Karnow's In Our Image: U.S. Empire in the Philippines
This paper reviews Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines, tracing the book's central argument that the United States exercised a de facto empire over the Philippines while denying its own imperial character. The review covers Karnow's sweeping historical narrative — from Magellan's arrival in 1521 through the Marcos dictatorship and the Aquino restoration — and evaluates his critique of American policy, including Reagan-era support for Marcos. The paper also examines the tension in Karnow's conclusion, where he shifts from condemning American imperialism to endorsing continued U.S. involvement, raising questions about whether benign imperialism is a coherent or defensible position.
- Overview of Karnow's Central Argument: Karnow's thesis on U.S. imperial denial
- Historical Scope and Narrative Structure: Narrative arc from Magellan to Aquino
- American Policy and the Marcos Regime: Reagan's support for Marcos analyzed
- MacArthur, Manifest Destiny, and Colonial Exploitation: MacArthur's role in Philippine exploitation
- Karnow's Conclusion and the Problem of Benign Imperialism: Tension between condemnation and endorsement of U.S. involvement
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What makes this paper effective
- The review identifies a genuine internal tension in Karnow's argument — condemning imperialism while endorsing continued U.S. involvement — and uses it as the paper's analytical anchor.
- It moves logically from thesis summary to narrative structure to policy critique to evaluative conclusion, following the book's own arc while maintaining critical distance.
- The paper deploys a concise definition of imperialism to sharpen its critique of Karnow's concluding position, demonstrating how a single cited concept can illuminate an author's contradiction.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates evaluative synthesis in a book review: the writer does not simply summarize Karnow's argument chapter by chapter but identifies and interrogates the book's ideological assumptions. By naming Karnow's final stance as "benign imperialism" and questioning whether he resolves the contradiction it creates, the writer performs genuine critical analysis rather than mere description.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis statement summarizing Karnow's central claim, then unpacks the book's subtitle and framing devices. It follows the book's chronological logic — Magellan, Manifest Destiny, McKinley, MacArthur, Reagan, Aquino — before pivoting to evaluate the conclusion. The final section identifies an unresolved tension: Karnow offers no mechanism by which sustained American aid would produce genuine Philippine independence, culturally or economically.
Overview of Karnow's Central Argument
Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines chronicles the history of the United States and the Philippines across several hundred years of modern history. Karnow's main argument about the relationship between the two nations is that the United States held an empire over this far-off but ostensibly independent country — an empire that "dare not speak its name." Over the course of the book, Karnow paints a convincing portrait of a colonized nation.
Karnow suggests that what was particularly damaging about the de facto, if not de jure, American empire in the Philippines was the contradiction it created with America's self-image as a democratic, non-imperial country. By engaging in the kind of relationship America had with the Philippines, the United States betrayed its most fundamental principles while simultaneously engaging in exploitation. Because America did not perceive itself as a nation capable of exploiting others — as its parent country England had done — it could not even acknowledge, after the fact, the abuses it perpetuated in the Philippines.
Karnow is explicit about the vehemence of his thesis from the outset. Even the subtitle, America's Empire in the Philippines, reinforces the idea that America attempted to remake the Philippines in its own image — politically, economically, and religiously. America used the Philippines as a colonial bastion against political ideologies it disliked, particularly communism. Furthermore, because this remaking was carried out on an unequal basis — with the Philippines assumed to be an inferior child to the parental and patriarchal United States — the relationship between the two nations was, in Karnow's view, almost structurally doomed to be exploitative.
Karnow quotes a Filipino saying that captures this layered subjugation: "Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.... Few countries have been more heavily shackled by the past than the Philippines." In other words, the Philippines existed first in the European imagination as a place to carry the "white man's burden" of exporting Christianity, and then in the American imagination as a beautiful and exotic island paradise.
Historical Scope and Narrative Structure
Karnow is not Filipino himself — he is an American foreign correspondent — but he unambiguously takes the Philippine nation's side in this book, or at least that of the Aquinos. Rather than beginning chronologically with the origins of U.S. engagement in the Philippines, Karnow opens with the image of Corazon Aquino speaking before a joint session of Congress, asking for aid and greater foreign investment in the Philippines. He uses this scene as a touchstone to explore the reasons behind Aquino's need to appeal for assistance and the shadowy circumstances surrounding the assassination of her husband, Benigno Aquino.
From that starting point, Karnow reaches back to Ferdinand Magellan's accidental arrival in the Philippines in 1521, tracing a history that stretches nearly as far back as the European discovery of the Americas. Magellan's installation of Spanish rule — and the corruption that came with it — created a tradition of political patronage and glad-handing that, Karnow argues, formed the very foundation of the Marcos regime centuries later. Karnow then moves rapidly through American history: the Manifest Destiny ideology of the nineteenth century and its application to the Philippines, and the successive presidencies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft, each of whom shaped U.S. policy toward the island nation in significant ways.
Works Cited
Greenberger, Allen J. "Imperialism." World Book Online Americas Edition. November 18, 2002.
Karnow, Stanley. In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines. New York: Random House, 1989.
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