Labor loomed large in the entwined worlds of U.S. military governance, commerce, and racial reform. Racialized workers played key roles in establishing and maintaining American imperial domains. They were subjected to programs devised by colonial administrators, military officers, and private entrepreneurs to locate, manage, and discipline them. Settler domestication projects in the American West, plantation economies in the post-emancipation American South and the colonized Hawaiian Islands, semicolonial corporate enclaves in Central America, and the American “civilizing mission” in Southeast Asia had common features. These similarities emerged from shared aims of exporting and refining U.S. market templates, accumulating capital, cultivating colonial prestige, and managing the global color line.Footnote ¹ In the Philippine context, a rich scholarship has parsed the relationship between islanders and U.S. labor projects, though it mostly bypasses Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. Colonial bureaucrats in the Philippines segregated, monitored, and moved native workers, rationalizing these acts through grammars of economic dynamism and colonial tutelage. The plantations, work camps, chain gangs, and industrial schools of the American-ruled Philippines are now increasingly understood as outgrowths of and contributors to the rise of U.S. global power in the Progressive Era.Footnote ²

Issues of education and “race management” intersected with colonial labor in these territories. Industrial schooling drew from curricula that developed in Europe, germinated in American overseas missions, crisscrossed the North American continent, and made their way into the former Spanish colonies after 1898. As David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch remind us, a key management strategy in the globalizing metropolitan and colonial economies of the late nineteenth century involved fusing hierarchies of race to capitalist labor regimes.Footnote ³ It manifested in numerous areas of colonial life, among them a trans-oceanically applied educational model premised on the idea that racialized groups represented a “problem” and promising permanent correction through labor-oriented school programs.Footnote ⁴

What connected an ostensible periphery in Southeast Asia to larger currents running through entangled domestic and imperial realms were ideas about labor: that race and economic torpor were linked and that the colonially constructed challenges of managing racialized groups could only be resolved in the classroom, factory, and field. Recentering labor in the history of colonial Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago serves multiple analytical ends. It textures accounts of military violence, legislated coercion, imprisonment, and local reform in the Moro Province, locating these issues within a border-crossing framework of “problems” and “solutions” grounded in prevailing theories of how colonized populations could or should work. It also connects colonial governance in the Muslim South to reform projects elsewhere in the Philippines and across U.S. extraterritorial possessions. Following the “closing” of the American West, the Moro Province represented the U.S. military's longest-lived and most extensive contribution to Progressive Era race management schemes. Administrators in the southern Philippines drew from directed labor programs and model marketplaces on Luzon, welcomed prisoner transfers from Manila to bolster their workforce, and shared an abiding faith in the benefits of industrial education with their civilian counterparts. Their efforts spoke not just to the colonial Philippines, but also the intertwined extractive agendas and civilizational initiatives of governmental officials, labor contractors, corporate leaders, plantation owners, missionaries, and educators throughout U.S. imperial territories, from Alabama to Hawai‘i to the Panama Canal Zone. An exploration of labor, violence, and reform in a militarized state thus acts as a window onto the larger efforts to build an American empire in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The creation and propagation of disciplined indigenous laborers from 1899 to 1914 animated U.S. efforts to solve the so-called “Moro problem,” a phrase conjured by American colonial elites to encompass the challenges posed by the sociocultural “backwardness” of Muslims in Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. The civilizing project in the Philippines rested in part on the belief that the market economy functioned in a redemptive capacity. In its ideal form—which resembled the industrialized national cores of North American and European empires—the new colonial economy required quiescent wage laborers who would settle by worksites and learn to desire and consume the products of global modernity. Precolonial commercial arrangements needed replacement or major readjustment. Recasting Moros and Lumad as contributors to emerging agricultural and industrial systems in Mindanao-Sulu integrated them into a larger structure, where colonial labor hierarchies, private enterprise, and military-led state building birthed market-oriented futures. In these futures, the south's peoples would escape the twin despotisms of the local datu (community leader) and the primitive labor system, and embrace scientifically validated managerial structures introduced by U.S. administrators. The extensive, interconnected labor programs devised by state and state-aligned actors moved through every district of the Moro Province, reordering localities in their wake. Roadworks, penal farms, plantations, primary schools, and local marketplaces became creation sites for the new colonial laborer, as well as spaces of contestation.

Despite its important contributions to the construction and imagined resolutions of the Moro problem, labor has played a secondary role in the historiography of the Philippines’ Muslim South. The region's distinct trajectories under U.S. colonialism have encouraged this oversight. The Moro Province was partitioned from the north and governed by army officers who served as both civilian administrators and military commanders. Armed hostilities in the south continued long after the conclusion of the Philippine-American War, driven by political instability, state violence, and cultural incursion. The Islamic and animist spiritual practices of the southern indigenous populations became mechanisms for distancing, used as evidence of innate fanaticism and justifications for extreme force. Given the extended presence of the U.S. Army in the south, scholarship on the Moro Province—growing but still limited compared to writings on the northern islands—frequently examines military violence in its most elemental forms.Footnote ⁵ The punitive expedition and the colonial massacre are shared features of modern empires and crucial to understanding the colonization of Mindanao-Sulu, but these phenomena were also wed to everyday forms of coercion, including the structuring of labor relations. Labor regimes and state violence shadowed and reinforced one another in the Moro Province, something most evident when U.S. Army officers linked road building to military pacification, but also apparent in collisions over tax codes, vagrancy laws, compulsory schooling, and market integrations.

On February 22, 1906, the children of Zamboanga's public schools gathered to celebrate the “patriotic occasion” of George Washington's birthday. The day's entertainments included poetry readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the singing of “O Spirit of the Nation, Come” by a school choir, and a Spanish-language paean to “El Rojo, Blanco y Azul”—the colors of the American flag. At the height of festivities, the Zamboangueño historian Balbino Saavedra gave a keynote address on the importance of industrial education to the southern Philippines’ future. Adopting the tone and terminology of U.S. reformers, Saavedra described the “modern world” as a “vast and varied workshop” with factories and fields as both measures and engines of civilization. “Victories are won and conquests are made, not by soldiers and warships, but by the immeasurably more powerful armies of industry and fleets of commerce,” he told the gathered crowd of Moros, Filipinos, Americans, and Europeans. Speaking from the seat of U.S. power on Mindanao, the historian voiced the aspirations of the Moro Province, a colony-within-a-colony administered by the U.S. Army and undergirded by a belief in rationalized labor systems and colonial marketization. Saavedra's martial language of industry, with its “armies” and “fleets,” unwittingly fit in another way: the Moro Province was a space where the creation of model native workers and the practice of state violence were mutually constituted.Footnote ⁶

Added to the United States’ expanded overseas empire following the 1898 Spanish-American War, Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago had not undergone the same degree of Hispanicization and Christianization as the northern islands of the Philippines. The south had approximately 500,000 inhabitants, most of whom received the blanket designation of “non-Christians” from the ethnologists in the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes responsible for racially mapping new colonial territories. Muslim Malays, called “Moros,” and inland animist groups, referred to as “pagans” (in this article as “Lumad”), comprised the majority of the population, with Christian Filipino enclaves hugging the western and northern coastlines of Mindanao.Footnote ⁷ While critical of the long Spanish imperial project and its outcomes, many Americans subscribed to the idea that previous contact with European Christian culture had a partially elevating effect on Filipinos on Luzon and in the Visayas. The south was a dark analogue in the colonial imaginary: unintegrated, undeveloped, uncivilized. This narrative fixated especially on Moro groups, citing their Islamic identities and long histories of political autonomy. “Their social condition is essentially different,” the Moro Province official Najeeb Saleeby wrote of the Moros, “and this difference is not in degree or in form, it is a difference in kind.”Footnote ⁸

Filtered through Progressive Era vernacular, this “difference in kind” became the “Moro problem.” Saleeby, a medical doctor and educational specialist who served as the colonized south's resident Moro expert, articulated the problem in straightforward terms: unlike Christian Filipinos, Muslims had not made the “preliminary progress in social development” required for them to adopt “European institutions and forms of government.”Footnote ⁹ Their civic bodies remained anchored in locality, region, and the wider Islamic world. Moro elites cultivated cosmopolitan connections in Singapore, Borneo, Java, and the Ottoman Empire rather than Madrid, London, or Washington. Although embedded in Southeast and East Asian maritime economies, the towns and villages of the south lacked American-approved forms of commercial agriculture and industry and thus a modern laboring class.Footnote ¹⁰

These issues raised questions among American administrators: how could existing societal structures in the south be co-opted or eliminated? What punishments or incentives would reconcile Moro (and Lumad) communities with the new colonial order? What combination of racial, religious, or economic obstacles might hinder progress? Resolving the imagined Moro problem would ultimately involve different strategies in different periods, from violent counterinsurgency campaigns during military rule, to the contested integration of “non-Christian” peoples into the emerging Philippine nation-state in the 1930s, to the economic “opening” of the island of Mindanao, which spanned the entire American colonial period. Writing for Foreign Affairs in the late 1920s, the University of Michigan political scientist (and future vice governor of the Philippines) Joseph Ralston Hayden worried about what came “next” for the Moros, “whose country [was] rapidly being brought within the limits of Western civilization.”Footnote ¹¹ The durable phrase survived American rule and saw use in the latter-half of the twentieth century, when Moro independence movements challenged Filipino cultural, political, and economic hegemony.Footnote ¹²

The idea of the Moro problem had multi-sited historical origins, born out of the violence of colonial race making in Southeast Asia and dominant discourses in the United States. Conditioned by colonial Catholicism and centuries of intermittent conflict between their empire and the Muslim sultanates of the southern Philippines, Spanish writers essentialized Moros as unpredictable, prone to religious fanaticism, and resistant to Christian civilization, creating a portrait of recalcitrant ungovernability.Footnote ¹³ Their accounts influenced the American soldier-officials administering the Muslim South. So, too, did those produced by the British in Malaya and North Borneo, which portrayed Malays as idle, volatile, and “slow of comprehension.”Footnote ¹⁴ U.S. native policy in the Philippines ultimately diverged from the British and Spanish models in important ways, but it derived from many of the same assumptions and critiques. Chief among these was the idea of Southeast Asian Muslim populations as a problem requiring resolution.Footnote ¹⁵

White Americans also brought their own notions of torpor and progress to the Philippines. The Moro problem joined a set of similar concerns produced by stateside reformers that targeted racialized groups in moral, political, material, and economic terms. Debates over the “Indian problem” peaked in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when military campaigns in the frontier territories, Congressional legislation, and intensive missionizing coalesced to erode indigenous political and cultural sovereignties across the Trans-Mississippi West. After 1898, Indian “underdevelopment” became explicitly linked to other “problems” in overseas colonial territories. Policy makers, army brass, missionaries, journalists, businessmen, and visitors from other empires discussed these issues at the annual “Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples” conferences, held in Lake Mohonk, New York, from the 1880s–1910s.Footnote ¹⁶ Fantasies of assimilation and expulsion likewise underpinned the “Negro question,” which stemmed from antebellum concerns about the place of African Americans in U.S. society and expanded following the Civil War as millions of formerly enslaved peoples joined free labor's ranks. By the Progressive Era, white advocates of “industrial evolution” saw a route to black integration through the shop floor, with racial issues resolved and racial progress achieved in the regimented environment of the twentieth-century factory.Footnote ¹⁷ A “problem” or “question” could also afflict entire regions or be abstracted even further to encompass societal shifts like urbanization.Footnote ¹⁸ The “Moro problem” thus took shape as part of a larger discursive trend, like the “Philippine problem,” which related to Filipino self-governance and national identity, and the “Davao problem,” shorthand for fears about Japanese economic domination of Mindanao during the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁹

The southern Philippines was hardly the indolent and disconnected space conjured in Spanish and American accounts. Customary labor practices varied across the heterogenous cultural and economic geographies of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. Coastal and island groups participated in regional mercantile networks and forged connections with other Muslim societies in Island Southeast Asia. The two major sultanates—Sulu and Maguindanao—controlled flows of manufactured goods in the Sulu Sea and prospered from their connections to Chinese and European traders. In the case of Maguindanao, agriculture in the verdant Pulangi River Valley proved an economic boon. Lowland Moro leaders in Cotabato taxed upland peasants, controlled commodities exports, and profited from Spain's inability to secure dominance over inland Mindanao.Footnote ²⁰ Along the coasts, foraged and hunted items like pearls and bird's nests “found lucrative markets in China,” and the sultanates became adept as brokers in the growing firearms trade.Footnote ²¹ Slavery also played a central role in regional economies, benefitting the Sulu sultanate enormously as it reached its zenith in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Tausūg aristocrats helming the sultanate deftly managed relations with different client groups (including the slave-raiding Iranun and Sama-Bajau), the Chinese merchant diaspora, and European and Euro-American commercial interests.Footnote ²² Maritime trade tied the coastal south to regional integrations and global commodity chain intensifications. By the late nineteenth century, however, the sultanates’ power had eroded, victim to the growing western imperial presence in Southeast Asia.Footnote ²³

Moro and Lumad communities in Mindanao's interior engaged in limited-scale agriculture, clearing forest areas through burning or with their bolos (bladed cutting tools). They turned soil by hand or small plow and planted seeds afterward. When cogon grass or other invasive plant life overtook a plot, a farmer might repeat the process elsewhere. This method—known as kaingin—readily supplied small markets with produce and fed individual Moro and Lumad families, but was criticized by colonial officials, who worried about its impact on the “agricultural future” of Mindanao.Footnote ²⁴ Most communities raised livestock, and there was also a brisk trade in cloth, wood, and metal manufactures. Moro craftspeople working with iron, gold, silver, and fabrics created ornate decorative items, drums, weapons, and clothing, which they traded or sold. A fishing industry also existed among the Maranao people of the Lake Lanao region. Chinese and mestizo traders provided links to the wider world, but also gave rise to debt relationships that amplified inter-ethnic tensions.Footnote ²⁵ The Spanish colonial presence remained minimal beyond coastal towns like Zamboanga, and native political power was less concentrated in Mindanao's interior, which allowed for a high degree of local autonomy.Footnote ²⁶

The bustling commercial life of coastal Mindanao-Sulu and the villages of the central plateaus did not impress U.S. officials, who regularly denounced regional forms of production. What little admiration they expressed was directed toward Moro manufactures, which became collector's items and subject to forms of both racial nostalgia and disdain. The ornate bladed weapons and woven fabrics of the south were fashioned in small workshops or family homes. This artisanal labor was time-consuming and difficult to scale and therefore an affront to the modernizing designs of the colonial state. At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, “primitive” items appeared in the display halls of the vast Philippine Reservation, presented by organizers as evidence of limited evolution in the centuries preceding U.S. rule.Footnote ²⁷ Indigenous agricultural practices fell under similar scrutiny, critiqued by civilian and military administrators for reducing soil quality and producing insufficient yields. Colonial desires to reform Moros and their land fed on a growing sense that the “opening” of Mindanao meant massive economic rewards for both ambitious officials and settler frontiersmen.Footnote ²⁸

Americans worried about the abilities of Moros and questioned labor practices in the region. Visiting Mindanao in the wake of the U.S. takeover, journalist Frederick McAuley Palmer saw little potential in Moro workers. He tempered his pessimism with the hope that American “enterprise and ingenuity” might develop a labor force capable of matching or exceeding those found in Europe's Asian colonies.Footnote ²⁹ Before this could happen, other issues needed to be addressed. The most contentious was slavery, which U.S. military authorities initially sidestepped during the Philippine-American War to avoid conflict with Moro datus and sultans. They did so by presenting enslavement in the southern Philippines as milder, contrasting it favorably with the American South, and assuring the metropolitan public that the U.S. government did not tolerate the “peculiar institution” beyond its shores. Prevailing ideas about race and work factored into this calculus. According to historian Michael Salman, colonial elites found slavery morally objectionable and inefficient as a system of production, but also accepted it as common among groups lower on the racial-civilizational scale and perhaps even “necessary … until a higher order of civilization” triumphed. Gradual abolition and prolonged tutelage became general prescriptions for avoiding economic strife. “Only at high stages could workers be left to govern themselves freely through self-control,” Salman writes, “just like advanced nations fit for independence and democratic self-government.”Footnote ³⁰ After 1903, direct rule altered this calculus and abolition became a means of weakening the power of the datus and creating new reservoirs of labor for the state and private enterprise.Footnote ³¹

All of these factors connected in a tidy colonial narrative: hobbled by the institution of slavery and the corrupt rule of traditional leaders, the indigenous producers of the south remained frozen in a premodern state, unable to labor effectively or properly manage their lands. Solutions to this constructed dilemma abounded. The Mindanao Herald framed the issue through the prism of race. “If races have missions on this earth,” an unsigned editorial declared, “the mission of the Aryan peoples [is] to preach the gospel of work.” Conjuring images of dominance and submission, the editors argued that the peoples of the Philippines could only become “strong, robust, [and] self-reliant” by “working as we have worked.” The “shop, factory, [and] field” served as training grounds, backed up by robust vagrancy laws and labor-creating public works initiatives.Footnote ³² Military officials spoke often about desired outcomes. Governor Tasker Bliss cast labor as a tool for integration, melding the “various races” of the southern Philippines into a “homogenous body under a common civilization.”Footnote ³³ A. B. Foster, governor of the Cotabato district, painted a hopeful picture in his attempts to boost the region, claiming Moros were keen to work for white business interests and could be hired cheaply. “Almost an unlimited supply of laborers can be secured at any time and they work for 40 and 50 cents a day,” he told the local press in 1907.Footnote ³⁴ The creation of a “permanent class of [native] laborers” was a primary objective of government during the military period.Footnote ³⁵

Protection and firm guidance served as moral rationales in the quest to make the southern Philippines economically productive and racially harmonious. Military administrators argued that labor relations under the datus and sultans were defined by either predation (slavery) or fragmentation (village economies). Unlocking labor potential involved creating a level playing field, where all could work for (low) wages. This aim meant identifying vulnerable groups, sheltering them from threat, and teaching them to work. The district governor of Zamboanga, John Park Finley, a self-taught ethnologist in his spare time, declared the Lumad of Central and Northern Mindanao as “the primitive farmers of the country and its real producers.” He believed they required shielding from Moro slavers, Chinese merchant profiteers, and predatory Euro-American business interests before their labor power could be harnessed.Footnote ³⁶ Annual reports from the Moro Province furthered the narrative of protection, recounting instances where Lumad and Moros fell prey to “unscrupulous traders”: Manobos selling foraged goods could expect a pittance for their efforts; Moro laborers received as little as twenty centavos for a day's work; plantation stores kept local communities in degrees of debt bondage; and price-gouging was common, particularly during periods of epidemic and famine.Footnote ³⁷ Governor John Pershing used these phenomena to justify the combining of labor and civilizational reform. Malign actors were “[fleecing] the credulous wild man beyond belief,” he wrote, and something needed to be done.Footnote ³⁸

The threat and exercise of violence underpinned the creation of the new colonial laborer. According to Governor Bliss, the southern peasantry could be taught to work only “under the guiding hand of a nation strong enough and just and wise enough to now impose upon all what in the remote future an intelligent majority of all will impose of its own free will.” New paradigms of production that would create the conditions for true democracy, in other words, needed “imposition” in the short term. Bliss openly acknowledged the disciplinary dimensions of labor programs, which would be enforced through imprisonment and, in some cases, search-and-destroy operations.Footnote ³⁹ Here the pieties of the civilizing mission and drive to make the south profitable intersected with security concerns. The connected processes of redefining labor relations and instituting new forms of taxation provoked resistance, especially among Moro populations in the Sulu Archipelago. Military officials interpreted local recalcitrance as the growing pains of peoples trapped in antique social and economic systems, and cast state violence as an initial—rather than ultimate—step toward the permanent correction of native behaviors. The “rough” lessons of incarceration, torture, and massacre would give way to vigorous enterprise, wage labor, private property, and a new class of native consumers, resolving the cyclicality of colonial violence that plagued the Spanish era. With force legitimated and integrated into the architecture of governance in the south, ecstatic prognosticating about the native potential to build roads, cut railroad ties, harvest hemp, and populate new agricultural settlements continued uninterrupted.

Initial efforts to forge a new Moro laboring class emerged amidst military operations in Lanao in 1902–1903. Located in northwestern Mindanao, the district was less accessible than coastal Zamboanga or Cotabato and had experienced only limited Spanish interference in the previous centuries, leaving traditional political and economic structures intact. Many Maranao sultans and datus guarded their autonomy, correctly surmising that the U.S. colonial state intended to co-opt or entirely displace local authority. Others decided to work with the Americans, which aggravated pre-existing communal schisms around the lake.Footnote ⁴⁰ As war subsided in the north, Lanao became the site of running conflicts between Maranao leaders and the U.S. Army. Punitive expeditions led by Col. Frank Baldwin and (future governor of the Moro Province) Capt. John Pershing targeted noncompliant datus and their cottas (fortifications), overwhelming them with small-arms and artillery fire. Violent, asymmetrical clashes at sites like Bayan and Bacolod left hundreds of Maranao dead with comparatively few American casualties. Army brass and sympathetic press organs framed these battles as the only practicable means of combatting “savage” opponents.Footnote ⁴¹ Military commanders twinned the onslaughts with attempts to cultivate collaborators, mimicking their European counterparts in other Asian colonies.Footnote ⁴² Subordinating the Maranao to American imperatives proved a difficult, unevenly applied process, particularly in the more remote areas of the region, and left the door open to further unrest. This was already occurring on Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago, where a group of Tausūg leaders had begun pushing back against new criminal statutes, land surveys, and the economic regulation of the maritime environment.Footnote ⁴³

Wage labor provided a potential means of mitigating these instabilities. Looking to the industrializing landscapes of the United States, army officers in Lanao envisioned a homogenous force of Maranao workers, who would be reliant on the state and private enterprise rather than local patronage relationships. Ideally, the sedentism of daily work would encourage the emergence of a modern consumer culture, thus locking the Maranao into the production-consumption cycles necessary for capitalist development. Lanao's perceived disconnection from coastal Mindanao (and thus the global market for agricultural commodities), as well as the logistical challenges this posed, made road building a preliminary area of focus. Roads could link the peoples of the lake to coastal communities like Iligan (to the north) and Malabang (to the south), binding Lanao to Mindanao's integrated economic future.Footnote ⁴⁴ In May 1902, army engineers and enlisted men began constructing a wagon road connecting Malabang to Camp Vicars, fourteen miles distant at the southern edge of the lake. Moros labored along this route, serving as guides, installing telegraph poles, and transporting supplies. American soldiers maintained a tentative relationship with these workers, who provided valuable manpower and topographical knowledge, but who were also viewed as potential fifth columnists. Cycles of attack and reprisal on the trail-turned-road aggravated American feelings of isolation and encirclement, a situation worsened by language and cultural barriers.Footnote ⁴⁵

The marriage of physical infrastructure and labor reform extended throughout the district. Further north, roadworks operated along a twenty-mile stretch of land linking Iligan to Marawi. The 2,200-foot climb between the coast and Lake Lanao presented surveying and grading challenges, as did finding laborers to renovate the old Spanish trail. Maj. Robert Lee Bullard oversaw the entire operation. A veteran of settler-indigenous conflicts in the American West, Bullard developed an expansive view of what road building might accomplish.Footnote ⁴⁶ Both the work itself and its outcomes represented pathways from primitive outer darkness towards civilization. Once completed, the roads would draw the Maranao into the “current of the world's progress.” The American tutelary fantasy began with Maranao men observing American soldiers reclaiming forest paths in the hills above Iligan and concluded with another sort of reclamation, where the Maranao began building roads themselves and reaped the rewards. This new Moro workforce, in lockstep with their American managers and the demands of industrial time, would inspire nearby communities and dampen anticolonial sentiment.Footnote ⁴⁷

The officer's pat redemption tale obscured myriad difficulties. Colonial conditions (warfare, dislocation, environmental degradation) aided the spread of infectious disease. Cholera sickened and killed both American soldiers and Maranao workers on the Iligan–Marawi road, with each group blaming the other. Bullard also struggled with leaders in the communities from which he drew workers, who expected compensation for providing laborers and generally mistrusted American plans. At the worksites, Moro labor gangs often operated on more irregular schedules and at slower paces that unsettled the industrial sensibilities of their overseers. Even under less-than-ideal circumstances, however, colonial officials believed that road work mitigated the “danger of idleness” and reinforced “white military authority.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1906, Bullard boasted that “lawlessness” had retreated as local communities collaborated to “earn money together on the American road” from their army paymasters. His article, “Preparing Our Moros for Government,” connected the military-run work camp to the creation of modern Muslim colonial subjects and promoted the notion that wage labor could eventually emancipate Moros from colonial rule entirely.Footnote ⁴⁹

Districts across the Muslim South experimented with programs to manage labor. Authorities on Jolo became more involved in the local trade in pearls and other maritime products, and colonial attempts to control sea traffic in Sulu reshaped Tausūg markets. Americans on the island also encouraged Moros to sell locally made “curios” for export to the United States. In response, Chinese and European merchants in Jolo town began stocking their shops with Moro manufactures.Footnote ⁵⁰ Finessing the island economy was a means for moving Moros toward approved forms of free labor and encouraging them to accept growing colonial dominion over trade in Maritime Southeast Asia. U.S. Army officers and their civilian counterparts in the north believed that sedate, reliable local labor forces were the future. American soldier-workers were temporary, subject to redeployment, replacement, and, increasingly after 1902, permanent numerical reduction. In any case, the climactic determinism of the day dictated that white men were not fit to labor “under a tropical sun.” As evidence, supporters of this idea pointed to pestilential conditions and high mortality rates in remote stations.Footnote ⁵¹

The establishment of the Moro Province in 1903 created new opportunities to assert control over labor. Devised as a long-term successor to direct military rule but staffed almost entirely by army officers, the new governing body gave the south an U.S.-led administrative core with extensive policy making abilities. It was technically subordinate to Manila yet possessed a large degree of autonomy, effectively making it an experiment in military-led state building. District governors at Zamboanga, Lanao, Davao, Jolo, and Cotabato served in dual capacities: they were responsible for overseeing administrative tasks typically performed by civilians and for leading armed campaigns against anti-state groups, giving them the character of local strongmen. The Legislative Committee of the Moro Province, based in the provincial capital Zamboanga, oversaw the districts and ensured coordination between them. Its first head, Governor Leonard Wood, was a military surgeon who rose to prominence as commanding officer of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. After serving as military governor of Cuba, where he designed and implemented public infrastructure projects, Wood transferred to the Philippines and received the south's top post.Footnote ⁵² An avowed Anglo-Saxon and Christian supremacist, the governor took a hard line towards the Moros, believing their civilizational redemption could only be achieved with a degree of force.Footnote ⁵³

Under Wood's direction, the Legislative Committee instituted an annual personal tax of ten pesos on “each able-bodied male resident of the tribal ward between the ages of eighteen and fifty years.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This poll tax mirrored the old cédula personal levied by Spanish authorities across the archipelago and was deemed necessary to make the province self-supporting.Footnote ⁵⁵ If a resident could show he had been “engaged in any lawful work, trade, occupation or profession,” he was exempted from the tax. Most work in the south did not meet government standards, however, and Moro men faced a choice: pay a tax that seemed arbitrary and unjust, or refuse to pay and face punishment. The Legislative Committee anticipated the latter. Tax delinquents faced trial under new vagrancy laws. Following conviction, they were required to labor on public works projects for fifty centavos per day, meaning potentially twenty days of work.Footnote ⁵⁶ Enacting vagrancy laws and prosecuting tax delinquents became the primary means for disciplining native workers. These practices blurred lines between free and unfree labor, allowing the government to sidestep comparisons to the notoriously draconian policies of European colonial regimes. Workers were “paid” for their time, although the notional wage simply went to pay the fine. Whereas Robert Bullard had to negotiate with local datus to secure road workers, the Moro Province had legal tools to create labor pools.

The public works programs in the Moro Province closely mirrored labor initiatives in the Northern Philippines. Luzon's Benguet Road, a years-long undertaking requiring thousands of native laborers, shared features with Bullard's roadworks in Lanao and the taxation acts being passed in Zamboanga. Cut into the hills leading to the colonial summer capital at Baguio, the road served as a “moving workshop in how to acquire, motivate, and retain [labor].”Footnote ⁵⁷ White management incentivized, coerced, and used legal mechanisms to bolster their workforces. Part of this involved wedding the Spanish polo—an annual tax for public works—to American concepts of free labor, creating a model where “forced labor and wage labor … [marched] together in close ranks.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1906, the year workers completed the Benguet Road, the Moro Province introduced similar measures. Act No. 187, colloquially known as the road law, stipulated mandatory labor for every male inhabitant of the Moro Province subject to the poll tax or payment of the “equivalent in cash of such days’ labor.” In addition to paying their personal taxes, Moro and Lumad men now had to work on “public highways, bridges, wharves, or trails” for five nine-hour days each year. The provincial annual report noted optimistically that the law was being accepted “in a public-spirited way and no trouble is anticipated in enforcing its provision.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The Mindanao Herald celebrated the act as a means of connecting “centers of commercial and agricultural activity” across the south.Footnote ⁶⁰

In addition to using taxation, colonial authorities marshalled labor by conscripting prison populations. The Legislative Council's 1906 Act No. 180, enacted to address worker shortages, provided for the “compulsory employment of able-bodied prisoners serving sentence in district or municipal jails.”Footnote ⁶¹ The act emerged from discussions between Leonard Wood and Commissioner of Commerce and Police William Cameron Forbes that linked the penal cultures of the military south and civilian north. The Wood–Forbes scheme borrowed from the Spanish practice of carceral circulation—namely, moving convicts from Bilibid Prison in Manila to sites around Zamboanga. The Moro Province received inexpensive and easily controllable manpower, while the Philippine Commission was able to weaken insurrectionary sentiment in its prisons through dispersal.Footnote ⁶² Overseen by the Philippine Constabulary, the colonial state's military police force, prisoners constructed roads, wharves, and public buildings in Western Mindanao. By 1907, Wood's replacement Tasker Bliss observed that “most of the public improvements [had] been with prison labor” in the larger municipalities.Footnote ⁶³ Imported convicts and a growing culture of imprisonment within the Moro Province itself swelled the population of its prisons and the Legislative Council sought remedies. They settled on re-establishing the old Spanish penal colony at San Ramon, near Zamboanga. Run as an experimental farm in the first years of U.S. rule, the site transitioned back to its original purpose in 1907. Inmates grew copra, coffee, coconuts, and other crops with the aim of making the farm entirely self-sufficient. They also joined their fellow prisoners from Bilibid laboring on public works. Touted as a model of colonial penology, the farm at San Ramon developed into the southern hub of the Philippines’ carceral network.Footnote ⁶⁴

The challenges and rewards of restructuring regional labor systems featured heavily in district reports, which gauged success or failure in terms of both military pacification and the ability of colonials to acquire, manage, and retain native laborers. Moros “worked well” in Lanao when handled with “tact and fairness,” building barracks, bridges, roads, and a sawmill.Footnote ⁶⁵ Davao, with “almost unlimited” land and an “extremely favorable” climate for hemp production, was the site of a nascent Euro-American settler movement. Settlers in the district encouraged Lumad and Moro villagers to resettle on their plantations and set them to clearing and cultivating the land. Laborers earned 50 centavos per day, although this often came in the form of “rice, cloth, beads, or some other commodity,” resembling the “company store” in the United States that kept workers bound to their employers through dependence, isolation, and debt.Footnote ⁶⁶ Basilan, the easternmost island in the Sulu chain, presented “unusual advantages” to companies and enterprising individuals. Its proximity to Zamboanga lessened supply costs, but the island lacked a vigorous labor market. Americans tried to develop one, encouraged by the relatively inexpensive cost of workers (twenty-five centavos per day) compared to Zamboanga (seventy-five centavos per day) on the other side of the Basilan Strait.Footnote ⁶⁷ On Jolo, Tausūg villagers increased their cultivation of hemp and coconuts under the approving gaze of district administrators, who pointed to “new and permanent” homes as evidence of labor's civilizing effects. Joloano farmers and craftspeople won numerous prizes at the 1907 Zamboanga fair for their crops and manufactures.Footnote ⁶⁸

Boosterism saturates the colonial archive, obscuring both the experiences of native laborers and the obstacles faced by the colonial state. Provincial documents enumerated successes, hoping to convince Manila and Washington of the U.S. Army's exceptional skill at discipline and direction. The regional press, which represented white merchants and settlers, even more hyperbolically downplayed problems and painted Mindanao as a place to make a fortune—an extended sales pitch at a moment when U.S. colonial zones in the Caribbean and Pacific competed for capital, labor, and settlers. Drawing resources and bodies to the Southern Philippines would transform the region and its peoples, boosters argued, borrowing language used in the settling of the American West.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet latent unease also surfaced in official reports and newspaper articles, much of it connected to labor shortages and under-financing. Davao planters complained of Lumad “timidity” and “aversion to hard work” and searched for migrant laborers in the Visayas. They also sought technological solutions, buying hemp stripping machines to reduce the need for workers who might be absent or inconsistent.Footnote ⁷⁰ The limited freedoms of the colonial labor market also created unanticipated frustrations for the state and private enterprises. Native workers moved between jobsites searching for higher payrates or, when they had earned enough money or grew tired of the demands made on them, simply returned to their home communities. Basic features of modern wage labor - choice and mobility - vexed white colonials, who preferred sedentary, predictable work crews. Other challenges also emerged: cholera outbreaks halted production; fluctuations in global commodities markets paralyzed plantation growth; itinerant traders bilked Moros and Lumad of their wages; and Chinese exclusion severed businesses from a key foreign labor market.Footnote ⁷¹

Although the Moro Province marketed itself as a space where colonial work replaced lantakas (cannons) with plows, its gradations of free and unfree labor produced a culture of violence. The stern language of American administrators suggested as much: “weeding out the weak and inefficient” Moros would lead to a superior class of local workers. Those unwilling to accept new realities were cast as remnants of a “crude” past and subject to detention or extreme force.Footnote ⁷² With their inbuilt provisions for directed labor, new taxation schemes proved especially unpopular in Moro communities and were often rejected as unjust impositions. The introduction of a cedula on Jolo became the source of ongoing state-subject tensions, with military violence the primary means of punishing the datus and peasants who flouted the tax. The 1906 massacre at Bud Dajo, where the U.S. Army killed between 700 and 1000 Tausūg Moros, constituted in part a brutal escalation of anti-tax protests. By absenting themselves to an extinct volcanic crater and building fortifications, the Tausūg families on Dajo signaled a rejection of the new colonial order, which expected them to live stationary lives, labor regularly, and direct some of their income into state coffers. A boundaryless ethos of race war amplified the resulting violence, justified by American officials as the only possible response to people who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the state.Footnote ⁷³

Najeeb Saleeby, one of the few moderates in the government of the Moro Province, despaired at the crude wielding of military power. “Peaceful measures bear more fruit in the end,” he wrote after his retirement from colonial service, arguing for a reform agenda that would simplify U.S. rule by channeling the authority of local datus and panditas (religious leaders).Footnote ⁷⁴ For some officials, applying “progressive” solutions to race “problems” became a means to permanently pacify the region. Nowhere was this more evident than in the school system. “In order to labor intelligently, education is necessary,” Tasker Bliss wrote. “We have no room in the Moro Province for an idle class, and we are, therefore, going to teach … children not only the knowledge which comes from books but the knowledge which comes from training in industrial and agricultural schools.” The child educated in manual skills would have “something to add” to the province, enriching its productive capacities while stabilizing its politics.Footnote ⁷⁵ “Industrial education should form nine-tenths of instruction here,” a 1905 Mindanao Herald article advised.Footnote ⁷⁶

Industrial education, which taught mechanical and agricultural skills, had a long history in the continental and overseas activities of American educational reformers, who gravitated to European manual training programs in the early 1800s and made attempts to apply them in the growing cities of the northeast. They also influenced Protestant religious organizations like the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which played increasingly central roles in the settler colonial cultures of Hawai‘i and Alaska.Footnote ⁷⁷ After the Civil War, the rising industrial fortunes of the nation ensured a steady demand for skilled and unskilled laborers, while compulsory schooling laws spread across the continent in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Mass immigration, class division, hardening racial categorizations, and the rapid settling of the western territories intensified calls for more instruction in manual skills, with a particular emphasis on the children of low-status groups.Footnote ⁷⁸ Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the Hawai‘i-born son of missionaries, founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1868 to train formerly enslaved African Americans. His stated intention was to “build up an industrial system, for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee State Normal and Industrial Institute followed in 1870, modeled along similar lines, and an indigenous-focused outgrowth of Hampton, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was established in 1879 by Capt. Richard Henry Pratt. Industrial education in reservation and off-reservation boarding schools expanded dramatically in the 1880s and 1890s. Curricula at these schools invariably emphasized Anglo-Saxon cultural norms and manual training.Footnote ⁸⁰

After 1898, the movement found proponents among white policy makers, missionaries, and educators in the new overseas colonies.Footnote ⁸¹ Extending industrial education to the Caribbean and the Philippines seemed natural to civilian and military leaders like William Howard Taft and Tasker Bliss, who framed the schools as part of a collective effort to resolve race problems in the U.S. empire. Circulation points like the Mohonk conferences and World's Fairs reinforced the notion of educational uplift as a key colonial strategy, both within the U.S. orbit and among the European empires. The experiences of the U.S. Army officer class “Americanizing” the indigenous West, and then participating in debates over native policy with civilian elites, influenced the character of school-building in the southern Philippines from the outset.Footnote ⁸²

While pre–Moro Province manual training schools in Mindanao, like the one run by son-of-missionaries Emerson Christie in Zamboanga, contained overt Christian elements, those that followed under Wood and his successors leaned more heavily on industrial proselytism. “Too many boys are attending school with the idea of earning their living by some other means than manual labor,” Wood complained in 1906. “Opportunities in agricultural and some of the mechanical arts are very great, whereas in the professions they are exceedingly limited.” The province required a supple labor force, in other terms, not burgeoning professionals whose education could lead them to challenge colonial hierarchies. Although Wood dreamed of covert Christianization, his principal understanding of industrial education—as a mechanism by which Moros could move towards the “proper stage of culture that modern institutions require”—was materialist and concerned with governance and development.Footnote ⁸³ In his view, training in industrial schools would contribute to Moros’ reaching cultural, economic, and political benchmarks required for self-governance—all of which fed into colony-wide narratives about “benevolent assimilation” and the ill-defined postcolonial future.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Moro Province started small. Limited budgets aside, education officials and members of the Legislative Council recognized that because plantation agriculture and manufacturing existed in an embryonic state, advanced industrial training for indigenous youth was impractical. Mindanao had few factories, and most of them lacked the “costly and complicated” steam-powered technologies found on an American shop floor. Developing the region into an economic dynamo was a long-term priority, but one that would happen only after specific manual skills had been developed by a majority of the labor force. Instilling such skills at a young age was intended to ensure that the Moro or Lumad child would grow into an adult who did not simply live “on the production of others.”Footnote ⁸⁵ As in U.S. continental programs, students initially received small tools with which to learn the basics of “wood-working, iron-working and agricultural methods.” If, in time, they attained employment in a more complex industrial setting, they would already have a “sound basis of practical tool work” and adapt quickly.Footnote ⁸⁶

Attending a public school in the southern Philippines meant rapid immersion in basic vocational education. American and Christian Filipino teachers instructed younger students on weaving techniques and block building. Upper-year boys learned woodworking; girls, in keeping with Victorian sensibilities, focused on domestic labor. Schools geared training activities toward the environments of their local districts, believing this would speed development, and curricula varied between remote and more heavily populated areas. With their advanced infrastructural demands, larger municipalities like Zamboanga required laborers who could grade roads, erect wharves, and contribute to local manufacturing. Rural schools focused on crop cultivation and the collection of forest products. At the experimental school in Lais in the Davao district, students spent most of their time tending the soil, though they also received rudimentary training in ironworking and carpentry. They raised vegetable gardens and each had a patch of hemp, which they could then strip during “recreation hours” and sell for their “individual benefit.” This mixed agricultural-industrial model led to the development of similar sites in the Cotabato and Lanao districts.Footnote ⁸⁷

Basic vocational training was part of a provincial strategy to domesticate “wild” labor and draw Mindanao's hinterlands closer to the colonial center. Bilaan, Manobo, Tagakaolo, and Bagobo communities in Davao had been intermittently served by Spanish missionaries, and some contributed to the small pre-American planter economy in Southern Mindanao. The Moro Province had more ambitious plans for them. The abaca, hemp, coconuts, rubber, bananas, and other crops grown in Davao required workers. White settlers did not exist in great enough numbers to cultivate the soil, and substantial increases in Visayan and Japanese settlement did not occur until after the Moro Province period. Frustrated by these labor shortages, the government and independent business interests saw education as a long-term fix. In Padada, a small municipality on the western side of the Davao Gulf, American planters established a school for the children of “hill people” working for them. Although provincial reports characteristically failed to distinguish between ethnic groups, enrolled students likely came from local Calagan, Bilaan, and Tagakaolo communities.Footnote ⁸⁸ Children from around 100 Lumad families attended the school, which became a model for others in the district. On a 1907 visit there, superintendent of schools Charles Cameron argued that creating “educational advantages” would solve labor shortages. Over time, Cameron and other supporters of plantation schools hoped the institutions would rectify extremely low rates of enrollment among the 28,000 Lumad children of school age and spell the end of “nomadic habits.” The operating logic was circular: agriculture, manufacturing, and trade would “induce community life and the accumulation of property.” Schools would grow and perpetuate these practices, permanently solving the “non-Christian problem.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Pedagogical solutions to labor issues extended beyond the classroom and followed from social reforms in the United States that presumed the elevating effects of commerce on religiously and racially suspect urban immigrant groups.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the Moro Province, these ideas found their champion in John Park Finley, district governor of Zamboanga, who believed that a failure to adopt Western systems of trade deepened communal factionalism in Mindanao-Sulu and hindered state formation. Finley developed a theory that regional growth had been restricted due to inter-ethnic predations by the “coast people” (Moros) toward the “hill people” (Lumad). He saw labor devaluation, precolonial economic networks, and elite corruption as factors preventing material—and thus racial—progress. To combat perceived “internal” causes of economic stagnation and anticolonial violence, Finley proposed integrating the south's peoples through a unified system of modern marketplaces. He called them “Moro Exchanges,” and claimed the markets would eliminate “racial, social, religious, and commercial” tensions, simplify colonial rule, and ensure future prosperity.Footnote ⁹¹

The directed marketplace gained currency across the colonial Philippines in the first decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹² Finley's ideas drew from programs in northern Luzon. A sequence of local markets had opened around Baguio under the direction of William Cameron Forbes, who served on the Philippine Commission before becoming governor general of the islands. The northern markets operated on a familiar premise: that they would turn the primitive indigenous subject into a modern citizen through commercial rehabilitation. This colonial “market pastoral” turned on the notion that economic, rather than political, development represented the road to individual and perhaps collective autonomy. By buying into the market, the Igorot in Baguio (or Moro in Mindanao) freed themselves from war, destitution, and a slavish dependency on their local leaders. In the north, Rebecca McKenna writes, American grandees like Henry Stimson and William Howard Taft promoted the idea that commerce would “[facilitate] democratic culture” in the Philippines and perhaps help usher the Philippine nation into being.Footnote ⁹³ In foregrounding market relations as the primary developmental vehicle for Moros and Lumad, U.S. officials tapped into a global conversation that reimagined the village-level transaction as potentially liberating. Ad hoc local and regional forms of “developmental imperialism” existed across the European, Japanese, and Ottoman empires—a common thread running through the civilizing missions of the late-imperial world.Footnote ⁹⁴

Approving Finley's Moro Exchange scheme in 1904, the Moro Legislative Council determined that it would encourage capital and property accumulation among “non-productive” natives.Footnote ⁹⁵ Finley enlisted the support of Moro leaders, using his connections to Datu Mandi and Sama-Bajau leaders on the Zamboanga Peninsula, to evangelize for the exchange system in testimonials. The missives, which Finley later used in his published writings, had a coached quality. “Governor Finley, help us avoid temptation and sin,” one read. “Regulate our customs and laws so that they may be brought into line … with the customs and laws of the American government, and that we as Mohammedans may become better American citizens.”Footnote ⁹⁶ At the ceremony celebrating the 1904 opening of the first Exchange in Zamboanga, Finley extolled wage labor and the market economy to the audience, calling them the “the only road to advancement, prosperity, and peace.”Footnote ⁹⁷

The Zamboanga Exchange site began as a single structure with twenty vendor stalls but quickly expanded. Its multiple buildings eventually included a 130-bed dormitory for visiting traders and farmers, animal pens, a tool house, and a lumber supply depot.Footnote ⁹⁸ In its first year of operation, the Exchange was visited by William Cameron Forbes, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and a party of U.S. Congressmen.Footnote ⁹⁹ Buoyed by this recognition, the system grew, and by 1911 Moro Exchanges operated in thirty communities across the Zamboanga Peninsula and Sulu Archipelago.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ An executive council composed of Finley, the provincial treasurer, and the provincial auditor oversaw the Exchanges, with Moro leaders acting as board members. They set fees for local traders and determined salaries for employees. Permanent vendors paid fixed stall rates, and “transient” traders surrendered 1 percent of their profits. While masked in the language of free enterprise, the entire operation was a tightly directed affair. The Exchange council controlled what was sold and purchased in the markets, managed loans, regulated labor, mediated disagreements, and ran a central bodega in Zamboanga to dispose of surplus goods.Footnote ¹⁰¹ To undercut outside commerce, the Exchanges sold imported items to Moros and Lumad for twenty percent above cost and sent agents to buy up stock from rural merchants.Footnote ¹⁰² Finley advertised the use of Moro employees in the markets, but any real native influence over the Exchanges came in the form of collaborating datus on the Executive Council, who ensured local compliance.Footnote ¹⁰³

The swift growth of the Exchanges excited the imaginations of reformers on both sides of the Pacific. By 1911, reports indicated the volume of trade at Zamboanga over the previous seven years totaled in the millions of pesos, with the Exchange at Jolo also doing sound business.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ News of the program filtered back to the United States, where the Washington Post reported it had been designed to mimic the New York Produce Exchange—“an engine of civilization”—as closely as “conditions would permit.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Finley returned to North America in 1912, where he wrote journal articles and gave public lectures touting the successes of the Exchanges.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Finley's charm offensive obscured harsh realities about the colonial marketplaces. Moro Exchange outposts appeared on Basilan and in Dapitan, for instance, in the wake of military assaults that “wiped” Moro and Lumad rancherias “off the face of the map.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Beyond serving as rationales for and outcomes of violent counterinsurgency campaigns, the Exchanges also faced opposition from native farmers and artisans. The 1 percent commission was unpopular, leading many producers to sell or barter privately. The “Bolsa Moro,” as locals referred to them, gained a reputation for economic coercion. Under Finley's direction, officials forced Moro and Lumad producers to sell at the markets even when demand was greater elsewhere. After 1912, the new district governor of Zamboanga, George Helfert, reviewed the entire system and concluded that native communities wanted to see the Exchanges either overhauled or discontinued entirely.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The 1912 U.S. presidential election brought a Democratic administration to Washington and a shift in the government's approach to the Philippines. Democratic Party policy makers ruled out immediate sovereignty for the islands and instead sought to move Americans out of administrative roles there, replacing them with Christian Filipinos. A new governor general, Francis Burton Harrison, committed to this “Filipinization” of the colonial bureaucracy. This development presented challenges for the Moro Province, which was still under U.S. military governance. Beginning in late 1912 and continuing through 1913, military commander of the Philippines, J. Franklin Bell, and governor of the Moro Province, John Pershing, worked with civilian authorities in Manila to “normalize” the south. The process ended the Moro Province, which in 1914 officially became the Department of Mindanao and Sulu. The new civilian governor, Frank W. Carpenter, was American, but Filipinos (mainly from Luzon and the Visayas) increasingly took over government posts in the districts (now organized as provinces). U.S. Army troops departed, replaced by the Philippine Constabulary and Philippine Scouts.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Moro Province continued to experiment with mandatory labor schemes, which persisted in various forms until the region was reorganized. Road extension remained a primary focus. In 1911, a road tax of 2.5 pesos per annum could be paid through five days labor, echoing earlier Legislative Council acts. Two years later the law changed, with every male non-Christian between eighteen and sixty now required to pay three pesos annually and “perform ten days labor upon the public roads and trails.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Imagining a future where plantation agriculture, shipping, and small manufacturing firms dominated Mindanao, the province's final military governor John Pershing passed an act “regulating relations between capital and labor,” describing it as a means to protect Moro and Lumad workers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Its actual impact on them escapes the colonial record. What does not is Pershing's antipathy toward the nascent Filipino movement in Zamboanga, which he erroneously connected to Moro insurgencies elsewhere in the province.Footnote ¹¹²

Similar approaches to labor survived in the Department of Mindanao and Sulu. Carpenter advertised the south at the Second Philippine Exposition in 1914, encouraging “immigrants and capitalists” to settle the region. He boasted of skilled Moro and Lumad craftspeople waiting to be harnessed by industry, including Bagobo bead workers, Maranao silversmiths, and Tirurary basket weavers.Footnote ¹¹³ The governor worked with Manila to encourage colonization schemes and to create a new class of native laborers, whose outputs would be bolstered by state-provided “scientific aids” and agricultural specialists.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Meanwhile, missionaries like the Newport socialite Caroline Spencer travelled to Jolo to teach the Tausūg “simple employments that [would] make the idea of labor attractive.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Spencer's collaborations with Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent on the Moro Educational Fund produced a boarding school on the island where Moro children raised crops and received basic industrial training. Students writing for the school newspaper dutifully assessed the productivity of their classmates. “Hadjan finished a good table last week,” one article read. “It is very hard and it would make nice furniture for an office. Halim completed very quickly his two little tables for the printing room. They were not difficult to make, but they are very neat. Halim is a rapid worker. Hamja and Gandawali are becoming rapid workers on the chairs.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

The Moro Province was an attempt by U.S. colonial authorities to reconfigure the political, economic, and sociocultural fabric of the southern Philippines. Tapping into the Progressive Era vernacular of race management, the “Moro problem” was the rhetorical scaffolding upon which U.S. military officers legitimated their attempts to enact these transformations. It originated in the racialization of Muslim Malays and animist groups, adapting stock colonial imagery to depict them as violent, work-averse, and cowed by petty datus and sultans. Reliant on bartering, subsistence agriculture, and cottage industries, they existed outside the linearities of historical progress.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These derogatory composites of “the Moro” provided rhetorical cover for the province's practice of “savage warfare,” with the demonstrative spectacle of torture, execution, and massacre used to enshrine white authority.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But, in the language of the “problem,” the grim lesson of the burned cotta or the executed “bandit” had to be augmented with permanent alterations to the structures of native societies—ones that would greatly reduce or obviate entirely the need for militarized pacification. Wage labor, first agricultural and later industrial, was an imagined means of accomplishing this aim. It tied “producing classes” to their employers, provided them with money, amplified their desires for material goods, and encouraged sedentism. Americans saw clear benefits: creating easily surveilled populations whose stake in the colonial order mitigated security concerns and who would serve as inexpensive and reliable workers. In an idealized future, authorities hoped, the stabilization of the Moro Province would draw industrious settlers and foreign business interests, with each group contributing to regional modernization.

Incentive, coercion, and violence coalesced as U.S. and Filipino state officials and corporate representatives enacted and profited from modernizing drives. The Moro Province was linked to military and civilian colonial state building in the northern islands through the shared prioritization of infrastructure projects, tutelary marketplaces, tax laws, industrial education programs, and land reform initiatives.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The state security apparatus coordinated across the semipartitioned boundaries that separated north and south, something most evident in the carceral circulations between Luzon and Mindanao, but also apparent in the growing influence of the Manila-run Philippine Constabulary in the final years (1910–1913) of military rule.Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet it is important not to obscure the distinctive qualities of the Moro Province. It was a sub-state whose governing structures were devised and directed by American military officers, in contrast to Luzon and the Visayas, where the U.S. Army's role diminished after the Philippine-American War. The province also lacked many of the fledgling representative bodies and nods to self-governance that existed in the Christian North, instead operating via Legislative Council diktat and mediating rule through a small group of collaborating datus. Most importantly, perhaps, the province's rulers possessed extensive repressive capabilities and rationalized their use through reference to ostensible civilizing missions. Beholden to global colonial imaginaries of race, reform programs were tightly connected to the capacity and willingness to perform violence.

In the southern Philippines, the Moro Province's legacy was not the successful conclusion of the “Moro War” (a homogenizing term that conjures battlefields rather than a long and complex imperial annexation), but rather its inscription of colonial development models onto “non-Christian” societies and the land itself. By positioning Moro and Lumad laborers as “solutions,” the province stimulated the growth of connective infrastructure (roads, ports, railways, telephone lines, relay stations), emphasized the relationship between work and private land ownership, imagined a future where agribusiness monocultures flourished on Mindanao, and encouraged deeper regional integration into global commodities markets. The military period and its programs anticipated the arrival of multinational corporate plantations between the 1910s and 1930s—which would include firms like Goodyear Tire, B.F. Goodrich, and what became Del Monte—and also initiated other forms of enclosure. The early twentieth-century land reforms that rendered “unclaimed” space surveyable, divisible, and alienable did modernize the south in a distorted sense: they expanded the power of landed elites and initiated the settler colonial arrivals that would define political and economic life in the region during the latter twentieth century. Beyond this, afterlives of the Moro Province appeared in the 1930s as the Commonwealth government extended roads throughout Western Mindanao, and also in the post-independence era, when the centralizing state attempted to impose rigorous taxation on Muslim communities.Footnote ¹²¹

Although often minimally present or entirely absent in broader studies of U.S. imperialism, the Moro Province shares important connections to continental, trans-Pacific, and circum-Caribbean American empire-building. Articulating a “Moro problem” allowed state agents, private entrepreneurs, and the U.S. public to translate the colonial encounter through the language of Progressive Era race management and borrowings from other empires, buttressing elite-driven arguments that the United States was engaged in a global project of uplift and legitimizing colonial security models premised on manufactured native threat. Marshaling local labor to build roads, municipal buildings, and other physical assets placed the Moro Province alongside contemporaneous and connected American attempts to pacify island populations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the northern Philippines public via works infrastructure.Footnote ¹²² Likewise, the provincial drive to embed plantation agriculture and enlist Moro and Lumad communities to work these new sites not only anticipated future capitalist development on Mindanao but is also implicated in intra- and trans-imperial drives to commodify land in the early twentieth century, most evident in the sprawling Hawaiian plantation complex but also present in the American South, the Caribbean, the Central American states, and across a range of tropical and semitropical spaces controlled by European empires.Footnote ¹²³ We can apply a similar observation to industrial education, whose metropolitan and overseas forms developed in dialogue with one another. Many of the provincial officials invested in these educational models had extensive links to transnational and trans-imperial reform networks.Footnote ¹²⁴

In 1905, governor of Lanao Capt. Daniel Devore toured the wards of his district. His report to Zamboanga's Legislative Council de-emphasized security operations, instead focusing on farming, logging, and other forms of “honest labor.” Devore imagined a shining future for Lanao. “When [the Maranao] are far enough removed from their savage nature to appreciate that protection can be given them in their goods and chattels,” he wrote, “they will be encouraged to accumulate a little property.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In its varied forms, labor provided a crucial means of assessment and a method by which to solve “problems” and vindicate colonial projects. The world of work fashioned by the Moro Province had its own particularities—especially in the ways it was ignored, contested, or renegotiated by targeted groups of Moros and Lumad—but also resemblances, and direct links, to other colonial contexts. These connections illustrate the value of analyzing labor regimes as both regionally emplaced and globally constituted phenomena, texturing the history of military rule in the Southern Philippines and connecting it to the controlling racial and economic logics of global colonialisms in the early twentieth century.