At the sunrise of the 20 th century, the U.S. military rapidly occupied Manila after which plunged right into a decade-long pacification crusade with outstanding parallels to today’s warfare in Iraq. Armed with state-of-the-art know-how from America’s first info revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the main sleek police and intelligence devices wherever lower than the yankee flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy indicates how this imperial panopticon slowly beaten the Filipino progressive move with a deadly mixture of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating details. Even after Washington freed its colony and gained international energy in 1945, it can interfere within the Philippines periodically for the subsequent half-century—using the rustic as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming neighborhood safety forces for repression. In attempting to create a democracy within the Philippines, the us unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the current day.
    yet protection suggestions bred within the tropical hothouse of colonial rule weren't contained, McCoy indicates, at this distant outer edge of yankee strength. Migrating homeward via either team of workers and guidelines, those techniques assisted in shaping a brand new federal safety equipment in the course of international struggle I. as soon as demonstrated below the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American method of public-private surveillance endured in a variety of varieties for the following fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with lively informers, secretive civilian enterprises, and executive counterintelligence enterprises. In each one succeeding international situation, this covert nexus accelerated its household operations, generating new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of work activists and ethnic groups in the course of global warfare I, to the mass incarceration of eastern americans in the course of international conflict II, all of the technique to the key blacklisting of suspected communists throughout the chilly War.

“With a wide ranging sweep of archival learn, McCoy indicates how repressive strategies constructed within the colonial Philippines migrated again to the USA to be used opposed to humans of colour, extraterrestrial beings, and very any heterodox problem to American strength. This ebook proves Mark Twain’s adage that you simply can't have an empire out of the country and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, college of Chicago

 “This ebook lays the Philippine physique politic at the exam desk to bare the ailment that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. yet McCoy additionally attracts the road from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of arguable counterinsurgency strategies utilized in Iraq have been sown within the anti-guerrilla operations within the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University

 

“Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is a magnificent old piece of analysis that appeals not just to Southeast Asianists but in addition to these attracted to interpreting the ancient embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police strength apparatuses and their it appears inherent propensity to enforce intolerant practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of present Southeast Asian Affairs

 

“McCoy’s extraordinary ebook . . . does justice either to its author’s deep wisdom of Philippine historical past in addition to to his infrequent services in unmasking the seamy undersides of kingdom power.”—POLAR: Political and criminal Anthropology Review

 

Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the organization for Asian Studies