Speaker Series - Discontented & Repudiating Tenants: Pacification and Colonial Land Reform in the American Philippines, 1899-1916

Paper Abstract:  American land policy in the colonial Philippines began as a tool of counterinsurgency and colonial state building. Believing that small farmers would make better and more reliable citizens than "discontented tenants," U.S. administrators sought to break up large church-owned plantations for redistribution and instituted an ambitious homestead policy that aimed to populate the public domain with land owning farmers. But this attempted redistribution failed, resulting in an even greater concentration of land in fewer hands and leading many Americans to claim that Filipinos were not ready for land ownership. This paper critically rethinks the reasons for this failure by looking at how small and large farmers and indigenous Filipinos responded to the land initiative. It also asks how and why culture became the dominant U.S. explanation for failure, both at the time and within subsequent scholarship.

There will be a ten-minute critical response to Professor Ventura's paper by Professor Andy Ivaska.

Prof. Ventura is assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of History. She holds an MA and PhD in History from Columbia University. Her research draws together the histories of United States foreign relations, medicine, agriculture, and the environment.

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