain susceptible to the
policies of the next imperial overlord: the United States.
A Purely Civil Government is Quite Impossible:"37
American Military Rule, 1899-1914

In the throes of bitter and ultimately futile battle against the Americans, one
of the leading protagonists of the Filipino independence movement, Emilio
Aguinaldo, initiated correspondence with the Sultan of Sulu. In a letter dated
January 18, 1899, Aguinaldo wrote to assure his, "great and powerful brother,
the Sultan of Jolo," that the new Philippine Republic would "respect
absolutely the beliefs and traditions of each island in order to establish on
solid bases the bonds of fraternal unity demanded by our mutual
interests."38 Aguinaldo concluded by guaranteeing the Sultan "the highest
assurance of friendship, consideration, and esteem."39 These entreaties
went unrequited. Instead, the Sultan opted to negotiate with Brigadier
General John Bates of the United States Army. Arriving in the Sulu capital of
Jolo in July 1899, Bates concluded a treaty vouchsafing that the "rights and
dignities of His Highness the Sultan and his datos shall be fully respected"
and promising the protection of religious freedom in return for a recognition
of American sovereignty.40 While many of Bates' colleagues criticized the
deal for being unduly lenient and conferring too much legitimacy on "The
Government of Sulu," it did succeed in cementing ties between leaders of the
Sulu aristocracy and the American military establishment.41 The Sultan's
decision to spurn Filipino nationalists like Aguinaldo in favor of Bates thereby
prefigured the intricate and often bitter triangular relationships between
colonial authorities, Manila politicos, and Muslim datu that would develop
under United States rule.
With the Bates Treaty of 1899 and the arrival of American troops in Mindanao
as well as Sulu by 1900, American troops and administrators found
themselves charged with the supervision of a vast, mysterious stretch of real
estate. Writing in 1931, Governor General Leonard Wood's biographer,
Hermann Hagedorn, depicted these lands in ominously menacing terms:
In tropic waters, a vast, green crab stretches out an irritated claw after a
school of minnows skipping out in the direction of Borneo. The crab is the
island of Mindanao, the minnows are the Sulu Archipelago. Southward along
the menacing claw the steamer bears the new governor.
On the left is a jagged shore rising three thousand feet or more to a dark
ridge with forests.42
While academics should not overstate the pervasiveness of this island "Heart
of Darkness" view, they should not discount it either. By inheriting these
southern "Moro Provinces," the United States needed to grapple with an
enormous and lightly populated area that comprised over half the territory of
their new archipelagic possessions and was four times larger than any other
Filipino province.43 Confronted with the unknown, it seems likely that
American arrivals would resort to preconceived frameworks for making sense
of the indigenous inhabitants. And the colonizers' new systems of
classification suggested they did just that.

Little time elapsed before the appropriate American authorities arrived at an

indubitable conclusion: the Muslims of the Philippines constituted a "wild"
race.44 The official 1904 colonial census divided the Filipino people into the
two overarching categories of "civilized" and "wild." The bulk of Filipinos
enjoyed the status of "civilized" by virtue of their Christian faith, even if
many other documents qualified this assessment with the prefix "semi,"
while the Census designated all the Muslim ethnicities, along with "Negritos"
and other tribes, as "wild." This categorization corresponded with the
viewpoints of many Americans on the ground. No sooner than he set ashore
on Mindanao in 1903 did General John Pershing proclaim of the Muslim that
"he is a savage,"45 and General George W. Davis castigated them as "born
pirates."46
The assumptions encoded by this American census scheme foreshadowed
two important characteristics of colonial rule in Mindanao and Sulu. First,
Americans would feel compelled to educate the inhabitants in the ways of
democracy and government. Given the undeveloped level of civilization
among these "wild" tribes, American military officials like General Davis
could declare in 1901 that "there is no civilized inhabitant of the Philippine
Islands, American, Spanish, or Filipino, who would even suggest that the
Moros are capable of civilized and enlightened self-government, for a
government of lawi.e., regulated liberty is absolutely unknown to and
unthinkable by them."47 Such deficiencies made it incumbent upon
Americans to furnish these benighted souls with tutelage in the ways of
political democracy. In a 1902 report, the Director of the American Bureau for
Non-Christian, David P. Barrows, reflected such sentiments when he
enunciated that "the objects of this bureau" is "to investigate the actual
condition of these pagan and Mohammedan tribes, and to recommend
legislation for their civil government."48 In many respects, this prescription
did not diverge from American plans elsewhere in the archipelago. A copious
literature documents the project of tutelage in Manila, where colonial
authorities embarked on a long term strategy to nurture democratic
practices among Christian Filipinos and prepare them for self-government at
some hazy point in the future.49 "Legislation" for the "civil government" of
"Mohammedan tribes" would seem of a piece with this. But a key distinction
did arise from the perception of difference between Christians and Muslims.
In that same report, Barrows subtly excluded the Muslims of Mindanao and
Sulu from the rest of the colony by stating that "there are seven great tribes
of Christians which form politically and socially the Filipino people, and the
Mohammedan Malays, or Moros of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago."50
The "Moros," essentially, did not appertain to the "Christians which form
politically and socially the Filipino people." While not universally held, this
understanding of difference was an article of faith among many Americans
working in the Philippines.51

With an idea of separateness firmly ingrained in the colonial psyche,

American officials from the outset constructed a mode of government in
"Moroland" that served to detach the Muslim South from the embryonic
Filipino polity. Philippine Commission Act No. 787, or the 1903 "Act Providing
for the Organization and the Government of the Moro Province,"52
functioned as the cornerstone of this entity Patricio Abinales termed "a
regime within a regime."53 Most notably, the Act stipulated that the Moro
Province would fall under the direct jurisdiction of the Civil Governor of the
Philippine Islands and the Philippine Commission. It also vested the Civil
Governor in Manila with the authority to appoint, "by and with the consent of
Philippine Commission," a whole sleuth of local officials including the
provincial governor, secretary, treasurer, attorney, engineer, and
superintendent of schools.54 And it further mandated that the provincial
governor, and many of the subordinate positions, be American military
officers. Such provisions stood in stark contrast to political innovations
elsewhere in the colony. As Michael Cullinane details in his monograph
Illustrado Politics, the American authorities had already devolved appreciable
power to local figures in Luzon and the Visayans by 1902, where an
indigenous, albeit limited, franchise elected municipal officials. These
municipal politicos in turn selected the provincial government.55 And though
the occupying army forces still exerted considerable influence, they did not
interfere in these local arrangements most of the time.56 Nothing of this sort
would come to pass in Mindanao and Sulu before 1914.
The juridical decoupling of "Moroland" from the rest of the American colony
had substantive repercussions for the early governance of Mindanao and
Sulu. Infrastructure policy offers one telling example. Although the military
did pursue some road and communications projects in other parts of the
archipelago, its efforts in Mindanao were unparalleled. Soldiers built a grid of
roads, telegraph lines, military outposts and naval patrols that became the
largest in the Philippines, enabling methodical military campaigns against
the sporadic rebellions of the early years, and then connecting the diverse
collection of Muslims on the island into a more integrated island
community.57
This impressive revenue Beyond infrastructure, economic policy affords
base, which departed an even more instructive glimpse into the import
significantly from the fiscal of Moroland's political structure. Intent on
norms of other Filipino keeping Mindanao and Sulu at a remove from the
provinces, would seemingly rest of the colony, military authorities
secure Mindanao and Sulu encouraged self-sufficiency in the area and,
with a solid underpinning surprisingly, went pretty far out of its way to
for autonomy from the rest discourage commercial ties with other Filipino
of the colony. areas. For instance, military authorities
sanctioned "Moro Exchange" markets that
conspicuously barred Chinese or "Filipino"

participation, thereby stimulating the growth of internal trade within the

province. The army governors also attempted to divert the exchange that
flourished between Muslim port cities like Cotabato and Filipino centers like
Manila and Cebu by renewing the right of Muslims to trade with Borneo,
Singapore, and even Australia. The Americans did not grant other Filipinos
these opportunities. And lastly, United States soldiers fostered the
spectacular rise of the hitherto non-existent hemp industry, as forty-two
plantations produced over 8,592 tons of the staple by 1911.58 The financial
proceeds from this internal exchange, external trade, and hemp production
allowed the American army regime to run budget surpluses every year with
the exception of 1909, 1910, and 1912.59 This impressive revenue base,
which departed significantly from the fiscal norms of other Filipino provinces,
would seemingly secure Mindanao and Sulu with a solid underpinning for
autonomy from the rest of the colony.
The Moro Province's steady drift away from the orbit of the Filipino colonial
political economy did not go unnoticed. As the gap between the structures of
government in the Christian and Muslim regions of the Philippines widened,
and as Christian Filipinos began organizing their own networks of influence
that joined provincial villages and Manila into one seamless web of
patronage, ambitious ilustrados issued more and more strident protests of
indignation.60 From 1903 through 1914, Filipinos in Luzon and the Visayans
progressively occupied a greater role in the government of the archipelago.
The formation of a unicameral Filipino legislature in Manila represented only
the most visible and dramatic manifestation of the trend toward self-rule,
albeit self-rule by a landed oligarchy.61 Moreover, the military presence in
the archipelago, though still large, abated considerably and exercised less
power over daily Filipino life. The Moro Province, by contrast, experienced
none of these changes, as they did not vote for municipal representatives,
did not play any part in selecting their own provincial governor, and did not
send any legislators to Manila. When the Americans took the almost
revolutionary step of allowing a legislature, it persisted in maintaining the
Moro Province's status as a ward of the military. And as late as 1909, the
military governor Tasker Bliss could baldly aver that "a purely civil
government is quite impossible" in Sulu and Mindanao.62 This trend did not
please Manila illustrados.
Although Patricio Abinales believes that ferment over the Muslim regions
commenced in 1907,63 Manuel L. Quezon's 1912 broadside entitled "The
Right of the Philippines to Independence " presents one of the earliest
available documents illustrative of the Manila mindset. Above all, the article
conveys the sense of insecurity that Mindanao and Sulu elicited amongst
Filipino nationalists. Out of the four pages in "The Right of the Philippines,"
Quezon devoted fully one and a half to the "Problem of the 'Savages,'" and
the "Moro Question."64 Why would Quezon, a shrewd progenitor of the
Filipino political party system and the first President of the Filipino

Commonwealth established in 1935, harp on such a superficially tangential

topic? Part of the answer rests with a straightforward desire to aggrandize
the status of Filipino elites. By stressing how "the Filipino Moros belong to the
same race as the Christian Filipinos, namely the Malay" and "the tie of
kinship would put a Filipino government into better position to govern the
Moros than the American government," Quezon was making a bid to
augment his political domain.65 In a related vein, the tantalizing possibility
of boosting the number of bureaucratic patronage posts at his disposal
probably figured into Quezon's thinking as well. But something else,
something beyond the grubby realm of machine politics, also lay at the core
of Quezon's argument.
Much of the argumentation in Quezon's polemic, and particularly his
assertions of Filipino military and legal power, emanated from the
contradictions of American policy. The United States promoted the idea of
Philippines coherence through visual media like maps and an outwardly
centralized juridical form, but it also simultaneously erected legal edifices
that called this very integrality into question. In 1909, for instance, one of
the leading geographers in the colonial establishment, William du Pre Smith,
published an article with a map of the colony. (See Figure 1) The map
projected an image to the world, pace Thongchai, of a unitary entity with
Mindanao and Sulu as co-equal constituent parts. Yet the United States
undermined not only the empirical, but also the juridical form of the Filipino
nation with its bifurcated structure of government that placed Moroland
beyond the purview of the Filipino legislature. In an international
environment where nationalist imaginings required the field of the "geobody," the separate American administration posed a real danger to the
legitimacy and aspirations of Quezon's nationalist milieu. In his pleas for a
common juridical framework, Quezon thus felt obligated to advance a case
for the "empirical" capacity of the Filipinos to govern the Muslim South.
Christian Filipinos should rule Moros not only because of their ties of kinship,
but because they would deploy a more effective political and military
presence than the Americans possibly could.

Figure 1: Map of the Philippines, from 1909 article written by Director of the
Manila Bureau of Mines, "Geographical Work in the Philippines " 66
A Philippine independent government can govern the Moros at least as well
as the United States is governing them today, if not better. The Moros are
kept under subjection through the American army, and the actual contingent
of United States troops in the territory inhabited by the said Moros is not
more than 7,000. There is no doubt that the Philippine independent
government could support a standing army of at least 30,000 men and could
place in Mindanao one-third of this force to keep order among the Moros; but
the Filipinos believe that this government of the Moros will meet with more
sympathy on the part of the Moros.67
Manuel Quezon, "The Right of the Philippines to Independence,"
Beyond the efficacy of a hypothetical military
force, Quezon also invoked the imperative of
restoring a common system of law, observing
that with regard to the issue of suffrage, "the
Christian and non-Christian Filipinos alike, would
stand on the same footing in the right of
franchise. The laws on the subject would be
general in character."68 Elsewhere, Gregorio
Araneta, an ally of Quezon's in the legislature
and a member of the Committee dealing with

Some of the datu, or the

Muslim leaders in
Mindanao and Sulu ...for
the first time fell under the
sway of Manila politics and
the developing
Nacionalista party.

finance and justice, stated in much more punctilious terms the same
imperative; namely, that uniform laws and standards of procedures should
obtain for all the provinces:
If, therefore, the legislature of the Island of Negros was not empowered to
repeal laws promulgated by the military governor of these islands, from
whom it received its power, and the Commission may not confer upon the
legislative council of the Moro Province greater powers than those conferred
upon the legislature of the Island of Negros, it is plain that the Commission
has no power to delegate to the Moro Province the right to amend or repeal
the laws of the Commission.69
In other words, Araneta, Quezon, and others hoped to eliminate the legal
exceptionality of Mindanao and Sulu and thereby definitively impose the writ
of the Manila Legislature over those territories. By doing so, they could reestablish a consistent set of laws for the entirety of the Philippines and
preserve the colony's sheen of juridical integrity.
One Last Hurrah for the Moro Province:
The Bacon Bill of 1926
As the Filipino legislature and Manila politicos exerted greater influence in
the evolving colonial polity between 1907 and 1914, the distinct legal,
political, and social position of the Moro Province became increasingly
untenable. It posed too much of an affront to the ambitions of Filipino elites,
and it offered too visible a symbol of how the nascent Filipino nation was not
yet truly a nation. Agitation on the part of the Filipinos, in conjunction with
transition in American leadership from the Republican to Democrat soon
precipitated a dramatic shift of policy. In 1914, the new United States
Governor General, Woodrow Wilson's appointee, Francis Burton Harrison,
oversaw the dismantling of the Moro Province military regime, the
establishment of a normalized Department of Mindanao and Sulu, and the
general incorporation of the region into the regular legal framework of the
Filipino nation.70 The Second Organic Act of 1916 codified this change,
placing Mindanao and Sulu for the first time under the jurisdiction of the
newly reorganized bicameral Filipino Congress.
Moreover, a number of de facto trends reinforced this de jure process of
integration. Christian Filipinos inundated the Moro Province in part to staff
the bureaucratic positions that proliferated in the region after 1914 and in
part to take advantage of multiplying economic and agricultural
opportunities.71 The incipient armed resistance to the Americans, though
brought under manageable control by the 1909, waned even more. But most
significant of all was the evolving role of the datu. Some of the datu, or the
Muslim leaders in Mindanao and Sulu who Jeremy Beckett depicted as "one
entitled to rule on account of his descent,"72 for the first time fell under the

sway of Manila politics and the developing Nacionalista party. Patricio

Abinales convincingly describes how one member of this aristocratic kinship
grouping, Datu Piang, endeared himself to Manila caciques by supporting the
new Department of Mindanao and Sulu and the expansion of Filipino public
schools into the region. In return, Datu Piang won an appointment to the
lower house of the Philippine Assembly and consolidated his control over
lucrative patronage networks.73 While many datu refrained from
participating in the world of Manila politics, the involvement of Piang and
others still signaled a major shift in Muslim-Christian Filipino relations under
American colonial rule.
In spite of the seemingly inexorable logic of integration, center-periphery
relations encountered another enormous stumbling block in the 1920s. As
the Republican Party regained power in the United States and American
stalwarts of Muslim separateness like Leonard Wood returned to the
Philippines as Governor-General in 1921, the colonial enthusiasm for the
Department of Mindanao and Sulu and for an independent Philippines
vanished. Instead, Wood pursued a strategy of intensifying the perception of
Christian-Muslim difference by detailing conflicts in minute detail in his
official reports and never missing a chance to emphasize Mindanao and
Sulu's peculiar place in the archipelago.74 He also cultivated the support of
datu who were antagonistic to Manila and its growing web of connections
with the politics of the Muslim South. Wood's disruptive machinations
culminated with a 1926 bill sponsored by his ally, Representative Robert
Bacon, in the United States House of Representatives. Interested mainly in
pleasing his backers both among rubber business interests and Leonard
Wood's coterie,75 Bacon revisited the logic of pre-1914 policy by drafting an
"independence bill." This bill, if enacted, would detach "the Moro Province "
from the rest of the Philippines and maintain direct American control there.76
But beneath this placid Politicians in Manila, already accustomed to
surface, the dispute over nearly a decade of accelerating integration,
the Bacon Bill and the erupted in fury.77 How could the United States
history of American rule dare to sunder such a pivotal region from the
more generally left some Filipino nation? Numerous party leaders and
problematic legacies in its nationalist figures took to the newspapers to
wake. decry the unspeakable calumny of this bill, with
Speaker of the Assembly Manuel Roxas
declaiming "we are at war" and Senator Camilo
Osias lamenting "the nefarious scheme."78 It is
also interesting to note that almost all of these bromides, in one way or
another, appealed to an almost divine sense of the Filipino nation. Speaker
Roxas for instance hoped that the massive protest rally in Manila against the
Bacon Bill would spark "a renewed feeling of national consciousness" and "let
us all fall behind the supreme national council which offers the only salvation
for our country in this hour of trial."79 Senator Sergio Osmea similarly

spoke of how the Bacon Bill would "dismember the Philippine nation," and
"destroy our unity."80 But more than any quotation, a picture inset from the
June 19th issue of the Philippine Free Press evokes the sense of violence that
many Filipinos believed the Bacon Bill would wreak on the Filipino "geo-body"
and juridical form. (See Figure 2) With Mindanao present in its normal place
on the Filipino map, but ominously blacked out, the illustration conveys the
perceived wound that separation would inflict on the Filipino nation. Such
images, as Thongchai discussed, can prove central to the idea of the nation
and the mobilization of national sentiment. Maps like this then undoubtedly
played a role in arousing the public to action.
The Bacon Bill, which amounted to the last hurrah of separatist sentiment in
Mindanao and Sulu during the colonial, or for that matter, pre-World War II
period, went down to defeat through the combined efforts of Manila
politicians and their considerable number of allies in Washington. The bill's
demise, finally, spelled the end of the United States' attachment to a distinct
" Moro Province."81 Relations between Filipino nationalist bosses and local
datu stabilized and ran a fairly harmonious course through the 1930s and the
creation of the Commonwealth in 1935.82 This stability would endure
straight through World War II, and the immediate post-war Republic faced its
most pressing challenges not from Muslims, but from Communist Huk
insurrectionists. But beneath this placid surface, the dispute over the Bacon
Bill and the history of American rule more generally left some problematic
legacies in its wake. The widespread datu embrace of what Abinales termed
the American "restoration" embittered many Filipino nationalists and elicited
a widespread sense of betrayal.83 Moreover, it set a precedent for keeping
Muslims and Christians apart. These realities would remain a part of
Mindanao and Sulu and return to haunt the Philippines after World War II.

Figure 2: Map of the Philippines with Mindanao and Sulu Conspicuously

Blacked out,
from the Philippines Free Press 84
Epilogue: Colonial History and Post-Colonial Separatism
In the 1960s and 70s, independence movements and violent separatist
rebellions erupted with tremendous form in the Filipino South, shattering the
relative calm that had prevailed in those areas at the conclusion of World
War II. In the Philippines, the main exponent of "Moro" independence was the
Moro National Liberation Front. Of course, to ascribe direct causality to the
distant historical events of the first half of the century would constitute an
error of teleological reasoning. Many circumstances have intervened to
radically reconstitute the Southeast Asian cultural-political scene since the
colonial era. In the Philippines, the migration of Christian settlers and the
displacement of Muslims from the majority in Mindanao and Sulu
transformed the social characteristic of the region. And the impact of weak
states and rejuvenated strains of Global Islam have also served to alter the
cultural landscape from its colonial incarnation. But to recognize the pivotal
importance of post-war developments and political actors in Moro separatism
does not require a dismissal of the pre-war past. It seems improbable that
contemporary movements do not draw from the legacies of separate colonial
administration, divide and rule policies, and the tortured efforts of nationalist
movements to incorporate messy societies into the neat juridical and
cartographic forms of the European state system. As such, this colonial
history did not simply abet the creation of coterminous post-colonial states,
as Benedict Anderson suggests. It also contributed to the creation of
historically, and colonially (as opposed to primordially) grounded centrifugal

impulses in the state system of the Southeast Asian world. And it should be
recognized as such.
<<< previous page
------------------1 Jacob G. Schurman, "The Philippines," The Yale Law Journal 9:5 (March
1900), 217.
2 Carmi A. Thompson, "Are the Filipinos Ready for Independence," Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science 131:Sp. Supplement
(May 1927), 3.
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 1991), 6.
4 For the barangay see Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso, State and
Society in the Philippines (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publications,
2005), 27.
5 Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, "Why Africa's Weak States Persist:
The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood," World Politics 35, no. 1 (Oct.
1982), 3.
6 See Ibid., 4-6, 12-14.
7 Ibid., 7.
8 Ibid., 13.
9 Ibid., 17.
10 Ibid., 18.
11 It should be noted that the sometimes contradictory norm of selfdetermination also emerged during this time.
12 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a
Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 17.
13 Ibid., 17.
14 "Territory Issue Snags Government, MILF Peace Talks," The Gulf Times,
May 6, 2006, http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?
cu_no=2&item_no=85113&version= 1&template_id=45&parent_id=25

15 United States Institute of Peace, "Special Report: The Mindanao Peace

Talks-Another Opportunity to Resolve the Moro Conflict in the Philippines,"
http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr131.pdf, 2.
16 Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of
the Philippines Press, 1999), 121.
17 Samuel Tan, Sulu under American Rule (Quezon City: University of the
Philippines Press, 1968), 15-16.
18 Ibid., 16.
19 Ibid., 17.
20 Thomas M. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and
Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 5.
21 Ibid., 29.
22 Ibid., 31-32.
23 Ibid., 77-78.
24 Ibid., 80.
25 James F. Warren, The Sulu Zone: The World Capitalist Economy and the
Historical Imagination (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), 39-40.
26 McKenna, 77-78.
27 Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the
Formation of the Philippine Nation-State ( Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2000), 47.
28 Winichakul, 133.
29 Peter Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim
Filipinos, 1899-1920 (Quezon City: Philippine Center for Advanced Studies,
1977), 12.
30 Warren, 44-45.
31 McKenna, 5.
32 Gowing, 13.

33 William Du Pre Smith, "Geographical Work in the Philippines," The

Geographical Journal 34:5 (Nov. 1909), 534.
34 McKenna, 79.
35 Smith, 532.
36 Abinales and Amoroso, 102.
37 Quote from Abinales, 17.
38 Quote from Gowing, 26.
39 Quote from ibid., 26.
40 Quote from Donna J. Amoroso, "Inheriting the 'Moro Problem': Muslim
Authority and Colonial Rule in British Malaya and the Philippines," The
American Colonial State in the Philippines : Global Perspectives, ed. Julian Go
and Anne L. Foster ( Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2003), 134.
41 Ibid., 135.
42 Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood: A Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Harper
& Brothers Publishers, 1931), 1.
43 Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the
Formation of the Philippine Nation-State ( Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2000), 19.
44 Amoroso, 121.
45 Quote from Gowing, 45.
46 Quote from ibid., 47.
47 Quote from ibid., 46.
48 David P. Barrows, "Report of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes for the
Year Ending August 31, 1902," Third Annual Report of the Philippine
Commission, 1902, Part 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903),
679.
49 See Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines : The Aims,
Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1981) among others.

50 Barrows, 681.
51 Gowing, 72
52 Ibid., 73.
53 Abinales, 18.
54 Gowing, 74.
55 Michael Cullinane, Illustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American
Rule, 1898-1908 ( Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003),
150.
56 See Abinales and Amoroso, 119-23: Military presence is not mentioned as
an important component of state-building here
57 Abinales, 19-20.
58 Ibid., 21.
59 Ibid., 21
60 Ibid., 17.
61 Cullinane, 314.
62 Quote from Abinales, 17.
63 Ibid., 30.
64 Manuel Quezon, "The Right of the Philippines to Independence," The
Filipino People 1, no. 2 (Oct. 1912), 1-5.
65 See Cullinane, 323: here there is discussion of the self-aggrandizing
tendencies of Quezon.
66 Smith, 531
67 Quezon, 5.
68 Ibid., 5.
69 United States Bureau of Insular Affairs, Journal of the Philippine
Commission Being a Special Section of the Second Philippine Legislature
(Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1911), 772.

70 Abinales, 31.
71 Ibid., 33.
72 Jeremy Beckett, "Political Families and Family Politics among the Muslim
Maguindanaon of Cotabata," An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the
Philippines, ed. Alfred W. McCoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Center for
Southeast Asia Studies, 1982), 398.
73 Patricio N. Abinales, "From Orang Besar to Colonial Big Man: Datu Piang of
Cotabato and the American Colonial State," Lives at the Margins: Biography
of Filipinos Obscure, Ordinary, and Heroic, ed. Alfred W. McCoy ( Madison :
University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, 2003), 210-11.
74 Howard T. Fry, "The Bacon Bill of 1926: New Light on an Exercise in
Divide-and-Rule," Philippine Studies 26 (1978), 259-60.
75 Fry, 257.
76 Ibid, 261.
77 See Abinales, Making Mindanao, 41-42 and Fry, 272.
78 " 'We Are at War'-Roxas," Philippine Free Press, July 3, 1926, 26.
79 Ibid., 26.
80 "New Separation Bill Shakes Political Heavens," Philippine Free Press, June
19, 1926, 36.
81 Abinales, 42-43.
82 Aruna Gopinath, The Tutelary Democrat (Quezon City: New Day
Publishers, 1987), 96-7.
83 Abinales, 58.
84 Ibid., 36.
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Joshua Gedacht