Building Empire’s Archipelago: The Imperial Politics of Filipino Labor in the Pacific

This article illustrates how the work of low-wage Filipino laborers fortified the US military’s imperial grasp on the Pacific and generated profit for American businesses. I argue that the hiring of Filipino laborers for work on US military installations deepened an existing transpacific migration pattern whereby state and capital interests collaborated to control, and ultimately exploit, the labor of Filipinos. This Pacific-wide circulation of Filipino laborers reproduced an imperial system based on deep wage inequalities, revealing how the geographic expansions of US national security and US capital were mutually constituted in the early postwar period.