Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Summary
This book is a transnational history of race and empire in the Philippines. Kramer examines the racial politics of empire and how hierarchies of difference were “generated and mobilized” in order to legitimize invasion, conquest, and colonial administration. Race, however, is also a contested site of power and looks at how empire-making interacted with, and transformed, the process of racial formation (contested, contingent, practice). This work examines the metropole and the colony in a “single, densely interactive field,” in which colonial dynamics are not defined simply by metropolitan forces. The remaking of empire and imperials remaking of race are not inseparable; “It was not simply that difference made empire possible: empire remade difference in the process.” (3) Rather than the idea that the U.S. “exported” race relations, specific race relations emerged from the local convergence of transnational forces. Kramer argues, the “racial remaking of empire” and the “imperial remaking of race” are not separable (3). Race acted as the legitimizing force of America colonial interests, as it helped give shape to the “modern bourgeois family upon which imperial self-definitions were commonly constructed, anchoring the differential powers for women and men in moral, biological, and world-historical frameworks.” (4) Race, Kramer argues, as a mode of knowledge and power was at the core of the making formal colonialism in the Philippines.

Example: 1903 Columbia Exposition in St. Louis

See also: Ian Tyrell, Andrew Zimmerman