Projections of Power

Throughout its history, the United States has been both imperialistic and anti-colonial: imperialistic in its expansion across the continent and across oceans to colonies such as the Philippines, and anti-colonial in its rhetoric and ideology. How did this contradiction shape U.S. interactions with European colonists and Southeast Asians after the United States joined the ranks of colonial powers in 1898? Anne L. Foster argues that the actions of the United States functioned primarily to uphold, and even strengthen, the colonial order in Southeast Asia. The United States participated in international agreements to track and suppress the region's communists and radical nationalists, and it entered into economic agreements benefitting the colonial powers. Yet the American presence did not always serve colonial ends; American cultural products (including movies and consumer goods) and its economic practices (such as encouraging indigenous entrepreneurship) were appropriated by Southeast Asians for their own purposes. Scholars rarely have explored the interactions among the European colonies of Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century. Foster is the first to incorporate the U.S. into such an analysis. As she demonstrates, the presence of the United States as a colonial power in Southeast Asia after the First World War helps to explain the resiliency of colonialism in the region. It also highlights the inexorable and appealing changes Southeast Asians perceived as possibilities for the region's future.