Disaggregating Colonialism: Recent Trends in Philippine Muslim Studies - Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World and American Datu: John J. Pershing and Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Muslim Philippines, 1899–1913 and Semi-Civilized: The Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition

Moros have always occupied a remote periphery in Southeast Asian studies. When scholars choose to study the Philippines, rather than Indonesia, Thailand, or Vietnam, they tend to focus on questions of lowland Christian nationalism, anticolonialism, and ethnic identity formation in the shadow of rising and declining empires. The Muslim south remains more an appendage of the Malay world than a critical component of the Philippine geo-body. These newly published historical monographs do much to center this periphery while simultaneously connecting it to wider global currents.¹ Ronald K. Edgerton, Michael C. Hawkins, and Oliver Charbonneau all move beyond conventional perspectives that disaggregate the various colonial experiences of different Muslim ethnolinguistic communities.² These works shift the locus of disaggregation from the colonized to the colonizers. This essay examines the ways in which each author explores intracolonial diversity and makes a case for disaggregating the Muslim south's early twentieth-century history by...