Philippines

Philippines. The Philippine Islands, located in the western Pacific and named for King Philip of Spain, became a Spanish colony in 1571 and so remained for 325 years. American contact commenced in 1790, and regular trade began in 1796 with the voyage to Manila of the Salem ship Astrea with Nathaniel Bowditch as its supercargo. Between the 1820s and the 1880s, New England traders imported hemp, sugar, and other commodities from the Philippines.

The Filipinos' war for independence from Spain began in 1896. America intervened on 1 May 1898 when, as part of the Spanish‐American War, Commodore George Dewey's fleet defeated the Spanish navy in the Battle of Manila Bay. A Philippine movement under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964) proclaimed independence on 12 June 1898 and subsequently established a constitutional government. This initiative failed, however, after Spain transferred the archipelago to the United States by the Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in February 1899. From 1899 to 1903 the United States waged a war against forces of the First Philippine Republic that cost the lives, from injury and disease, of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and some 4,200 Americans. Involving both open battles and guerrilla campaigns, the war, especially the latter phase, was marked by atrocities later investigated by a U.S. Senate committee.

From the appointment of William Howard Taft to head the first civil commission in 1900, America's expressed intention was to limit its control over the colony. Filipino officials ran local government from the outset, and by 1907 the first Philippine legislature met and shared lawmaking responsibility with the Philippine Commission, appointed by the U.S. president. The 1916 Jones Act provided for an elected senate, completing the turnover of legislative responsibility to the Filipinos. The executive remained under U.S. control until 1935 when the Tydings‐McDuffie Act (1934) created the Philippine Commonwealth. Manuel Luis Quezon became the first elected Filipino president.

During World War II, Filipino guerrilla forces provided critical help in resisting the Japanese occupation, and the Philippines became independent on 4 July 1946. Subsequently, American economic and military assistance kept the Philippines and the United States closely allied. America exerted considerable control over the Philippine economy through tariff arrangements and leased military bases in the archipelago as part of the its Cold War strategy in Asia, particularly Clark Air Force Base and Subic Naval Base. The United States provided military aid to help the Philippine government suppress the communist Hukbalahap movement from 1946 to 1956. Philippine nationalists and others have dubbed these postwar relations neocolonialism.

U.S. support of Ferdinand Marcos's repressive martial law regime (1972–1986) elicited growing Filipino resentment of American influence, and in September 1991 the Philippine Senate voted to terminate the leases on the military bases. Despite the Philippines' growing affiliation with other Pacific Rim nations, American business investment in the Philippines and ties with a large Philippine‐American community kept the bonds between the two countries strong as the twentieth century ended.
See also Expansionism; Foreign Relations: The Economic Dimension; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia; Foreign Trade; Insular Cases; Protectorates and Dependencies.

Bibliography

H.W. Brands , Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines, 1992.
John A. Larkin , Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society, 1993.

John A. Larkin