Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South by Michael C. Hawkins

Michael C. Hawkins, who is assistant professor of Asian history at Creighton University in Nebraska, probes the connections between US colonialism and the image of the Moro in Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South. Hawkins tackles the Americans’ perceptions of the Moro as well as the Moro warrior’s self-perception and argues that simplistic ideas about race are inadequate in explaining American perceptions of the Moro during this period; the then burgeoning discipline of ethnology and American colonial engineering were highly influential in this regard, contingent as they were on developing notions of time, history, and evolution. However, Hawkins also looks at the other side of the colonial divide by pointing to the high degree of collaboration between Moros and the American colonial state, a process that contributed to the development of a modern Moro subjectivity. The book has four chapters, aside from the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter 1 analyzes the processes involved in categorizing Filipino Muslims using modern “scientific” tools in the social sciences, especially ethnology. The second chapter looks at the different aspects of Moro culture, such as its rich Islamic heritage in the arts and literature, which posed problems for the American colonial project, especially in its attempt to depict Moros as uncivilized. The issue of slavery among the Moros forms an integral part of this section. Chapter 3 deals with the impact of capitalism. Americans believed that capitalism could hasten the process of civilizing Moros through their participation in profitable business endeavors. The impact of capitalism was intense, and for many Americans the result was not all positive, leading them to experience colonial guilt. This colonial guilt vis-à-vis the project of modernity is the theme of chapter 4. The book ends with an epilogue entitled “The American Military Period in Historical Memory,” which talks about the author’s personal reflections about the impact of American colonialism on the identity politics in the country, in terms of the dichotomy that separates Moros from “real Filipinos” (140).