Writing
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In Monetary Authorities Allan E. S. Lumba explores how the United States used monetary policy and banking systems to justify racial and class hierarchies, enforce capitalist exploitation, and counter movements for decolonization in the American colonial Philippines. Lumba shows that colonial economic experts justified American imperial authority by claiming that Filipinos did not possess the racial capacities to properly manage money. Financial independence, then, became a key metric of racial capitalism by which Filipinos had to prove their ability to self-govern. At the same time, the colonial state used its monetary authority to police the economic activities of colonized subjects and to curb movements for decolonization. It later offered a conditional form of decolonization that left the Philippines reliant on U.S. financial institutions. By showing how imperial governance was entwined with the racialization and regulation of monetary systems in the Philippines, Lumba illuminates a key mechanism through which the United States securitized the imperial world order.
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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.
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"Left Alone with the Colony" situates Duterte's fascistic regime within a longer lineage of: anti-communism and counter-revolution, "strongman" violence, and the afterlives of U.S. colonial practices, logics, and institutions of punishment.
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"Transpacific Migration, Racial Surplus, and Colonial Settlement" explores settler logic in the management of migrant labor and colonial land, in the extractive colony of the Philippines and the settler colony of Hawaiʻi.
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“Imperial Standards," examines how the use of the gold standard in the Philippine colony was deeply intertwined with fantasies of U.S. imperial expansion.
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“Imperialism and its Limits” thinks about the significance of the colony in understanding global racial capitalism—both its necessity to dispossession and accumulation (that structures capitalism) but also as the antagonistic limit to capitalism.
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“Empire, Expansion, and its Consequences” an overview essay that argues for rethinking the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the lens of settler colony and global empire, racial capitalist power, and anti-capitalist imaginations.
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"Philippine Colonial Money and the Futures of Spanish Empire" examines monetary and imperial crisis and how race operated as both obstacle to repair and possible fix.