The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–1925

The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States 1898–1925
SECOND EDITION

By Moorfield Storey and Marcial P. Lichauco
Edited by Rolando O. Borrinaga and Cornelia Lichauco Fung
Foreword by E. San Juan Jr

The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–1925 is considered a crucial work that contextualized the Filipino campaign for independence and self-government to an American public largely misinformed and ignorant about their colonial possession. This joint project by the American anti-imperialist Moorfield Storey and brilliant young Filipino lawyer Marcial P. Lichauco was one of the only publications at the time to present a Filipino viewpoint in persuading Americans that the Philippines must be given its long-desired freedom. 

Following the Spanish-American War and the US intervention in Cuba, Spain eventually ceded the Philippine Islands to the United States through the Treaty of Paris in 1898. The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–1925 exposes the historical context of America’s colonization of the Philippines and lays out the brutal trajectory of the Philippine-American War.

At the time of the book’s first publication, the New York World called it “an argument in a laudable cause, the cause of Philippine Independence. We have plenty of treatises addressed to the question whether it is expedient to free the islands at once or not, it is well to have one which also reviews the question of their historical right to independence.”

Another review in the Christian Science Monitor said, “The authors are right in their assertion that the Filipino point of view has never been adequately represented to the American people, and they have no doubt contributed to a better understanding of the question setting forth that view in a capable and vigorous fashion.” 

Nine decades after its first publication, this second edition celebrates Storey and Lichauco’s work as a significant part of the Philippine independence campaign and underlines its relevance as a historical text for present-day readers and scholars. 

"When The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–1925 was published in the US in 1926, the book merited full-page treatment on the first page of the New York Times Book Review… The authors—described by the Times reviewer as “fair-minded and judicious”—laid out the case for the occupation of the Philippines to end before an uninformed or misinformed American public. This cooperative effort by a US legal thinker and a young Filipino intellectual was a prodigious attempt to set the record straight about a period of their history of which most Americans are still unaware. The truths they present about American politics and adventurism in the world are as relevant as ever."

— Alejandro Reyes,
senior fellow of the Centre on Contemporary China and the World at the University of Hong Kong and scholar-in-residence at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center