In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines

Stanley Karnow's In Our Image traces almost half a century of American rule in the Philippines, from the islands' transfer from Spain after the war of 1898 through the Philippine American War fought to suppress the islands' own independence movement, the colonial administration that followed, and the long legacy that left the Philippines culturally American in ways still visible when Karnow was writing amid the political upheaval that toppled Ferdinand Marcos's twenty year regime in the 1980s. Karnow wrote the book in the years just after the People Power uprising of 1986 toppled that regime, an upheaval that put the Philippines back on American front pages after decades of relative neglect.

Karnow, a journalist rather than an academic historian, blends archival research with the reporting and personal observation built over a career covering Asia, tracing how American administrators cast their rule as tutoring Filipinos in American style democracy even as they suppressed the resistance that rule provoked. The title states the book's argument directly: American colonialism aimed to remake the Philippines in the United States's own image, imposing American institutions, language, and consumer habits on a colony most Americans, Karnow argues, scarcely thought of as part of their own empire at all.

Reading the book means following a veteran foreign correspondent's eye for character and telling detail, built from reporting and interviews as much as archives, in the tradition of Karnow's earlier Vietnam: A History. It suits a reader who wants the Philippines' colonial history told with a journalist's narrative sense rather than as a purely academic study of empire.