Monetary Authorities reviewed in Diplomatic History

Monetary Authorities was recently reviewed by (the great) Yoshiko Nagano in Diplomatic History. [Diplomatic History, dhad047, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad047]

Dr. Nagano has been the foremost expert on monetary and banking history in the American colonial Philippines, and I’m truly honored she would take time to thoughtfully read and review my book. Her book State and Finance in the Philippines (and her numerous articles) has been truly pathbreaking and was especially fruitful in generating horizons for my own approach to analyzing economic archives.

Monetary Authorities reviewed in American Quarterly

Monetary Authorities was recently part of a long review in American Quarterly by Leanne P. Day “Transpacific Radical Solidarities: Racial Capitalism, Empire, and Settler Colonialism.” [American Quarterly, Volume 75, Number 2, June 2023, pp. 405-418]

Other books reviewed include Archipelago of Resettlement, Menace to Empire, and Settler Garrison. It was a very generous and granular review of Monetary Authorities. Honored to be mentioned and connected to such groundbreaking books!

Monetary Authorities reviewed in Pacific Affairs

A succinct review of Monetary Authorities by Ateneo’s Katherine G. Lacson in Pacific Affairs. The questions about “unconditional decolonization” have me thinking some more about future research.

https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/monetary-authorities-capitalism-and-decolonization-in-the-american-colonial-philippines-by-allan-e-s-lumba/

Black Agenda Report Book Forum: Monetary Authorities Featured

Excited that Monetary Authorities was featured in Black Agenda Report’s Book Forum. I have so much respect for Black Agenda Report and its radical critiques of global politics. I also got to share a little about other authors and thinkers that have shaped me and my thinking.

You can check the link here: https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-allan-es-lumbas-book-monetary-authorities

Toynbee Prize Foundation Review

Monetary Authorities was recently reviewed by Jaimie Martin, and I, in turn reviewed, Martin’s The Meddlers. It was a cool experience, and there are so many resonances in the historical questions we are both exploring about tensions and entanglements between capitalism, imperialisms, and the possibilities (or impossibilities) of sovereignty.

https://toynbeeprize.org/posts/side-by-side-allan-lumbas-monetary-authorities-and-jamie-martins-the-meddlers-reviewed/

Monetary Authorities was recently featured in podcast, Critical Literary Consumption

I recently discussed my book Monetary Authorities on Critical Literary Consumption. It was a very generative, and more personal conversation with Anna Nguyen. The podcast tends to explore questions about writing form, reading practices, and theoretical approaches, so it made me think about my scholarship more reflexively. I also ended up sharing some of my other thoughts about field formations and counter-formations, the path I took to get to academia and what are my commitments while in this realm. Overall, it’s a more personal conversation, and I really got to hand it to Anna for being a wonderful host. Definitely check out some of the other interviews, which is with a lot of creative writers and radical scholars. You can listen to the episode here: link.

Thomas Sankara on Debt and Decolonization (1987)

A powerful and convincing speech, in plain language, on the mulltiple mechanisms of capitalist power (and knowledge) that produced necolonialisms throughout “postcolonial” Africa.

Courses scheduled for Fall 2023 and Winter 2024

I’ll be teaching some courses for AY 2023-2024

Fall 23 "American Capitalism: A Global History" and "U.S. Foreign Relations, 1945 to Present"

Winter 24 "History of Southeast Asia," and seminar "History of Asian America."

For more information please see: https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/history/programs/undergraduate/courses.html

Monetary Authorities was featured in podcast, Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast

I recently discussed my book Monetary Authorities on Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast. It was a great opportunity to delve deeper into themes of racial capitalism, decolonization, and imperial militarism, especially in light of the recent intensification of U.S. presence in and access to Philippine military bases. Jessica Levy, the host and editor, did a great job I believe in making my rambling a more succinct experience. I really appreciate the engaging questions and helpful framing of the main arguments and relevance of my book. You can hear it on apple podcasts, spotify, and directly from the Who Makes Cents website: link.

Fantasy Reductions: A response to Lisandro Claudio’s review of Monetary Authorities in Philippine Studies.

The December 2022 Vol. 70, no. 4 issue of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints contained a review of my book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American colonial Philippines. The review was written by Lisandro Claudio. The review was written in bad faith, shot through with, in some instances, deliberate misreadings, and in other instances, complete fabrications. Claudio frequently argues that I make claims that I never do. In the following I will highlight some of the more egregious instances which reveal Claudio’s desire to reduce my book to an enemy of good scholarship: as either a flimsy strawman or a dangerous bogeyman.

In one instance there is the fabricated argument that I demand that taxation be abolished.[i] Here he uses an example from Monetary Authorities chapter one (Philippine wartime taxation) and another example from chapter two (U.S. colonial seigniorage). The quote he uses in the example on seigniorage is incorrectly written (he writes “decolonization” when it should be “counter-decolonization”). Perhaps this typo by Claudio could have led to a misinterpretation, but in any case, Claudio uses these two examples to argue that I collapse “nuances” since they both refer to state techniques of capital accumulation. Here is Claudio’s argument about my supposed comparison between wartime taxation and colonial seigniorage.

Should Lumba dismiss both episodes as comparable cases of violent “capital accumulation” (i.e., making money)? Aguinaldo’s raising of taxes entailed a flowing of capital into a fledgling state that was combatting imperialism, while American tinkering with seigniorage generated money to build a colonial state that had restricted its own spending power through the gold standard. These nuances are not just important policy distinctions but moral ones as well. Because he condemns everything that happens within capitalism, Lumba has no compunction about deploying rightwing, libertarian rhetoric to discredit any form of “capital accumulation.” Aguinaldo’s tax regime, as a result, is just one of “the coercive techniques of expropriating wealth from the population under [the revolutionaries’] control” (32). Does Lumba advocate abolishing taxation?[ii]

I don’t directly compare these two episodes, but in Claudio’s mind I do. In fact, if anyone is guilty of collapsing “nuances” to make an argument, as he claims I do, it is clear from this instance, it is him. I agree, however, that they are connected by the concept of “taxation.” Seigniorage for instance can be considered a kind of “tax” imposed on a population for the “cost” of minting a currency they are legally required to use. In the history I trace, the U.S. uses the profits from this “tax” of seigniorage to offset costs of maintaining colonial occupation, especially through aiding the needs of military logistics and bolster the colonial civil government.

Again, I do not ever make a direct comparison between these two examples. Nor do I collapse “nuances” to make an argument about “abolishing taxation.” But instead, I explore these historical episodes (and other episodes as well) to show the actual gradations in modern state techniques of expropriation and its relation to capital accumulation. One episode demonstrates a kind of conditional decolonization (Philippine wartime taxes) and the other episode demonstrates a kind of counter-decolonization (U.S. seigniorage). Furthermore, even if these two states are ideologically different (one anti-imperial and the other imperial, a distinction my book is clear about sharpening), my book demonstrates there is a tendency for modern state formations to adhere to certain isomorphic structures under capitalism. Since most of my book examines the relation between state formation and capital accumulation (mainly the colonial state accumulation), I’m not sure why the multiple dimensions I focus on (be they taxation, or seigniorage, or savings banks, or speculative loans, etc.) should be considered dubious or somehow lacking nuance or complexity.

As for why I spend time on Aguinaldo’s taxation, it is because I am interested in how taxation, in this moment of attempted decolonization, might have inherited logics from the Spanish colonial state, and thus reproduced class and racial hierarchies. I explore how taxation—not in the abstract—but in the actual attempts to collect or to evade it during wartime, created instabilities within the revolutionary movement for decolonization and emboldened counter-revolutionary practices. In fact, as I state in the book, the ones who benefited the most or at least attempted to, were Filipino capitalists or landowners. And I’m not the only one who thought this way. In the late 19th century, propagandists like Gregorio Sancianco warned about how and why taxation reified colonial, class, and racial hierarchies. Apolinario Mabini also warned other leaders in the Malolos Government about the political risks of how wartime taxation would be interpreted by those of lower social rank. But my chapter is not interpreted by Claudio as a critique of how relations of power messily unfolded during the late nineteenth century, but instead seen as a simple manifesto for abolishing taxes. Claudio thus fantasizes an argument I never make, which to him, proves that I am “deploying rightwing, libertarian rhetoric,” and at the same time remain “sympathetic” to “communist armies.”

After mentioning my sympathies to “communist armies,” Claudio uses this moment in the review to launch into a tangential reference that supposedly exposes the contradictions in my thinking. Claudio references the “Vietminh” and what he alleges was their exploitative taxation policies.

Even communist armies (to which, as we shall see below, Lumba is sympathetic) such as the Vietminh taxed and, even worse, expropriated land from poor farmers to support their war effort.[iii]

The Viet Minh were an anticolonial coalition that warred against the French Indochina state from the 1940s to the mid-1950s. I do not ever mention the Viet Minh in my book. Yet there is this fantasy conjured that I would defend the Viet Minh if I did mention them in my book. Why he wants to compare a completely different political organization from a completely different geography and time period to the subject of my chapter on taxation (the late 19th century in the Philippines) remains a mystery to me. Perhaps it is to implant suspicion in the reader, like a bad rerun of a Cold War era scholarship, that I am some sort of communist sympathizer.

After this allegation of collapsing nuances for ideological purposes, Claudio then claims my scholarship is negligent, which leads to “factual error.”

One may reject all of capitalism, but that should not entail a refusal to assess its subtleties. A major consequence of such negligence is factual error. In chapter 2 Lumba accepts the premise of an economically illiterate colonial source and notes that “higher prices” often “accompanied gold- based currency.” As a result, “the prices for the necessities of life” would increase, and “wages would have to correspondingly be raised” (54). Lumba then proceeds to expose the racism implicit in the view that colonials should not be exposed to price inflation caused by the gold standard.[iv]

Again, I do not ever claim to accept “the premise of an economically illiterate colonial source.” Indeed, the section from which he lifts his quotes from is drawn from interviews of American and European businessmen conducted by the Philippine Commission during the Philippine American War. In this section I examine how and why the words and opinions from white businessmen would be treated by Charles Conant as reliable data as he designed the colonial monetary system.

The following paragraphs is the section from my book that Claudio lifts lines from, which supposedly prove that I accept “the premise of an economically illiterate colonial source.”

American entrepreneur John T. Mcleod argued that the Native would never be able to afford any of the higher prices that usually accompanied gold-based currency. Unlike individuals in modern industrial societies who understood how to properly save and invest money, the Native would simply “gamble it away.” Yet, even if the Native did in fact manage to not waste money through gambling, the Native’s way of life did not necessitate consuming higher priced modern commodities that a gold-based market would bring. Asked by the commission whether Natives, once on gold, would consume higher priced commodities produced in the United States such as manufactured clothes, Barnes dismissively answered: “the native does not use a great deal of clothing.”'' For both Mcleod and Barnes, therefore, the savage Native—one who wasted money and had primitive consumption needs—was incapable of the more modern desires that naturally accompanied gold currency.

Perhaps the most prudent rationale for anti-gold arguments, however, especially for American and European capitalists and entrepreneurs, had to do with the effect of gold currency on wages. If the prices for the necessities of life were to increase, wages would have to correspondingly be raised. Increased wages would cause a problem for American capitalists eager to profit from the colonial occupation of the Philippines. Another concern was that Natives could demand more value for their work and thus challenge the authority of their white employers and by extension the authority of the colonizer.[v]

This section illustrates how those on the ground believed markets based on a gold backed currency worked and how it could potentially hurt their bottom line in the colony. After all, from their perspectives, the gold standard only existed in modern industrial markets, where prices for goods appeared higher than the ones in the colonies. I do not understand how showing what the American and European business community thought about the gold standard could be considered a “factual error.” If anything, these paragraphs illustrate the alibis that capitalists conjured, not necessarily that they were correct in their logic. Instead this passage revealed their anti-gold logic and how they articulated it. The point is that their bottom-line interests were to suppress wages and keep exploitation going, which they argued could not continue under the gold-standard.

If we are to believe Claudio, I not only accept the premise of the gold standard automatically creating higher prices (as if prices and wages are inherently determined by monetary laws and are not instead overdetermined by capitalist intentions for profit), then I also accept that Filipinos simply “gamble away” their wages or could never develop more “modern desires” for consumable goods. The point of the paragraph is not to argue that these business owners in the colony actually knew what they were talking about, but rather that their opinions on the matter were elevated in the minds of the colonial state. In this way, it’s only through colonial occupation that obviously “economically illiterate” foreigners were transformed into sudden experts.

Claudio then goes on another tangent to describe the ideal “laws” and logic of a gold standard system. I’m not sure who he is arguing with at this point. Perhaps it is the economic experts of the early 1900s, but it’s certainly not me. In fact, if one considers Claudio’s terminology of “inflationary bias” and “deflationary bias,” he is literally describing how a gold standard should ideally operate if left in a vacuum. In reality, the justification for monetary standards (including the gold standard) is to create a stable value of currency. There is not supposed to be an inflationary or deflationary bias in standards, and instead these were what people at the time debated (1870s – 1910s). These debates would even lay at the basis of several social movements. Indeed, much of contemporary histories of money are less concerned about how the gold standard would have worked in ideal conditions and instead focus on how and why it would become naturalized as the most stable standard (especially in relation to a bimetallic system).

This supposed stability of the gold standard espoused by experts is especially strange to many historians, since what was considered a gold standard system oftentimes wasn’t an orthodox one. For instance, Yoshiko Nagano in her book State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898 – 1941 demonstrates that the American colonial Philippines was only briefly on a gold standard, and in fact became a de-facto dollar standard, especially after the collapse of the international gold-standard after WWI. That the gold standard would appear stable during the conquest of new colonialisms, expanding of imperialisms, and an intensification of settler colonialisms, is no coincidence. Gold standard empires primarily achieved “stability” through the dispossession and extraction of colonial mines, the increased militarization of international asymmetrical trade, the manipulation of colonial debts and laws (for instance in British India or Dutch Java), and of course collaborating with the banking and capitalist classes. These movements by capitalist empires is what I allude to throughout my book as the global conditions of what is happening in the Philippine colony. There is nothing “natural” about monetary standards being deflationary or inflationary. Prices are determined through a panoply of forces, not merely the logic of economic law.

What is striking about Claudio’s tangential rant, therefore, is it seems to want to determine which monetary policy that worked more efficiently in the colony (hard or fiat currency as he talks about in the review). Indeed, my refusal to choose which colonial policy would ideally be best for the colonized is what frustrates him. As he writes about my analysis of colonial policy:

While he acknowledges that wages were down during this period (144), he makes no attempt to assess which monetary standard would have best addressed this problem. (It would have been a fiat currency.)[vi]

I don’t find this speculation on which colonial policy would have worked best very useful in understanding how histories of power unfolded at the time. Instead, my book tracks how monetary policy congealed colonial relations of power, maintaining a racial and imperial hierarchy between colony and metropole. Oftentimes monetary policy occluded the violence that the currency system benefited from. One point I make in the book, is the role of militarized occupation. Indeed, it was the military occupation during the long Philippine American War (or the first decade and half of occupation that military cash) that kept the colonial monetary system afloat. Cash for militarized violence in turn motored the “civil” colonial government and economy of the Philippines.

In addition to fabrications and misreadings, Claudio makes hyperbolic claims about my book’s thesis. He alleges that my book contains dangerous ideas, ideas that would cause “generations of suffering Filipinos” perish. As he states:

Here I must admit my biases. As a liberal social-democrat, I believe in finding ways to make capitalism fairer in the short run. After all, generations of suffering Filipinos will be dead when/if the country achieves Lumba’s unconditional decolonization.[vii]

How does my book seem to turn a blind eye to the “generations of suffering Filipinos,” and how is my book seemingly responsible for this mass future death? For Claudio it is my conception of “unconditional decolonization,” something he equates to communism. Again, I do not ever make this equivalence, and indeed, much of what I look at as eruptions of what could be considered desires for “unconditional decolonization” have historiographically been categorized as reactionary rebellions, such as millenarian groups or even the Sakdalistas. Despite this, Claudio cites the book’s conclusion as proof of my dangerous thinking.

In my conclusion I contrast two irreconcilable viewpoints on money in the immediate years after Philippine national independence. One is from the first central bank head Miguel Cuaderno and the other is Luis Taruc, a leader in the Huk rebellion. As Claudio states:

Unconditional decolonization, however, is a high bar, and Taruc’s Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas—a sectarian party that sought “guidance” from Stalinist American and Russian operatives—hardly clears that bar. There is also nary a mention of how communists like Taruc envisioned the organization of money at this period. Was it the fiat currency of the pre-1922 Soviet Union? Or was it the effective gold standard implemented by the Gosbank (the Soviet central bank) afterward (a deflationary policy similar to Cuaderno’s approach)? Lumba is no doubt attracted to the revolutionary sentiment informing Taruc’s words. But while fighting words may hint at a different world, that world is built by plans.[viii]

Again, Claudio alleges something I never claim: stating that I am advocating for a decolonization modeled on a soviet style state, or as he writes, a decolonization which “sought ‘guidance’ from Stalinist American and Russian operatives.” This is an argument that is not in my book but conjured by Claudio, and one that is meant to impress upon the reader of the review, that I possess some kind of communist agenda in my writing. Perhaps by mentioning Stalin, it is to invoke in the minds of the reader a commonly thought historical villain, or perhaps to imply that Taruc was simply a puppet of foreign communists. In any of these cases the mention of Stalin is meant to undercut my examination of Taruc’s words, and by extension one of my main frameworks of historical analysis. Here Claudio is correct that I am more interested in examining the words than the policy of Taruc. I find the words expressed by Taruc generative in illustrating that desires for unconditional decolonization continued even after nominal Philippine independence had been achieved. Here is the Taruc quote I briefly examine in the conclusion:

The Filipino moves about in an American-made world. . . . The value of his peso depends entirely on the value of the American dollar. The very home he lives in (if he lives in the city) is virtually American-made: the corrugated iron roof, the nails in the walls, the electric light bulbs, the electric wiring and switches, the kitchen utensils, the plates and spoons, his toothbrush, the bed clothes, the ring with which he weds his wife. And finally, of American make, are the guns, the tanks, the planes, the artillery, the vehicles, and even the uni- forms of the troops that have been used to shoot down the Filipino people who would like to see a Filipino-made future for their children.[ix]

These words are from Taruc’s memoir Born of the People, which is thought to be mainly written by William Pomeroy. Taruc, later on in life, would renounce most of his communist thinking. For me, however, the words articulated in Taruc’s memoir, is not one from the viewpoint of a policymaker or even a “perfect” revolutionary, but rather Taruc’s quote articulated the possible suspicions of capitalist money (figured in the U.S. dollar) shared by those rebelling in the late 1940s through early 1950s. There was a suspicion that adopting “modernization” through the U.S. dollar (commodities, militarized security) eventually reproduced colonial dependency and colonial violence. They saw their desire for land reform under the newly independent nation-state as being blocked by dependency upon U.S. imperial power. I am not the first to point out this suspicion that independence instead brought upon “neocolonial” dependence for the Philippines. Taruc’s words, therefore, appeared to give voice to those who questioned how and why, despite achieving national independence, all of their things, their entire world, seemed to be dominated by American money. Those who joined the Huk rebellion, therefore, seemed to seek a different world from one impressed upon them. They refused a world that would be dependent upon and overdetermined by the U.S. dollar. By joining in a regional rebellion centered on food and land, they refused to follow the imperial logic laid out by capitalist empires in the Bretton Woods and GATT era.

As one of my mentors has said about radicals and revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century, they might not have had the right answers, but they did ask the right questions. I am therefore interested in Taruc’s words not because I hope to romanticize him as some sort of hero, but rather his words offer an entry-point to critique power. Taruc’s memoir, after all, had an international reach, a reach that resonated with others who were critical of global racial capitalism and U.S. empire. The foreword was written by Paul Robeson. And one of the blurbs for several first editions were written by W. E. B. Du Bois. Taruc, whether one agrees with him or not, was thus a figure for the possibility of another world emerging at the time: internationalist notions of anti-imperial solidarity connecting Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Taruc’s memoir gestured not only to national independence (or even a communist revolution) but rather to a world indebted to past anticolonial and antislavery rebellions and marronage, what Cedric Robinson has called “the Black Radical Tradition.”

This is all to say, Claudio’s undercutting of Taruc’s words was an attempt to undercut the very concept of unconditional decolonization. The focus of my book, however, is to illustrate how conditional decolonization could only emerge as a reaction to both formal colonialism and the threat of something else that continues to haunt all nation-states under capitalism, what I call unconditional decolonization. It is clear that I hope to denaturalize how power and hierarchy are normalized, and seek, through history, to examine how power and hierarchy operate over time. This is where Claudio and I obviously have incompatible notions of how to critically analyze history. I am not interested in creating studies about comparative policy, but rather, I am interested in tracking the dominant, residual, and emergent histories of decolonization in the Philippines.[x]

History to me is not foreclosed, there are many residual histories that had not yet been realized, and many yet to be. Many historical episodes of the past that could be rehearsals for future movements. I do not think historians should be content to justify the present through the past, but rather to illustrate how the dominance of the present came to be. And as I observe, the present of an independent Philippine nation-state was formed through a panoply of conscious suppression of what could have been: it was only through the suppression or domestication of a possible unconditional decolonization. Other scholars have of course read against the grain of Philippine history. I am indebted to their approach to texts, close reading the archives to better understand the residual possibilities of another possible world that fell away due to dominant forces in history, or to track the opening for new emergent worlds to come.[xi]

With my book I had intended for the relational concepts of “conditional decolonization,” “unconditional decolonization,” and “counter-decolonization,” to help better think through the Philippine past and pending. To me this is a serious and collaborate endeavor, one that is about inviting others to think alongside with. It is not a frivolous practice. Yet, Claudio at the end of his review implies that I take this all very lightly, that my scholarship is mere performance. He writes that my goal:

is ostensibly to provide a genealogy of racial capitalism in the Philippines, which necessitates, to borrow from contemporary slang, “dunking on” the language of imperialist and racist capitalists. In this regard Lumba’s work is a success. It is a clear-sighted, archivally rich, and erudite account of how imperial logic defined the birth of modern economic thinking in the Philippines and the US.

Yet we must hold Lumba to a higher bar. A predominantly linguistic approach does not suffice when studying the material phenomenon of capitalism, whose power to order everyday lives transcends the discursive. In the world of capital, it is necessary to study not just the discourse of economics, but also the economics itself. [x]

Here my book is backhandedly complimented as “a clear-sighted, archivally rich, and erudite account of how imperial logic defined the birth of modern economic thinking in the Philippines and the US.”[xii] But as I demonstrate, economic thinking was part and partial to the spectacular and structural violence enacted upon those colonized in the archipelago. It wasn’t simply that colonial officials held racist thoughts (they certainly did), but race (especially their investment in white supremacy) justified, legitimized, guided, and even inspired capital accumulation through colonial dispossession. To me, the “linguistic” archives—to which I assume he means the plans and policies that I analyze and that were created by monetary authorities—were not separate from the material world. Monetary policy not only recorded the world, but they simultaneously, to paraphrase Claudio, helped build the colonial world that monetary authorities wished to see. Here I am not introducing some radically new methodology to Philippine and Southeast Asian studies. I am, after all, indebted to others before me who studied the structures and superstructures of capitalism and colonialism in Southeast Asia.[xiii]

Why this historical approach doesn’t fit Claudio’s definition of the “material” (his emphasis) I don’t know. At the same time, I don’t really care to know. What it boils down to is this: I analyze capitalism as a historical process, something that emerges and is reproduced out of the material world. Capitalism is not some default state of the world that we just simply have to live under, accept, and tinker with. In other words, to think about capitalism as having a history—a history that we have all been forced to share in the present—simultaneously raises the possibility that capitalism doesn’t have to be our only shared future. Indeed, other futures may appear, other horizons of how to collectively live.

In this review, my book is treated like a fantasy. Claudio fantasizes about what my book should be, and since the book fails this fantasy, he fantasizes about what my book supposedly claims and reduces the complexity of my book to a strawman to attack, or a dangerous bogeyman that demands policing. Claudio admonishes my book as not being up to the proper standards, and perhaps even lowering the standards of Philippine studies specifically and historical scholarship, generally.

I must be held to a “higher bar,” Claudio writes. The sporting analogy of having my book needing to clear a “higher bar” reveals several aspects of Claudio’s approach to radical scholarship. First, it implies that the standards of peer review and any other scholarly feedback and editing were lowered because of my radical critique of racial capitalism. Deploying “anti-woke” parlance, Claudio claims that by critiquing the history of colonial and racial capitalism in the Philippines I am simply “‘dunking on’ the language of imperialist and racist capitalists.” A critique of racial capitalism, in other words, is not a difficult or rigorous form of scholarship, and one that is merely performative, without actual scholarly substance. At the same time, Claudio’s use of a sporting analogy also treats radical scholarship more generally like some competition, a sporting event where one performs a debate against defenseless actors of the past to try and shame those with power in the present. To me, however, my book is not a competition, game, or performance. It’s an invitation to seriously reckon with the past so as to genuinely seek justice and build good relations with others in the present.

With this response, I want to be clear: I’m not playing.

Notes:

[i] Claudio, “Review of Monetary Authorities,” 603

[ii] Claudio, 603

[iii] Claudio, 603

[iv] Claudio, 603

[v] Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 54

[vi] Claudio, 604.

[vii] Claudio, 602

[viii] Claudio, 605

[ix] Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 147.

[x] Claudio, 605

[xi] Here I am indebted to Lisa Lowe’s argument about possible histories in The Intimacy of Four Continents, which is an extension of Raymond Williams’ formulation.

[xii] I am thinking particularly of the works by Carol Hau, Vince Rafael, and Neferti Tadiar.

[xiii] Claudio, 605

[xiv] My methodological approach to archives is indebted to the methodological approaches of Ben Anderson, James Siegel, Vicente Rafael, Laurie Sears, Carol Hau, Pheng Cheah, Neferti Tadiar, etc.

New Directions in Political History

I was invited by the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era to take part in a dialogue on “New Directions in Political History,” specifically for the GAPE. In my contributed essays, I urge political historians to engage frameworks of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and affect to better rethink the horizons of U.S. political issues, past and pending. The abstract and link for the special issue for the roundtable is below:

This roundtable takes up old themes and new perspectives in the field of political history. Scholars engage with six questions across three main categories: the scope of the field, current debates, and teaching. The first two questions ask how we should think about political power and the boundaries of what constitute political history. The section on current debates interrogates the relationship between governing and social movements during the GAPE, and how to situate the political violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot in historical perspective. The final section on teaching takes up two very different challenges. One question is a perennial concern about connecting with students in the classroom about political history. The other dilemma is how to respond to the growing cascade of censorship laws passed by state legislatures that prohibit the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts.”

Journal of Gilded Age Progressive Era

Did you know that Monetary Authorities is open access?

Get a digital version for free here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58913

A paper I wrote for Currency and Empire at New School

Unsettled Matter: The Colonial Destruction of Money

Allan E. S. Lumba, Concordia University

I originally pitched this paper as something about the recoinage of silver currency in the Philippines during the initial years of the U.S. colonial occupation. It was intended to be a somewhat more granular extension of my argument that I made in my book, Monetary Authorities. By tracing the journey of collected silver currencies form the archipelago to the U.S. mint, its melting down, and recoinage in San Francisco, I was hoping to better map out the geography of U.S. colonial currencies more rigorously, and colonialisms more broadly. In particular I wanted to illuminate how and why we cannot think of the Philippine colony, as an “overseas” occupation, as some novel break from older U.S. colonialisms. And how it is crucial to think extractive and settler colonies as always alongside one another, feeding off each other, within a racial capitalist system. 

As I delved further into my sources, however, I became more interested in other questions, particularly material questions. First, I examine how silver currency was not necessary of stable matter. It was not only about bullion values contained within the coin, but also what it was backed by (sometimes gold due to silver crisis). During the first decade, for instance, the money-form of larger denomination “silver” in the Philippines was actually silver certificates. It was paper currency. I became fascinated about the kinds of thinking that went into paper appropriation, storage, and processing—the mutilation and the pulping—and the possible value of paper itself in relation to seigniorage, but also in relation to salvaging previous histories of paper currency, to sell in the paper market. Second, silver certificates were about state power (as micropower) filling and controlling circulation. I wonder why the state was obsessed about fine-tuning the number and speed of smaller more populous denominations and in addition, how the face of silver certificates in particular was a highly charged site for coding a new colonial regime.

The second question, related, yet perhaps more speculative, was a question of the relation between money and archives. Can there be money without archives? The tension over data (serial numbers) and the proper management and recordkeeping. During the initial roll-out of the new monetary system in the Philippine colony, there existed tensions over the proper record keeping of mutilated and macerated paper currency. Yet, the money-form itself is less about who holds money, but rather who has the authority to maintain records, and to make money—whatever form it may take—as legal for exchange. This obsession over recordkeeping, archiving, recoding, and mass data, is of course a materialization of the colonial state, how it seeks to portray itself as modern (and the metropole as modern) through knowledge accumulation. Here knowledge accumulation is the literal accumulation of money-forms, an accumulation through colonial dispossession. This is of course done through “knowledge,” but also an archiving of “knowledge,” which rests ultimately in a kind of violence against previous and other historical forms of exchange. In addition, as mentioned above, archiving was also a process that materialized on the face of currency. The images imposed by the new colonial state operated as substitution of a new colonial archive—an official imperial and state history—papering over previous memories and historical relations of the colonized. Money-as-archive (and perhaps all of modern money) thus is an attempt to erase the possibility to reckon with or make an account of other histories in the future.

I.  Unsettled Matter

Money is usually thought of in terms of circulation, and in thinking about circulation, one thinks about money’s power over territory and speed. But circulation is also about power as density. Density lets us think about presence and absence in the ordinary and quotidian. Currency is an expansion of colonial power relations on micro and macro scales. I refer to micropower here as habitual activities and structural mundane relations. What happens when density is lessened? The porousness of sovereign territoriality is exposed and it illustrates the need to fill the holes, saturate the pores with a new currency. Colonial occupation entails dispossession. Dispossession of existing currency, and thus the desire to substitute one money relation for the previous one. As the United States removed previous currencies from circulation, violently creating an absence, it justified its own presence by arguing that if it did not fill in the vacuum, anarchy and capitalist insecurity would ensue.

Currency circulation as micropower was especially necessary to spread out over the archipelago. The Mint Bureau of the Treasury and the War Department in the settler colony collaborated to materialize the new coinage law. The dies were struck on both sides of the continental settler colony, Philadelphia and San Francisco and then shipped via Hawaiʻi (for refueling) to Manila. Consequently, the colonial state was able to put 24,000,000 pesos of new coins in circulation early July 1903. The colonial state had set as the goal to eventually double this amount to saturate the “outlying portions of the archipelago.” A report written at the time described the smaller denominations in terms of material and purpose, which was mainly for use by the broader “modest scale” of exchange for the “natives of the archipelago.”

“The new currency issued in the islands has consisted not only of the standard piece of one peso, representing the weight of the Mexican dollar formerly is use, but also of pieces of fifty centavos, twenty centavos and ten centavos of silver, corresponding approximately in size to coins of the same number of cents in the United States; nickel pieces of five centavos; and bronze pieces of one and ½ centavos. The smaller denominations meet a great many requirements of the modest scale of expenditure prevailing among the natives of the archipelago and will be coined in as large quantities as the demand seems to require.”[1]

Yet coins were not the only necessary currency, but for larger transactions paper currency was introduced, mainly in “silver certificates.” Perhaps because these certificates were targeted for the upper classes and non-Native or Chinese merchants, businessmen, and bankers, these silver certificates would interestingly bear the portraits of Jose Rizal “the well known Filipino patriot,” and U.S. presidents George Washington and William McKinley.[2] A few years later a larger denomination silver certificate would be introduced with the figure of Magellan. I will return to this later.

In the practical operation of a new Philippine colonial monetary system, silver was necessary. Despite being forcefully transformed into a currency dependent upon the U.S. gold dollar, the United States was still fundamentally dependent on silver currencies. This was not only because of “domestic” settler agitations (the pro-silver populist movements from the 1870s – 1890s), but also because of how silver remained crucial to international monetary systems. Moreover, silver was essential for the most trusted money-form at the time: the coin. Even the token Philippine peso under U.S. colonialism was, in its initial years of introduction (1903 to 1906), composed of .900 fineness silver. The price of silver bullion would be seemingly unstable due to colonialisms. It was also because the U.S. had entered into a space of the world, Southeast Asia, where unfamiliar monetary territories existed, and were entangled with one another.

In addition to ongoing anti-colonial antagonisms in the archipelago, was the kinds of unsettled conditions elsewhere in the region. One particular stress on the silver supply was the ongoing Boxer Rebellion in China. As one authority argued, the gathering of “forces of the western powers” necessitated “a large army with is commissary, medical, quartermasters, and pay service.” This military infrastructure required currency that “could not be met from the stock of Mexican silver dollars in use…nor be supplied promptly by the Mexican mints.” [3] Due to the demand created from militarized scarcity, silver “Mexican coins” worth millions of U.S. dollars would be drained from the Philippine archipelago.[4] Chinese merchants (and more generally, the broader Chinese population) in the Philippines would be blamed for this loss of silver, which destabilized the new colonial monetary system.[5] Additionally, the proliferation of guerilla warfare with revolutionaries during the ongoing Long Philippine American War, would continue to disrupt the circulation of the new U.S. colonial currency.[6]

As a consequence of this systemic dependence, U.S. authorities were constantly anxious and obsessed over the market price of silver bullion. But it was not only the market price of bullion that troubled U.S. authorities, but the logistics of making money. The infrastructure for minting did not exist in the Philippines due to Spanish imperial hesitancy. As a consequence, in addition to material costs, transportation, machinery, contractor, and labor costs were especially of concern. This was especially significant, as the Philippine colonial state wished to make a substantial profit though seigniorage of the new colonial currency.[7]

By 1908, there was reported to be over 30 million pesos worth of Philippine coins and certificates in circulation that had been received directly from the U.S. mint.[8] It was not a simple process, however, especially considering the wild fluctuations of the global silver bullion prices.[9] In addition were pressures on the imperial logistics of making money. Logistics meant buying and transporting from foreign sites and navigating the international supply chain of silver, which had become tumultuous due to the demonetization of silver by some and the hoarding of it by others. This was not totally chaotic, however, but followed the geographies of a racial and colonial hierarchy between “core” monetary systems in the North Atlantic, and “peripheral” monetary systems in Asia.

One report in 1905 described the international disruptions of the global silver supply, which had, according to authorities, been “for many years nearly constant.” One contingency was the combined demonetizing of silver by “the German Imperial government,” the “Government of the Latin Union,” and the government of the U.S. settler metropole colony itself. “Thus these governments withdrew from the silver market, and the chief outlets remaining for the metal were found in India and the Orient.” This supply was further complicated because of imperial rivalry and violence.

“With the exhaustion or reduction of these old stocks occurred a considerable change in the demand for silver. All the governments which had been using their old silver have appeared in the market, or will so on appear, as purchasers of bullion. The war between Russia and Japan called for large amounts of silver in Manchuria, and while this demand was in a sense temporary, the silver absorbed there seems to be finding its way into circulation in different parts of China and the East, instead of returning upon the bullion market. The government of British India, moreover, has continuously made large purchases of silver since the autumn of 1903, and indicated to the Commission on International Exchange in 1904 that these purchases were being made with comparative regularity. Sill more recently, a fund, known as the “Special Ingot Reserve”, has been accumulated in London by the Indian Government, with the avowed purpose of being prepared to meet coinage demands in India promptly when they arose. The last Indian financial statement states that experience has shown that the amount of this reserve originally fixed was not large enough, and it has been decided that is amount shall be doubled.” [10]

 Adding to all this activity in Asia was the move by the Mexican government to take advantage of the upward trajectory of silver prices by selling off much of its currency reserves to London markets for gold. About $22,500,000 worth of silver flooded the London market and would destabilize the price of silver. [11]

II. The Logistics of Dispossession

The making of money through colonial dispossession also entailed imperial obsessions over logistics. U.S. authorities in the Philippine colony and the settler metropole would fixate on the price of transporting and amalgamating metals for the coin supply and for the monetary reserves. Working with the San Francisco mint, colonial and imperial authorities would transport tens of thousands of small denomination coins alongside U.S. troops. Indeed, the shipment of the new colonial currency in 1903 were transported on the same ships as U.S. soldiers across the Pacific, proving that the Philippine American War, declared completed in 1902 by the U.S. government, was in actuality far from over. San Francisco would also prove to be crucial in the production of Philippine colonial currency. The San Francisco Mint would be in charge of hiring contractors and technicians, purchasing metals and dies, and operating the machinery. In addition, it was capable of recoinage of expropriated currencies of past imperial and foreign sources, for example the Spanish-Filipino coin. [12] San Francisco, a city built from multiple and overlapping settler colonial processes, was a crucial node in assembling U.S. imperial techniques, material, and labor.

In addition to transportation, another logistical aspect of great concern was storage. Certain denominations of coins were introduced or discontinued due to anxieties over the space. Indeed, coins that were less popular could potentially clog up vaults rather than remain in circulation, endangering the movement necessary in markets to maintain popular confidence in the new currency.  One prime example of this was the one-half centavo. Authorities decided to discontinue the production of the “minor coin.” As one authority wrote in March of 1904:

“There has been no demand for the minor coins of this denomination, and what little has been placed in circulation has been practically forced. It is not considered adapted to the uses of the people, and consequently, there is little or none of it in circulation. The one-centavo coin is exceedingly popular, and nearly one hundred thousand pesos of it have been placed in circulation.

The half-centavo coin occupies a great deal of space in the vaults which could be utilized for the storage of other coin. It is considered adicalbe by this office to cease the coinage of money of this denomination, and utilize the metal in the coinage of the one-centavo pieces.”[13]

The lack of “demand” for a particular minor coin made it appear as if the colonial state was manipulating circulation, forcing its will into the realm of capital. Force was not supposed to be so blatant within the capitalist fantasy of the “free market” of exchange. Force would cast suspicion upon the colonizer, setting off other suspicions from the colonized. Consequently. authorities in the settler metropole agreed and decided to pause or slow down the production of the one-half centavo, a minor coin.[14]

The slowing down of production of Philippine minor coins was only possible since it coincided with production problems at the San Francisco Mint, which was “overtaxed with domestic coinage.”[15] The supply chain pause, however, could not be avoided for long by authorities in the Philippines. In June 1904 demand for minor coins in the colony had soared. The problem was that almost 7 million pesos worth of Spanish Filipino currency had been taken out of circulation, while only 1.5 million pesos worth of the new currency had been introduced. Provinces were also increasing demand, due to the uptick in agricultural production in the wake of the major disruptions of the “official” war and the legal demonization of non-U.S. colonial currencies There was thus a void left in the Treasury, with only around 3 million worth of pesos in the vaults, which was “considered inadequate” by authorities “to cover the possible demand for exchange.”[16] Production in San Francisco would be so behind schedule for months that authorities in the Philippines continued to plead in October for “the urgent necessity for prompt coinage” and “immediate action.”[17]

The problem in 1905 was that the price of silver bullion was continuing to wildly fluctuate as mentioned earlier, throwing a wrench in the minting supply chain. Consequently, different aspects of the production in San Francisco and Manila were being located as possible sites of “fixing.” In both cities, colonial and imperial law seemed to impede or throw a wrench into the stability and consistency of circulation.

In San Francisco it was the problem of logistical labor. There was not enough personnel to oversee the various steps necessary—dictated by intra-colonial monetary law—to verify and securitize the money supply. As one official in November 1904 complained of an “impossible condition” resulting from the tedious system in place.

“Weighing sealing and boxing of coinage continues during entire month and unless such orders are received one month in advance cannot be complied with. Orders at present are received so late as to crowd proper carrying out. Consideration of conditions is requested of the Department and also that impossible responsibility be not placed on these headquarters and officers who may be detailed to carry out instructions.”[18]

In Manila it was a problem of a supply and material. Silver bullion was becoming too difficult to procure.

“The demand for Philippine silver certificates, silver pesos, subsidiary and minor coins has been a heavy one, due to the fact that local currency can not be used as money and this demand will probably continue for some time to come. It would be most unfortunate if the Treasurer should be compelled to discontinue the issue of the silver certificates on account of there being a lack of pesos to be exchanged therefor.”[19]

One solution strongly promoted by some authorities was the recoinage of appropriated Spanish Filipino silver coins. But again, the process of recoinage—which entailed sending the currency to the settler metropolitan mints—would take up to 30 days. [20] One possible solution entailed borrowing bullion from the U.S. settler metropole supply to bypass the step of melting down and purifying the dispossessed coins.[21]

Due to increasing fears that silver continued to hemorrhage from the archipelago, another possible solution was to reduce the fineness of silver in the newest minted version of the minor coins.[22] This would be backed up by other authorities and eventually adopted.

“Treasurer recommends authority be secured to reduce fineness of peso to 800, same as Japanese yen and new Mexican subsidiary coins, which would not affect size of peso, would increase durability, and render improbable danger of export, which now exists.

 Present peso materially finer than Commission originally recommended. The action recommended by Treasure in this respect wise, conservative, and much safer than present conditions. Now coins would circulate side by side with present ones just as Mexican and Spanish Filipino circulated side by side, and profit would pay for recoinage of existing issue.”[23]

Finally, silver bullion was still necessary to be held in storage or as reserve for silver certificates. Despite the possible production of paper currency, there was anxiety over whether there was enough silver to back up demands for exchange.[24]

In addition to conditions of political hostility from ongoing anti-colonial resistance, American authorities were stressed by the conditions of the Philippine climate, supposedly hostile to modern money. The Philippines, which was considered a “tropical” place, wore down both metal and paper in ways foreign to U.S. officials. The erosion or disfigurement of money—as silver coin or silver certificate—meant the unsettling of uniformity or ordered circulation, an extension of the kinds of micropwer necessary in maintaining investment in the stability and credibility of a U.S. colonial state and economy.

One example were authorities’ concerns over the cleaning of smaller denomination silver coins that were deemed “unfit for circulation on account of corrosion from sea water.” A 1906 exchange between the Bureau of Insular Affairs (BIA) and the Director of the Mint, in the settler metropole is especially illuminating. In previous years, these “unfit” coins were transported from the Philippines across the Pacific on ships and then loaded onto trains to travel across the settler continent, to be cleaned in the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The Chief of the BIA, Frank McIntyre, believed that the coins could and should simply be cleaned in the archipelago, where a “chemist…is employed by the Philippine government.” This would not only save money and time, he reasoned, but would also demonstrate the capacity of the colonial state to operate through modern techniques and utilize modern knowledge.[25]

The level of detail elucidates the kind of technical knowledge necessary. It is seen in the following directions provided by a specialist at the Philadelphia U.S. Mint:

Relative to the cleaning of Philippine coins, I beg to inform you that the coiner reports that the samples sent by you were cleaned by being placed in a mixture containing ten gallons of pickle, made of equal parts of oil of vitriol and water, to which was added two gallons of oil of vitriol, two gallons of nitric acid, and four ounces muriatic acid. This mixture should be kept in an earthenware receptacle.

“The coins should be placed in a perforated earthenware basket and dipped into the mixture for a short time. When sufficiently cleaned they should be immediately dipped and thoroughly washed in water and then tried out in sawdust. if the mixture is found to be too strong, reduce the quantity of nitric acid.”[26]

But what this knowledge and technique of modernity in salvaging “unfit” coins to become “fit” also demonstrates that what is considered modern knowledge and technique is only possible in and through the conditions of settler colonial conditions, and knowledge collected and experiments conducted through centuries of settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous matter. Connecting it to the Philippines, also illustrates that modern technical knowledge accumulation emerges through interlocking-colonial dispossession.

In addition to silver coins were silver certificates, a paper form of money. Silver certificates were considered easy prey for tropical material conditions. According to authorities, modern paper gets worn down faster and were thus “unfit” for tropical conditions.[27] Thus authorities speculated on the need to macerate worn out paper money and create anew, or to at least derive some sort of value from the older unusable material form, by selling the pulp on the paper market.

“In view of the fact that paper currency has now been shipped to the Philippines, and will before long be circulating in those islands, the question of the redemption and destruction of worn out and mutilated currency will soon become an important one to the Treasurer of the Philippine Archipilego. As you know the climate is hot and moist, every purse and pocket which carries silver certificate will be sweatty [sic], and it will not be long until certificates will reach the Treasurer which out not for sanitary reasons to be reissued. As the Philippine Islands have no macerating machine and perhaps have devised no plan for the destruction of mutilated currency, I venture to suggest that a letter to be written to the Secreatary of the Treasury requesting that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing be invited to describe some process whereby mutilated currency may be effectively destroyed so that it may be charged off the accounts of the Treasurer of the Philippine Archipelago.”[28]

A process for the destruction of paper money was necessary. It was an intra-colonial process that tied together multiple sites across the Pacific and North America. It also entailed myriad machinery and chemicals and other materials, illustrating the dependence of destroying money on other supply sources.

One possible process of maceration went as such. First large cylindrical revolving boilers, holding a capacity of about 1,700 pounds, “such as were used in old paper mills” were “fitted with steam and water connection.” Each boiler was sealed with “a removable iron cap fitted with locks of different combinations, the keys of which are held, respectively, by the several representatives of the offices responsible for the contents of the cylinder.” Each cylinder was then filled with “soda ash and lime for the purpose of destroying the ink with which these papers are printed.” It was then locked and filled with steam “equal to from 15 to 25 pounds pressure is turned on, furnishing the requirist heat for boiling the contents.” It was estimated that for each 1 hundred pounds of paper currency destroyed would require different combinations of lime, soda ash, and water. The cylinders were then set into motion and after several hours the contents were examined. If the pulp contained no more ink, then it would be removed. The pulp would then be sent to a “board-making machine similar to that used for the manufacture of tar-boards, or trunk-boards, and is dried and made up into bales of 250 pounds each.” According to the expert once flattened into a commodity shape, the pulp could be sold “from $18 to $20 per 1,000 pounds for resue in the manufacture of paper of commerce.” Overall the cost of operation was estimated to be about “$20 for macerating on an average of 2,000 pounds of securities per day, against which there is a credit of the amount realized from the sale of the product, about 1,000 lbs. of dried pulp per day.” The overall start-up cost of a macerating cylinder was estimated at $2,245.[29]

Another alternative, which cut the costs of additional chemicals or solvents like alkali, was a specialized machine used by the Treasury. This machine, manufactured by the Holyoke Machine Company, was more automated, comprising of an “engine which cuts and steams the paper within its boiler without the use of alkalis or solvents other than steam.” The cost of the machine was estimated at $2,750, and it was believed to hold the capacity to handle macerating 500 pounds of dry paper per day. Unfortunately, since there was no alkali involved, the ink was not removed, and no pulp could be produced for resale. [30] Maceration was thus a costly process, with several possibilities of recouping costs. At the same time, maceration was strangely a subset of the paper industry, even involving the development of industrial machinery.

A sample of pulp made from macerated material:[31]

III. Money as Archive

In all these situations of recoinage—of cleaning “unfit” coins, reducing the fineness of silver in coins, or even pulping and reprinting silver certificates—was that money, despite changing its material, could still survive in its essence as money-form through the archives. In other words, the practice of archiving—which is to say the very concept of “the archive”—was always necessary for the money-form. This is most visible when one considers the labor of archiving throughout the process of the destruction and production of money. I borrow Derrida’s conception of archive to more acutely emphasize that the deployment of creating multiple steps of recording and verification—to archive this process—was a practice or habit that flexed power and command.[32]

Colonial money was also an archive to replace previous histories, and to crowd out any history other than U.S. colonial history. It is the generation of more data to disappear other previous kinds of data: a settler tactic and logic. Through this material history, we see how the colonial state is materialized—how it seeks to operate as modernity itself. But Silver Certificates were also some of the most visually imposing and blatant of U.S. imperial power, and indeed imperial history itself. Out of all the “money-forms” forced into circulation by the U.S. colonial state, the silver certificate is perhaps the most shockingly cliché in terms of its iconography: Washington, McKinley, Magellan. It is the cooptation of Rizal as a nationalist hero, which begins the process and animation of recoding Rizal as a non-violent “reformer” rather than a violent “radical.”

The new currency issued in the islands has consisted not only of the standard piece of one peso, representing the weight of the Mexican dollar formerly in use, but also of pieces of fifty centavos, twenty centavos and ten centavos of silver, corresponding approximately in size to coins of the same number of cents in the United States; nickel pieces of five centavos; and bronze pieces of one and ½ centavos. The smaller denominations meet a great many requirements of the modest scale of expenditure prevailing among the natives of the archipelago and will be coined in as large quantities as the demand seems to require. In order to meet the different class of currency requirements for larger transacitons and to take the place of the paper currency of the United States, which is now leaving the Philippines, coin certificates have been issued in the denominations of two, five and ten pesos authorized by the coinage act. These certficates bear the portrait of Rizal, the well known Filipino patriot, of Presdient McKinley and of President Washington. [33]

Below are silver certificates from 1903 include Washington and Mckinley, and Rizal. In 1906, Magellan was included, due to demand for larger denominations.[34]

The state was also hungry to accumulate data, and the accumulation of monetary data exhibited the process of racial capitalism in the colonization of Philippine money. The recording of every single serial number and other description of notes both destroyed and created materialized the simultaneous dispossession of, and extraction from, the colonized and its replacement by colonizer matter. Circulation entailed archiving the colonial order of money. We see this simultaneous production of money and archiving in the following process of maceration of paper money.

To the process of destroying paper money, the same being desired for the guidance of the government of the Philippine Archipelago in disposing of its mutilated silver certificates, I have the honor to inform you that, when mutilated money issued by the Untied States is received at this Department for redemption, it is counted in the office of the Treasurer of the United States into bundles of four thousand (4000) notes each, sub-divided into packages of one hundred (100) each, and these packages are cut in half lengthwise by a machine constructed for that purpose. The upper halves go to the Register of the Treasury for verification and the lower halves to the Secretary. After verification, both halves are turned over to a committee appointed to witness their destruction by maceration, and when they have been destroyed, the committee furnish a certificate to that effect, which is the basis for a credit to the Treasurer on account of the redemption of the notes.[35]

As we see in this process, serial numbers were recorded before being divided and sent to two different offices. At the two different offices, the two halves were separately verified. Afterward, the halves were brought to the same site to be destroyed, but the destruction had to be witnessed. And after the destruction the “committee” of witnesses “furnish a certificate,” creating another record as “the basis for a credit.” It is thus the series of records—or the archiving of the entire process of verified and orderly destruction—that leads to a credit that can be exchanged for the “redemption of the notes.” In this instance, anarchy is held at bay, and value is produced only in and through the archive.

But there were tensions, and perhaps contradictions, within the archiving process, or at least when considering the cost of archiving. We see this in 1908 contentions between different colonial authorities. The following complaint by one official illustrates the problem of costs due to excess need for laboring bodies and labor time.

“It was found that to keep a record of serial numbers of the individual bills destroyed, would require almost double the force of the Auditor’s Office. It is stated that this was done until about twenty-five or thirty years ago, when the volume of currency destroyed became so great that some shorter method had to be devised; and from the experience they had had it was found that a record of the serial numbers served no material purpose, that it was rarely, if ever, consulted, and therefore it was abandoned.”

This particular official questioned the need for the archives, seeing recordkeeping serial numbers as an unnecessary expenditure. As a possible solution this official suggests short-circuiting the process to “abandon [the] check of the numbers destroyed, and take cognizance only of the amount of money involved, which, they say, will involve no difficulty.”[36]

In addition to these labor problems was the law. The Auditor had to legally be one of the witnesses of the destruction of the currency, which would further delay the maceration process. All these issues piled up and created a stoppage of the entire process that would last almost half a year. Some worried about the millions worth of pesos in the vaults, that the paper certificates would be devoured by “white ants” before credit could be issued.[37] Despite the urgency, the postponement would drag out almost for a year, with authorities on both sides of the Pacific arguing over whether archiving the serial numbers was necessary. In the end, due to concerns over counterfeit certificates, the theft of not fully destroyed certificates that could be redeemed, “dummy cases” of certificates as substitution,[38] and in general the public appearance of modern state agents carrying out “reasonable diligence, and the precautions dictated by ordinary business prudence,” the maceration process would adhere to a rigorous archiving of serial numbers.[39] In other words, concerns over security would eventually triumph over concerns over labor costs.

[1] “Currency of the Philippine Islands,” Undated but most likely mid-1903; Box 586, Folder 9714, Records of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Record Group 350, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter BIA RG350, NARA).

[2] “Currency of the Philippine Islands,” Undated but most likely mid-1903; Box 586, Folder 9714, BIA RG350, NARA.

[3] Charles Conant, “The currency of the Philippine Islands,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Nov., 1902, Vol. 20, Finance (Nov., 1902), 45

[4] Charles Conant, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , Nov., 1902, Vol. 20, Finance (Nov., 1902), 45

[5] Allan E. S. Lumba, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), Chapter 2.

[6] Monetary Authorities, Chapter 2.

[7] Monetary Authorities, Chapter 2.

[8] “Correspondence from Ide to McIntyre,” February 8, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[9] “Correspondence from the Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs to the Governor General of Philippine Islands,” December 9, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[10] “Report on Currency Legislation under United States,” February 27, 1912; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[11] “Report on Currency Legislation under United States,” February 27, 1912; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[12] “Cablegram from Edwards,“ October 23, 1903; Box 586, Folder 9714, BIA RG350, NARA.

[13] “Correspondence from Treasurer of Philippine Islands to the Secretary of Finance,” March 18, 1904; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[14] “Correspondence from Edwards to Wright,” March 26, 1904; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[15] “Correspondence from Edwards to Wright,” March 26, 1904; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[16] “Correspondence from The Treasurer to the Secretary of Finance and Justice,” June 20, 1904; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[17] “Correspondence from Philippine Treasurer to Secreatary of Fiancne and Justice, October 8, 1904; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[18] “Correspondence from the Commanding Department of California to the Military Secretary of the Army,” November 30, 1904; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[19] “Correspondence from the Treasurer of the Philippines to the Secretary of Finance and Justice,” January 11, 1905; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[20] “Correspondence from Edwards to Wright,” April 11, 1905; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[21] “Correspondence from Edwards to Wright,” April 11, 1905; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[22] “Telegram from Edwards to Jenks,” November 18, 1906; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[23] “From Philippine Treasurer to Secretary of Finance and Justice,” November 23, 1905; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[24] “From Acting Treasurer, PI. To Secretary of Finance and Justice,” Jan 11, 1905; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[25] “Correspondence from Director of U.S. Mint to McIntyre,” May 18, 1906; Box 108, Folder 808, BIA RG350, NARA.

[26] “Correspondence from Acting Superintendent to the Director of the Mint,” May 18, 1906; Box 269, Folder 2325, BIA RG350, NARA.

[27] “Correspondence from the Philippine Islands Treasurer to the Governor General,” October 14, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[28] “Memorandum on Destruction of Philippine Island Currency,” August 22, 1903; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[29] “Director of U.S. Mint to Chief of Bureau of Insular Affairs,” August 28, 1903; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[30] “Director of U.S. Mint to Chief of Bureau of Insular Affairs,” August 28, 1903; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[31] “Pulp Sample,” September 1, 1903; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[32] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

[33] “Currency of the Philippine Islands,” Undated but most likely mid-1903; Box 586, Folder 9714, BIA RG350, NARA.

[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Philippine_peso

[35] “Correspondence from the Acting Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to the Secretary of War,” September 1, 1903; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[36] “Correspondence from the Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs to the Governor General of Philippine Islands,” December 9, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[37] “Correspondence from the Philippine Islands Treasurer to the Governor General,” October 14, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[38] “Correspondence from the Acting Auditor to the Governor General,” October 24, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

[39] “Correspondence from the Acting Auditor to the Governor General,” October 26, 1908; Box 522, Folder 8448, BIA RG350, NARA.

For May Day, some old and rough writings about Crisanto Evangelista

The following is an excerpt of some writings I’ve done thinking about Crisanto Evangelista, one of the founders of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), the first formal Philippine Communist Party. I’ve presented this work in various places at least since 2015, and as a consequence, parts have ended up in various published pieces, most notably Monetary Authorities and my essay in the Histories of Racial Capitalism anthology. Since the footnotes didn’t transfer at all, I’ve listed the texts that were referenced at the end of the excerpt.

On Revolutionary Decolonization

Before exploring Filipino Marxism and its relation to struggles for decolonization, I want to emphasize that Filipino radicals under U.S. colonial rule had to reckon with the afterlives of the 1896 Revolution. Beginning with the 1521 colonial encounter, what is now known as the Philippine archipelago had been under Spanish imperial rule. Although Spanish rule had been threatened by a multitude of local uprisings and revolts (usually labeled as mutinies) it would not be until 1896 that a sustained Revolution would erupt. Filipino Revolutionary thought and energies were greatly influenced by anarchist and socialist thought circulating around the globe, in particular during the late nineteenth century. Soon, however, counter-revolutionary forces would quickly take positions of power within the movement, with many elites grabbing leadership positions to establish the first modern republic in Asia. The Republic would soon be dismantled through U.S. military force during the Philippine American War, replaced by the American colonial state. Revolutionaries and subversives were quickly outlawed by the American colonial state, with many driven to exile or imprisoned. During the 1910s, however, there was an intensified uptick in radical organizing, particularly in the increasingly urban areas of the colony. By the time news hit of the 1917 Russian Revolution, organic intellectuals in the Philippines would begin to theorize, and concretely organize around, Marxist conceptions. One of the primary Filipino Marxist intellectuals, if not the most important Filipino Marxist intellectual before WWII, was Crisanto Evangelista.

Crisanto Evangelista was born in 1888 into a peasant family. His father fought and died in the 1896 Revolution. Too young to join in the Philippine American War, at the age of ten he would become a printer apprentice, eventually teaching himself how to read and write. Throughout the 1910s Evangelista would attempt to work with establishment parties like the Nacionalista Party. Evangelista was even appointed as the representative of Filipino workers in the first Independence Mission to Washington in 1919. Eventually Evangelista would turn his back on the Nacionalista Party and embrace Marxism.

In the early 1920s Filipino Marxists began to actively build relations with peasant organizations, whose memberships were increasing rapidly. For instance, agriculturally based unions, such as the Kalipunang Pambansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (National Association of Peasants in the Philippines), steadily gained numbers throughout the immediate post-WWI years. Evangelista, would emphasize organizing bonds between urban factory workers and peasants. By the mid-1920s Evangelista was avowedly a communist, having established communication with the Comintern, and working transnationally with other communist leaders, like Harrison George of the Communist Party USA and Tan Malaka, the famous Indonesian born transnational communist. Evangelista would hold prominent positions in the Partido Obrero, one of the first Marxist organizations in the Philippines. He would also be one of the five representatives of the executive committee of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a subdivision of the Red International of Labor Unions.

Crisanto Evangelista in the Pan Pacific Monthly, June, 1929

In 1927 Evangelista, along with other organizers, would seek to re-orient the Partido Obrero toward a Marxist-Leninist organization. This transformation would be marked by a new name, which honored the 1896 Revolution, yet simultaneously emphasized its analysis of proletarianization. The new name was Katipunan ng mga Anak-Pawis sa Pilipinas (or the KAP) its English translation at the time, was the Proletarian Labor Congress. At the time of its founding KAP membership was estimated to be about 33,000. At its height it would swell to almost 100,000 official members. After a few years Evangelista again would again make plans to re-orient radical organizations in the Philippines, pushing to change the name from the KAP to overtly embrace the label of Communist, and solidify the ties between Philippine revolutionary organizations and a broader internationalism committed to the overthrow of both imperialism and capitalism. 

The KAP would go on to produce a series of publications in vernacular presses, preparing members and the broader public for the transformation. Calling for a formation of a “mass political party,” the KAP would publish the first Tagalog translations of the Communist Party and republish famous Soviet pieces like “the ABC of Communism.” Eventually during the convention of August 26, 1930, the new party was formed as the Partido Komunista sa Pilipinas (PKP), to coincide with the 34 Anniversary of the Cry of Balintawak, the moment the Philippine Revolution officially kicked off in an organized uprising in Manila, the tearing of cedulas—the colonial identification papers used for taxation of native subjects. The PKP would make public its formation on November 7th, 1930, to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The crowd of about 6,000 in the Tondo district of Manila declared the formation of PKP through chants of “Down with Imperialism!” “Down with Capitalism!” “Long Live the Communist Party!”

Here we see the attempt by Filipino communists to draw upon two seemingly estranged or unconnected Revolutions—the 1896 Philippine Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Moreover, it established their commitment to communism—not anarchism or socialism—as the primarily political program to which would accomplish their primary objectives of: on one hand, the end of imperialism, and on the other hand the end of capitalism. To Filipino communists, therefore, these twin objectives were inextricable. We can see this theorization especially in Evangelista’s approach to organizing and recruitment.

By the time Evangelista was appointed as the PKP’s first General Secretary, Evangelista led a humble life, residing in a small home with his wife and five children. Frequently he was described as someone with a frail stature, oftentimes coughing as a result of malnutrition and near-chronic sickness. This was most likely due to the rate in which Evangelista was incarcerated for his political organizing, in an out of prison multiple times through the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was nevertheless an inspiring speaker, less an imposing voice, but rather a patient, effective, and authoritative educator. 

In 1930, Evangelista was described by American writer Agnes Smedley as one of “the strangest and most interesting characters in Asia.” Smedley would go on to state that he was “perhaps the only Filipino Marxist theoretician” who was able to “accumulate and read hundreds of works on the social sciences” and “possess the only Marxian-Leninist library in the Philippines.” Smedley would go on to describe one particular scene which illustrates the difficult and complex work of radical organizers within colonial conditions.

He was teaching the fisherman the causes of the revolutions against Spain, of the workers and peasants who fought in the revolution—and of the compromise signed between the American military invaders and the Filipino leaders—a document of the betrayal of the revolution. He taught them of the workers’ movement in various European countries and in Soviet Russia, and of the theories of socialism. Through his Tagalog language came such words as “Karl Marx,” “Lenin,” “surplus value,” in English. For three hours he taught, earnestly and without any demonstrativeness, and the only movement in the audience was when some man would arise from the hard earth to rest his legs for a moment.

Evangelista, even in this moment in which he was attempting to recruit fisherman, a kind of worker that was far from a Marxist notion of “proletarian,” Evangelista was grappling and engaging with if and how Marxian-Leninist concepts would work in colonial conditions—conditions that for many orthodox Marxists was a backwards political and economic condition. After all, so this logic goes, colonies and colonized peoples were historically underdeveloped by colonizers for imperial purposes, and thus modern conditions had to be created in order to produce a communist revolution. Until then, the best that could happen was a national revolution, like what happened in the Philippines.

What I want to emphasize from such a short and small observation is that Evangelista both incorporates traditional Marxist notions like “surplus value” but also brings it into conversation with the Philippine Revolution, a revolution that he correctly points out, was driven, not for strictly nationalist purposes, but driven by and through the revolutionary energies of workers and peasants, the very peoples that had been exploited for their “surplus value.” In this, I believe, Evangelista is attempting to articulate a consistency in this longer struggle against racial capitalism and colonialism in the Philippines, from the sixteenth century to this particular moment of capitalist crisis between the two World Wars.

By the time Smedley had visited the Philippines, Evangelista had already been imprisoned multiple times by the American colonial government. The PKP would not even see two years of existence before it was outlawed by the Philippine Supreme Court in October 1932. Evangelista would be either repeatedly imprisoned or harassed for the rest of the decade. In 1942 he would be executed as a political prisoner by a different colonial power, the Japanese, during World War II. As a result of this, not much of Evangelista’s theoretical thoughts exist in the historical record after the establishment of the PKP. Still, if we are to look at his writings from the late 1920s, just before the KAP turned into the PKP and right after his increased exchanges with the COMPUSA and the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, we see this intensified move toward not only a nationalist communism, but a more internationalist form of revolutionary decolonization.

In a short 1928 book written in Tagalog, Evangelista would focus on the extremely popular rhetoric of the Nacionalista Party, the dominant mainstream political party of the Philippines. In particular Evangelista wanted to underline the limits of nationalist notions of decolonization, particularly conservative decolonization which emphasized national control of capitalism and increased autonomy of established Filipino political leaders. Titled, Nasyonalismo-Proteksiyonismo vs. Internasyonalismo-Radikalismo or Protectionist Nationalism vs. Radical Internationalism, Crisanto Evangelista attempted to pull back the curtains from the “narrow, conservative, and reactionary nationalism,” of Filipino statesmen and protectionists, urging readers to look beyond these “narrow horizons” of political sovereignty and economic development.  

Evangelista’s analysis emphasizes what he saw as two fundamentally antagonistic kinds of political economic futures. On one hand, there was the future proposed by Filipino protectionists, who argued for a Philippine economy shielded from foreign competition. In this scenario Philippine industry and markets would be protected—artificially by the state—from the natural laws of a global capitalist market, a market that was already historically rigged in favor of more advanced industrial and imperial economies. Under this protection, the Philippine economy would diversify and mature. For Evangelista, however, protectionism was simply an accommodation of the exploitative system of capitalism, albeit with a local twist, in which already wealthy Filipinos would be protected by the state from wealthier capitalists from abroad. On the other hand, Evangelista envisioned a future of radical internationalism, dictated by the desires and needs of workers. In this future, workers would pursue a radical solidarity that combined both anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism to struggle toward a world unfettered by the artificial and violent constraints of imperialism and capitalism. 

In the first section, Evangelista tackled the economic aspect of nationalist protectionism, asserting that protectionism not only bred racial chauvinism, but dangerously created an unproductive trade policy of isolationism. These conditions—chauvinism and isolationism—would lead to Filipinos being shunned by other nations, seriously wounding international trade. This would then create a chain reaction in which demands for Philippine commodities would fall, leading to immense drops in commodity prices and wages, and eventually mass unemployment. Filipino workers, desperate for work and wages would flee the Philippines in even greater numbers, to other territories that were still under what he argued was under the “grasp of imperialism, like Hawaii” or Mindanao, which Evangelista argued was ironically under the control of “Foreign Investment.”

For Evangelista, the very notion of “protectionism” was suspect. Although proponents of protectionism argued that it would lead to national vitality and a proliferation of native entrepreneurs and small businesses, he warned that it would simply intensify the drive toward local monopolies. “First, it [small businesses] will be swallowed by large investors; and second, the small investor will fight or think of killing those they are chasing or those that are equal in stature in “the name of free competition.” That is what is called the “free competion” of capitalism. That is the law that capitalism follows. That is the anarchy and antagonism [anarquia y antagonismo] of the system of capitalist production [sistema de produccion capitalista].”

Thus, rather than an orderly world of economic growth and national progress, protectionism would instead lead to a world of intensified exploitation, disorder, and violence. However, because the state would exclude foreign capitalists from the economy, the source of antagonism would not be an imperialist power, but instead from within, an antagonism within and between native Filipinos.

In the second half of the book Evangelista switched to the political aspects of protectionism. He specifically focused on the question of American colonialism, the unjust historical condition that protectionism was supposed to resolve. Here Evangelista challenged the protectionist nationalist position on colonialism, arguing that it was not necessarily the presence of the foreign that was the enemy. “The American people are not our enemy,” he asserted. Instead, the enemy was “the imperialistic world consisting of American, English, Japanese, French, Dutch, Spanish, and others.” 

Thus, instead of the narrow horizons of what Benedict Anderson would call “official nationalism,” Evangelista argued for a broader global approach. One therefore had to see true freedom as a radical overturning of the entire world, not simply the achievement of national sovereignty. For Evangelista “the independence of the Filipino people is dependent on the problem and the fate of the other colonies and semi-colonies.” Put differently, rather than focusing on the antagonism between colony and metropole, one had to see the central antagonism between colonies and the imperial world system. For Evangelista the struggle for Philippine independence had to be connected to the larger struggle of international anti-colonialisms, in concert with other colonized workers. As he stated:  “If we are freed, it would change the shape of colonialism in the world,” leading to what Evangelista envisioned as “an outbreak of fire that would burn and smolder inside the people of Taiwan and Korea to fight against Japan; the Indonesian against the Netherlands; in Indo-China against France and Portugal; the Indians, the Malaysians and other English colonies against England.”

Under Evangelista’s formulation, Filipino anti-colonialism must fundamentally be “internationalist,” to “make friends and join in the international workers’ movement.” In this political and ethical formulation of friendship, simulaneously within and beyond the nation, “the enemy of our people…is not only national but worldwide.” In this “international movement against international imperialism” he argued that not only must Filipinos “unite with the Indonesian, Malay, Korean, Taiwanese, Indians, Chinese and other similar young colonies,” but Filipinos must “join, befriend, and collaborate with workers in the capitalist countries and the imperialist order by forming a single column, through cooperation and simultaneous resistance to weaken World Imperialism.”

References

Ken Fuller, Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from Foundation to Armed Struggle (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2011); William J. Pomeroy, The Philippines: Colonialism, Collaboration, and Resistance! (New York: International Publishers, 1992); and Jim Richardson, Komunista: The Genesis of the Communist Party, 1902 – 1935 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 2011).

Crisanto Evangelista, Nasyonalismo-Proteksiyonismo vs. Internasyonalismo Radikalismo, (Manila: Katipunan ng Anak-pawis sa Pilipinas (KAP), 1929); Agnes Smedley, “Philippine Sketches” in The New Masses, June 1931.

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