 Wonderful, yeah so a couple changes there I'm kind of halfway between Canada and Scotland right now I'm starting at Glasgow in September so that's different also I sort of narrowed my topic from the original abstract so thanks for inviting me to this unique and wonderful conference I've learned a lot and I'm really excited about kind of all the innovative work I've heard being done on Mindanao I come from a US history background so you know I'm often the only person at the conference talking about Mindanao and you know having to explain every single term and not having to do that here is what wonderful relief but I'm really humbled to be among scholars with so much regional expertise it's fantastic so my program abstract describes a larger article or set of articles I'm not sure that I'm presently working on involving the creation and maintenance of imperial labor regimes this is something that I didn't end up being able to fit into my first book which is coming out next year and given the limitations of time here I want to focus on a couple key examples of the interrelationship between work and Empire building in the southern Philippines so in particular I'm interested in road building and the creation of model communities in the district of Lanau under US military governance in terms of situating this there's a there's a growing body of writing on the US colonial state in Mindanao in the Sulawakipelago but North American scholars have traditionally tended to what else military conflict although over the last couple of decades this has begun to change some of you might have seen Michael Hawkins work or Greenwalthers work that that deals with other topics like race and religion but no larger project has addressed the complex ways that labor shaped US colonialism across Mindanao in the Sulawakipelago and the topic remains disconnected from this really sort of exciting innovative body of scholarship on the Constitution and centrality of work to US extra territorial control so there's for instance we go further north there's a lot of work being done on Filipino labor migration sort of within and outside of US extra territorial possessions stuff on the Panama Canal Cuba other topics like this so I'm thinking about sort of how do we situate this topic kind of within that so behind me here is a quote from the Chicago Daily Tribune in September 1899 it's not talking about Lanau but it gets at some of these ideas that I kind of want to pick apart here this is a few months after the Americans arrive in Sulu and make what's called the Bates Agreement with the Sultan of Sulu and part of the article reads the people of the island are even now thinking less of war and more of legitimate labor and this connection between military violence and labor is something that we see again and again throughout the period of US occupation even in these opening days of rule the idea of work of legitimate labor drove colonial policy and this this accelerates in coming years so you probably most of you probably encountered the term the moral problem whether in US colonial history or Philippine national history and this is often framed as an issue of labor by colonial policymakers the moral rehabilitation of the imperiale constructed morrow would be determined in this narrative by their successful adoption of Western modes of production and consumption so to state actors this meant blending military violence with applied labor programs targeting Muslim and Lumod communities and so we see this in a very very variety of areas during the period youth industrial education curriculums which Korean will tell you more about public works projects state-run marketplaces to name only a few so I'm using Lanau here because it remains understudied in the literature beyond battlefield narratives in terms of the US period although Midori Kawashima has done some really important work on this and in the following I want to assess how road building and colony making became cat categories by which civilizational fitness could be produced assessed and contested in the southern Philippines so some quick background here and forgive me if this is redundant Lanau posed unique challenges to the American colonial state previous Spanish missionary and military efforts there had been limited in the inland region lacked the accessibility of Kotobato Zambuanga or holo making it difficult to math and control beyond this Americans found Maranau politics opaque and struggle to understand the shifting alliances and kinship networks that differentiated groups around the lake collaboration with local tattoos did not emerge as readily as in Taosuk or Maguindono territories and those that did famously with this guy here John Pershing often extended only two small collections of villages just because of these complex sort of power structures and in Lanau with the Philippine-American War winding down in 1902 US military forces focused on pacifying Lanau army battalions led by Colonel Frank Baldwin and Captain John Pershing clashed repeatedly with Maranau groups resulting in hundreds of morrow deaths and relatively few American casualties a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the American period the military established bases at the northern and southern ends of the lake and Pershing personally conducted campaigns to bring the Maranau into the colonial fold and these sort of combined charm offensives with massive displays of military force targeting uncooperative tattoos and Sultans while the US military was able to use the complex local politics of Lanau to their advantage in certain cases they also viewed fragmentation as a long term impediment to governance Pershing and other officers saw collaboration as sultanants and Datus as a means of temporary pacification but also feared the reemergence of indigenous power centers that could mobilize greater opposition towards the occupation this was something that was in 1902 1903 already occurring on holo where groups of Taosuk strongmen had begun to push back against things like taxation land surveys and the regulation of the maritime environment so American Army officers in Lanau envisioned wage labor as a potential mitigating influence creating a homogenous force of Maranau workers would decrease reliance on local leaders and create modern colonial subjects capable of producing surplus value ideally the sedentism of daily labor would also encourage the emergence of a consumer culture thus locking the Maranau into production consumption cycles necessary for colonial capital to flourish gone would be slash and burn agricultural practices and local bartering systems replaced by a cash economy built on the backs of the Maranau peasant so through this lens labor became a means by which to simultaneously pacify and civilize Lanau's perceived disconnection from coastal Mindanao and the logistics problems this created for army forces on the March made road building an early imperative roads could forge links between the lake and coastal communities like illegal to the north or Malabang to the south integrating Lanau into the colonial state through rapid transfers of people and materials in May of 1902 Army engineers and enlisted men began building a wagon road connecting Malabang to Camp Vickers 14 miles distant at the southern edge of the lake Maranau men labored along the route placing telegraph poles and transporting supplies and US troops maintained a tentative relationship with these workers at the laborers provided crucial manpower and topographical knowledge to American soldiers but also found themselves subject to various forms of imperial imperial paranoia paranoia indeed if you go through the colonial archives the stories of you know the diaries of American soldiers are filled with this you know simultaneous recognition of the need to use local labor and also fear of local labor as well to the north road construction occurred along a 20 mile stretch of territory linking Iligan to the lakeside settlement of Marawi American engineers and surveyors grappled with a climb of nearly 2000 feet while officers negotiated with Maranau Datus to acquire day laborers in charge was the man who wrote this article guy named Major Robert Lee Bullard who was a veteran of the North American frontier as many US officers and enlisted men were in the Philippines and turned himself into a colonial specialist in a different capacity although that's another topic altogether Bullard lamented Spain's failed imperial mission and dreamed of drawing the Maranau into what he called the current of the world's progress so roads became something other than just roads they functioned as a guidepost towards civilization or civilization as imagined by the United States and Bullard's racialized world view the Iligan Marawi Road led Maranau communities away from a pre-colonial past or Spanish colonial past typified by Islam polygamy slavery traditional kinship networks and towards a future made legible by state power and directed labor the major in this article here wrote these long strange descriptions of how Maranau saw the Americans as gods who could force their subjects into slavery yet beneficently offered a living wage for for their labor this is a this article is totally bizarre text and I would spend the entire 20 minutes talking about it but I can't as happens reality was more complex than the colonial redemption narrative suggested cholera broke out amongst Americans in Maranau alike with the Maranau identifying the conditions brought by the Americans warfare and dislocation as aggravating the epidemic Bullard spent his days locked intense negotiations with community leaders many of whom reject rejected the culturally disruptive nature of American plans and moral labor gangs often worked at odd hours and and and not to the satisfaction of the Americans who many of whom emerged from from this rapidly industrializing East Coast US context and had a particular idea of what labor should look like even under less than perfect circumstances however roadwork mitigated what Bullard saw as the danger of idleness and instilled white military authority writing for the Atlantic Monthly in March 1906 he boasted that the ills of lawlessness that plague the region retreated as different factions collaborated to quote earn money together on the American road the one's favorite favorite punitive expedition pioneered by Pershing in the Lanao region had been replaced by what Bullard called the method of work the illegal Marawi whoa road was was plagued by practical challenges and underwritten by thank you by Bullard's problematic ideas but its completion did facilitate important connections between coasts and highlands goods flowed more freely to Marawi and its role as commercial hub in northern Lanao sort of deepened in this period the markets in Marawi traditionally served communities along the eastern and western sides of the lake although of individuals from these rancherias often had little contact with the colonial state a circum Lanao road envisioned by Pershing did not materialize and most villages connected with each other via rudimentary paths and suited for heavy traffic encounters with Americans in these isolated spaces frequently came in the form of search and destroy missions where troops burned Maranau crops as they scoured the landscape for for outlaw bands many areas remained unsurveyed and officials lamented the different difficulties of inducing civilization beyond the hubs of Marawi in the north and campfickers in the south appointed district governor of Lanao in October 1906 captain John Macaulay Palmer sought to build on Bullard's idea so this is kind of the second sort of example that I want to talk about to do so he developed plans that linked early infrastructural labor on the roads to later ideas of reform through agricultural colonies and any of you had caused to study the later years of the American operation occupation probably know about the rice colonies and all of these other sort of settler plans that came into effect Palmer's goal was broader goal was one of rationalization and control of course he wanted to reform the tribal wards which is a government system established to channel customary leadership towards official ends and this involved mapping the boundaries of rancherias of creating directories of local tattoos compiling all sorts of other statistics of populations industries resources holding instructive conferences and developing new modes of taxation basically modernizing the region itself but it also relied on what Palmer called cooperative work in early 1907 the district governor developed designs for a planned community across the August River from Marawi to be known as Don Salon he contacted American businessmen and Ilagan pushing them to harness what he called Maranao industrial capacity and transform the nascent settlement into an economic powerhouse there were precedents to this of course for the west in Zambuanga the district governor captain John Park Finley was experimenting with something he called the morrow exchange system which was a series of state run marketplaces that used capitalist methods to induce social change and Michael Hawkins has written a little bit about that and there's something on it in my book as well so inspired by this the government will now look to the 32 native markets ringing the shores of the lake or the 32 that they identified believing that Don Salon would serve as a hub for imported goods where white hole sailors would sell to traveling Maranao salesmen and the salesmen would move these items through the native market system encouraging the growth of a consumer culture the need for surplus capital to buy these types of goods would lead to the development of new cash crops like hemp and coffee expanding the district's export outputs the Datu would come to rely on American supplies and in Don Salon and the peasant now habituated to the trappings of modern material culture would eagerly work for his consumables so behind me this is a blurry photo that I took in a military archive maybe five or six years ago with a really bad digital camera so my apologies that took me a while to translate what was going on there Pauler did not stay long enough to watch his plans come to fruition resigning in October 1907 but after returning to the United States the former official maintained his interest in Lanao writing the provincial governor guy named Tasker Bliss with ambitious plans for reforming the region further and Palmer's new plan this chart which is a part of it involved the creation of a model colony where 50 Maranao families would farm 40 acre plots the community would grow coffee cocoa tobacco for export as well as staple crops for sustenance buildings roads bridges and boat launches would all be maintained by mandatory labor and this particular element the mandatory labor aspect of it was modeled on the Dutch system in Java so Palmer said to quote him here while the well the idea of enforced labor is rather startling to Americans its necessity in dealing with people like the Moro's must be apparent to anyone who's had occasion to study them or similar peoples in Malaysia so there's this sort of trans-imperial dimension going on here as well mandatory labor was viewed as useful for transitioning the peasant class out of what they call the slave system and into one where they voluntarily worked for profit eventually the colonies would self perpetuate and lead to the development of other industries so Palmer provided these charts showing profit projections for instance in order to incent the provincial governor to help him build this colony the thinking was then as it was later that the success of the settlers laboring in this particular way or the settlers in the colony laboring in this particular way that would be an object lesson to other Moro's so there'd be a there'd be like a domino effect right this is a similar idea you see in with the rice colonies as well the model colonies grew from a desire to stamp out local forms of organization and during his time in Lanau Palmer complained bitterly about autonomously minded Maranau leaders local Datu's or some local Datu's identified the changing job market as a potential threat and growing labor mobility meant that unmarried peasant men could change the residency frequently and this undermined Datu authority which relied at least partially on the rhythms of traditionally structured communities so labor became yet another way in which the colonial state challenged indigenous societies in the south objections to American impositions and there were many led to increased activity by anti-state Datu's the rise of outlaw bands and religious movements some groups would fortify themselves in kata's such as the one led by the Prophet UT near the mouth of the Taraka River others used the hilly terrain to stage hit-and-run attacks on American troops and collaborating Maranau villages so labor sort of became a source of social disruption and in the minds of Americans a potential cure-all as well so it had this kind of bifurcated role Palmer's colony ideas arrived at a time when military officials and white settlers across Mindanao in the Sula archipelago were experimenting with labor schemes Finley's markets in Zamboanga were one manifestation of this but further east in Davao Euro-American plantation or owners tried to lure Lumod villagers down from the hills to tend abacca and coconuts Patricia Dacuda's recent phenomenal dissertation on the talks all about this and Dr. Abin Alice has also done done work on this as well the specific colony model laid out by Palmer was not adopted but estimations of the Maranau continued to be defined by their capacity for work in 1911 for instance the Washington Times lamented the U.S. Army's failure to create a class of effective laborers saying blaming this for ongoing issues in the region the rice colonies that would operate in Kotobato and Lanau under the department of Mindanao in Sulu post 1913 grew to population pressures in the Christian north but they were also tutelary fantasies that would have been familiar to Palmer namely the idea that if moral families brought bought into the colonial labor model others would see them prosper and follow suit so redemption through labor ends up being this very durable concept in colonial Mindanao and so when I'm trying to sort of think about with with the larger article I mean this one I just I just wrote about these two sort of case studies in Lanau I'm trying to think more about sort of how work became this this really really durable concept in in constituting U.S. Imperial role in the southern Philippines so I'm not I'm not as far along with it as I want I want to be but it's nice to talk about something that I'm actually doing in the future rather than my book which is already done so I'd be happy for any suggestions thanks