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Since the founding of the United States, American officials have faced decisions about how to govern newly acquired territories. Until the 1890s, these decisions were intended to be temporary, merely in force until the territories could be admitted to the United States as states. In 1898, however, American officials faced a new type of decision: how to govern territories that were never intended to become states. Until recently, scholars assumed that models developed in the metropole for education, health care, and governance were meant to be exported to the colonies.Scholarship on the Philippines has primarily explored the ways in which American institutions were transplanted, sometimes in lesser forms, sometimes changed in the process, but originating in the metropole. More recently, scholars have begun to perceive that policy development was a two-way rather than a one-way street.1 What happened “out” in the colony had the potential to, and often did, affect what happened “in” the metropole. This observation, which motivates the present volume, is changing perceptions of the interrelated nature of the development of state capacities, democratic institutions , immigration law, and educational systems to name the most frequently studied examples. These, however, are institutions that already have received abundant scholarly attention. The new approaches serve primarily to deepen our understanding of institutions that are relatively well known. The development of a U.S. policy to prohibit opium during the early twentieth century, initially in the Philippines and consequently in the United States, has been comparatively neglected. Finding motivations for American decisions to prohibit opium in the United States, however, requires examination of policies developed for the Philippines. Opium prohibition in the Philippines, by no means an inevitable consequence of U.S. rule, prompted American leadership of the international anti-opium movement, which in turn was a key factor in passage of the first Prohibiting Opium in the Philippines and the United States The Creation of an Interventionist State anne l. foster 95 prohibitionist law against narcotics in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, anti-opium activists perceived colony and metropole as merely two different parts of one space needing reform. Missionaries and Reform Interestingly, given the vibrancy of scholarship about prohibition in the United States, American drug and alcohol policies in the Philippines have attracted little attention. David Courtwright’s classic Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America outlines the basic story about U.S. policy in the Philippines in a single page: opium was legal and subject to the farm system in 1898, and Americans initially adopted a simple import tax, leading to increased consumption. American missionaries protested against the legal opium trade in part because they were worried about opium consumption in China. They began an opium prohibition campaign in the Philippines, which succeeded in 1905; prohibition was in force by 1908. At the same time, these missionaries began to push for an anti-opium conference in Shanghai. Planning began in 1906; it occurred in 1909. The American promoters of this conference, embarrassed by the legal status of opium in the United States, pushed the first major restriction on American opium imports through Congress one week after the conference began.2 Even in this brief account, interrelationships between “domestic” and “imperial ” suggest themselves. The missionaries claim our attention first. By the turn of the twentieth century, many American missionaries viewed their mission in part as spreading ideas of Americanism: raising the status of women in Japan, introducing John Dewey’s educational ideals in China, and teaching English to Filipinos. The missionaries themselves debated how to balance these cultural reforms with the more traditional mission of saving souls. American missionaries were often a group apart in the Asian missions, but in other ways they were part of a transnational movement to promote morals, in this case advocating against opium. Many were from denominations that promoted prohibition, often also of alcohol, in the United States. These American missionaries could simultaneously view themselves as promoting an American vision of a Christian life and a Christian vision of a good life.3 American missionaries saw an opportunity in the acquisition of the Philippines to promote the prohibition of opium there, in China, and in the United States. They perceived no hard-and-fast line dividing “domestic” from “foreign” or “colonial.” The initial efforts, in 1899, to draw the attention of the U.S. government to prohibition of opium came from American missionaries in China, who had long advocated...

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