From the Convent to Hollywood: The Legacy of Spanish and American Rule in the Philippines

The Philippine Islands experienced two radically different colonial regimes: the Spanish Empire and the United States. These two regimes, however, had two points in common. First, both occupied the Philippines due to the islands' strategic location, and both were sorely disappointed by that decision. Second, both nations solved the "imperial trilemma" -- the trade-off between settlement, control, and economic exploitation -- by jettisoning metropolitan settlement and exploitation. Despite those similarities, however, the effects of the two regimes on the Philippines were radically different. The Philippines as we know it would not exist without the Spanish empire, whereas the long-term impacts of the American period (other than the English language) is at best unclear. The Americans under-resourced their reform efforts and sabotaged many of their own accomplishments in a rush to decolonize after 1935, for reasons of domestic American politics, not Filipino nationalism.